Mexico’s mass graves illustrate a horrifying norm for those living in cartel-land

pulse

March 22, 2017 7:42 PM

Mass graves have been a longstanding and grisly hallmark of the Mexico's drug war.

A policeman stands guard on a plot of land where skulls were found at unmarked graves on the outskirts of Veracruz, Mexico, March 16, 2017.

Earlier this month, authorities in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz confirmed that they had recovered 253 skulls from what is believed to be a cartel burial ground.

Mexico

Suspicions of such complicity have been heightened by the government's seeming inability or unwillingness to mount investigations into mass graves and clandestine burial sites.

A September report from news site Animal Politico found that, over the previous four years, federal police had uncovered only six hidden graves in Veracruz, which has the second-highest number of disappeared people in Mexico, behind Tamaulipas.

Between April and August 2016, however, citizen groups found 90 of them.

One of those citizen groups, Colectivo El Solecito, or Little Sun Collective — formed by mothers of disappeared people — led the effort to unearth the 250 skulls found in Colinas de Sante Fe.

The Mexican government has registered just 13 federal convictions for enforced disappearance. In 22 of the 27 Mexican states with the crime of enforced disappearance, there only been 95 investigations, four indictments, and no convictions.

One of the most prominent cases of forced disappearance was the kidnapping and suspected killing of 43 student-teachers in Guerrero in September 2014.

Local police, military stationed in the area, and the state's then governor have been accused of complicity in the crime, and the government's "historical truth" that the students' bodies were incinerated at a nearby garbage dump have been disputed by scientific analysis.

Not long after the student-teachers' disappearance, Meyer noted, more than 100 mass graves with at least 136 human remains were discovered in the surrounding area.

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