27 hacked-up corpses were discovered by volunteers in the border city of Reynosa, Texas, according to reports.
Many of the corpses were hacked to pieces, while some were buried recently, allowing authorities to identify the bodies.
Edith González, leader of the search group “For the Love of the Disappeared,” said that the burial site was located close to the center of Reynosa, which is around 4 kilometers from the southern border.
González said that some of the 16 burial pits contained two or three bodies and suggested that the burial site may have been used by gangs recently.
The discovery was confirmed by the Tamaulipas prosecutor’s office. Such sites are reportedly used by drug and kidnapping gangs to dispose of the bodies of their victims. The burials were found late last week at a site close to an irrigation canal, according to an anonymous tip.
“People are starting to shake off their fear and have begun reporting” the body dumping grounds, González said. She added that some tips may come from “people who worked there (for the gangs) and are no longer in that line of work.”
Such information has proven to be both a blessing and a curse for search teams, which are usually made up of the mothers or relatives of Mexico’s over 110,000 missing people.
This comes after authorities said that a drug cartel bomb strike in the southern state of Jalisco used a false tip of a mass grave to draw police into a trap, killing four police officers and two civilians.
The incident occurred earlier this month when a volunteer searcher received information from an anonymous caller regarding what was allegedly a burial site next to a road in Tlajomulco, Jalisco. IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, were buried by the cartel under the road, and they were later set off as a police vehicle passed. The IEDs were so powerful that they left holes in the road, injured 14 people, and damaged four vehicles.
As a safety precaution, police involvement in anonymous tip searches was temporarily suspended.
The U.S. has been seeing massive migrant numbers since President Joe Biden announced last year that he would be lifting “Title 42,” a controversial border policy implemented by former President Donald Trump back in March 2020 that allowed the border agency to turn migrants away.
