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Investigators examine human remains placed in red evidence bags, taken from a clandestine grave at Arbolillo, in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, Friday, September 7, 2018. A day after the announcement by the authorities of the Mexican state of Veracruz skulls in mass graves, reporters arrived on the scene Friday discovered that it was the same place where the authorities said to have found 47 bodies l & 39; last year. (Felix Marquez / Associated Press)
ARBOLILLO, Mexico – A day after authorities in the Mexican state of Veracruz announced the recovery of at least 166 skulls in illegal pits, journalists who arrived at the scene Friday found that they had found 47 bodies in 2017 .
Veracruz prosecutor Jorge Winckler said Thursday that the authorities had been working on the site for 30 days and found 32 funeral pits containing 166 skulls. He said that the burials were at least two years old, but did not mention that he had announced previous discoveries on the same site in March 2017.
An Associated Press photographer went on the site with other journalists, thinking that they would be stopped at a security perimeter, but found themselves in the middle of active searches. Around them, 40 to 50 people were working on the graves, depositing leftovers on white sheets and finally placing them in red plastic bags. Many other unopened graves have been registered.
The site is located on a narrow isthmus between the Gulf of Mexico and the Alvarado Lagoon, about an hour southeast of the port city of Veracruz. The closest community is Arbolillo, a small fishing village.
Access required a 20-minute walk through tropical vegetation and mangroves. The graves were scattered under palm trees in a site to which the burials probably reached by boat.
Just days before the announcement in 2017 of the discovery of 47 skulls, Winckler said on another mass grave site: "There are pits where we do not work because we have no room for the bodies" .
It was not immediately clear if that was the reason why the authorities did not return to Arbolillo until last month. The prosecution did not respond to the Associated Press's request for comment.
Under the pressure of groups of relatives of the missing state, the authorities began Friday afternoon to show families the photo albums of clothes, identities and other objects recovered from the site to see if they recognized something belonging to a loved one. This access was originally proposed for next week.
The National Human Rights Commission of Mexico said Friday that the latest discovery of Veracruz had brought to 696 the number of corpses found in mass graves since the beginning of 2017. The government agency said that 163 pits have been discovered, mainly in states such as Veracruz, Sinaloa, Zacatecas and Jalisco.
The commission said the existence of such funeral pits shows the lack of effective crackdown. Mass graves are often dug by drug and kidnapping gangs to get rid of the bodies of their victims or rivals.
The pace of these discoveries does not seem to have slowed much since the drug war in Mexico. The commission said that between 2007 and 2016, 3,230 bodies were found in mass graves.
On Friday, as journalists were driven out of the grave, authorities began removing a security perimeter.
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