After dogs bit into human body parts, activists in western Mexico demanded Friday that the government continue digging what appears to be a clandestine burial site.
An organization representing the families of some of the more than 112,000 people missing in Mexico said it feared police would leave the site on the outskirts of the city of Guadalajara because of a long holiday weekend.
They had already been molested by dogs and it was feared that more evidence would be lost.
The Light of Hope is a volunteer search group that represents families of missing people in the western state of Jalisco. The group said 41 bags of human remains had been recovered at the site, which was discovered earlier this month after dogs were seen trotting off with a human leg and a skull.
“It is outrageous that the authorities, who can’t keep pace, take the weekends and holidays off and don’t work extra shifts to continue with this investigation,” the group said in a statement.
Officials have not commented on how many bodies the bags may contain.
Guadalajara has long suffered from turf battles between factions of the Jalisco cartel, and hundreds of bodies have been dumped at clandestine sites there.
Drug cartels occasionally place the bodies of executed rivals or kidnapping victims in plastic bags and sell them in shallow pits.
Dogs or wild animals can disturb the remains and destroy fragile evidence such as tattoos, fragments of clothing, and fingerprints that can identify victims.
The animals have already taken the government to agencies in Mexico.
Last November, police in the southern state of Oaxaca found a dismembered human body after seeing a dog running down the street with a human arm in its mouth. The discovery led the researchers to locate other parts of the dismembered frame in a suburban community in Oaxaca. city, the capital of the state.
Days earlier, clandestine graves containing human remains were discovered in the central state of Guanajuato after neighbors told volunteer searchers they had noticed a dog with a human leg.
Weeks before, residents of a town in the north-central state of Zacatecas saw a dog running down the street with a human head in its mouth. Police eventually managed to wrest the head away from the dog.
In that case, the head and other body parts had been left in an automatic teller booth in the town of Monte Escobedo alongside a message referring to a drug cartel.
In Mexico, drug cartels leave notes next to piles of dismembered human remains, to intimidate their rivals or authorities.
In June 2022, the bodies of seven men were found in a popular tourist region with warning messages written on their corpses referencing the Gulf Cartel, which operates mainly along the U.S. border to the north.
In April 2022, it was reported that six severed heads were found on the roof of a car in Mexico with a warning sign to others: “This will happen to whoever opposes it. “
Mexican police and other governments have struggled for years to devote the time and other resources needed to search for clandestine graves where gangs bury their victims.
That lack of help from officials has left dozens of mothers and other family members to take up search efforts for their missing loved ones themselves, often forming volunteer search teams known as “colectivos.”
Sometimes the scope of the discoveries is shocking.
In July, investigators found 27 bodies in clandestine graves in the Mexican border city of Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas, and many of them were dismembered.
In February, the government exhumed 31 bodies from two clandestine graves in western Mexico. Last year, volunteer investigators found 11 bodies in clandestine graves miles from the U. S. border.
In 2020, a search organization said it discovered bodies in a series of clandestine graves in the north-central state of Guanajuato.
According to the data, there are more than 100,000 disappeared people in Mexico. Most were reportedly killed by drug cartels and their bodies dumped in shallow graves, burned, or dissolved.
AFP contributed to this report.