Mass graves continue to turn up as Mexico continues to deal with its image of lawlessness. News outlets have begun to focus on this side-effect of out of control cartel violence the increasing number of clandestine mass graves nationwide.
Most recently, Mexican news outlets have focused on a news report by the Associated Press. Their report is based on a freedom of information request to the Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office. The response confirms that they have found 60 mass graves and turned up 129 bodies while searching for 43 education students who were kidnapped and are believed to have been butchered by drug cartels.
(AP Caption) In this Oct. 22, 2014 file photo, demonstrators protest the disappearance of 43 students from the Isidro Burgos rural teachers college, in Mexico City. Tens of thousands marched in Mexico City’s main avenue demanding the return of the missing students who were rounded up by local police in Iguala, a town in southern Mexico, and handed over to gunmen from a drug cartel Sept. 26.
The shallow graves are typically used by drug cartel members to dispose the bodies of their victims who were either killed in firefights or were kidnapped and later executed.
The finding of the mass graves sparked enough outrage that Amnesty International issued a statement condemning the current security conditions in Mexico.
According to the organization, in recent years, Mexico has seen 22,700 individuals go missing never to be heard from again.
“This latest macabre revelation confirms what we had already found: the sheer magnitude of the crisis of enforced disappearances in Guerrero and elsewhere in Mexico is truly shocking,” said Erika Guevara Rosas the America’s Director for Amnesty International in a prepared statement.
As Breitbart Texas previously reported earlier this year, in the border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, authorities had begun to search for more than 800 individuals who had been officially reported as missing or kidnapped to authorities. At that time, authorities searched various places looking for those types of graves.
In 2013, Mexico’s Milenio news organization reported that authorities had found more than 785 bodies in just six years. They were buried in multiple mass graves throughout the country.
The search in Reynosa is not the first of its kind near the Texas border. In 2011, Mexican authorities discovered 193 bodies in the rural city of San Fernando located about 80 miles south of the Texas/Mexico border. The mass graves were made by Los Zetas drug cartel members who had been hijacking buses to kidnap unsuspecting victims. They also carjacked motorists who traveled along the main highway that runs north to south through the region.
That massacre came just months after Mexican marines raided a Zeta camp and found the bodies of 72 illegal immigrants who had been executed by the cartel gunmen and left behind in a warehouse.
Scene of massacre Central and South American immigrants by Los Zetas cartel members in Tamaulipas. (Photo courtesy: Office of the Attorney General of Mexico)
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
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