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MEXICO CITY – Investigators said Thursday they found 166 skulls in clandestine landfills in the state of Veracruz, one of the largest mass graves ever discovered in Mexico.
Veracruz prosecutor Jorge Winckler said that for security reasons he would not reveal the location of the site.
Mexican drug cartels frequently use clandestine pits to get rid of their victims.
Winckler said the bodies were buried at least two years ago and did not rule out finding more remains. He said the investigators found 114 identity cards on the ground, which contained about 32 funeral pits.
The clothes, personal possession and other parts of the skeleton were also recovered, but the investigators focused on the skulls to count, because each one corresponds to a person.
Veracruz has been the scene of bloody battles between the Zetas and Jalisco drug cartels, but the state has also suffered waves of kidnappings and extortion.
Winckler said the prosecutors had found the land after a witness told them that "hundreds of bodies" had been buried there.
Investigators used drones, probes and a ground penetrating radar to locate the pits and began digging about a month ago.
Winckler said groups of relatives of missing persons who are conducting their own gravesearch have not been invited to participate in this one to keep the secret. He said that they would receive pictures of objects found on the site to try to identify the remains.
The missing activist Lucia Diaz, whose group Colectivo Solecito has led police to other burial sites in the past, said she does not trust this announcement.
"We do not trust the work they do, we have many reasons," said Diaz, noting that in the past, investigators had searched too quickly and extracted bodies in pieces. "In this case, they released 166 organizations in one month? It could not be done properly. It's impossible, too fast.
Diaz joined the effort after his own son, Guillermo Lagunes Diaz, was abducted from his home in 2013. No trace of him was found.
She said the prosecutors had illegally excluded the families of the missing from the last attempt. "He (Winckler) went against the law because the law says that families have the right to participate now."
Maria de Lourdes Calvo Rosales, who was looking for her son Jonatten Celma Rosales since his abduction with his girlfriend in July 2013, said the news of the newly discovered grave "gives hope".
"Next week, they are waiting for us in forensic medicine to examine the cases and IDs that have been found," she said.
She said the authorities have invited all family groups in the state to search for missing loved ones, including the mothers' network of Veracruz, to visit the state capital, Xalapa.
His son was 25 years old and working in foreign trade when four armed men took him home and his girlfriend six blocks from the mother's house. When she reported it, the authorities told her that she had to wait 72 hours. Later, they dismissed her, saying that the couple had run away, she said.
Four days after they were taken, she received a call for ransom and warned her not to go to the authorities. She paid a fraction of it for five seconds on the phone with someone who could have been her son. It was enough to hear him say "mom," then the cut line. She has not heard from him.
It was not the first time that a person with deep knowledge of the mass graves had revealed his location.
In 2016 and 2017, Veracruz investigators found 253 skulls and bodies in funeral pits outside the capital, after relatives of missing persons said they had received a hand-drawn map.
In 2011, police found 236 bodies in funeral pits in the northern capital of Durango State, also called Durango.
A total of 193 corpses were found in the town of San Fernando, in the state of Tamaulipas, north of Veracruz. Officials say that most of them were Mexican migrants traveling to the United States and abducted by buses and killed by the Zetas cartel.
