— Investigators have uncovered 13 more bodies in mass graves in the violent northern state of Tamaulipas, where 59 dead were exhumed earlier this week, officilas said Friday. Families and authorities from across Mexico contacted the morgue in search of those who have vanished in the country’s drug-war.
Seventy-two bodies have now been discovered since authorities began chasing reports in late March that gunmen had kidnapped people off of passenger buses headed toward the U.S. border. See pictures of Mexico’s drug wars.
Nine of the bodies were discovered in one newly found grave and four in another on Thursday near the city of San Fernando, state Interior Secretary Morelos Canseco said Friday. The total now matches the number of migrants who died in a massacre near that town last August.
Canseco said investigators are searching for yet more graves in the area.
Families came to the morgue in the border city of Matamoros across from Brownsville, Texas, looking for loved ones not seen for a couple of weeks, others a few months — some as long as three years. Canseco said he has heard from officials in the central states of Guanajuato and Queretaro searching for residents who disappeared on buses traveling through Tamaulipas or to U.S. border.
Guanajuato attorney general spokeswoman Susana Montero said 17 missing people rode an Omnibus de Mexico company bus to northern Mexico in March. The bus route and exact date were unknown, but Montero said they were apparently travelling to the United States.
In the western state of Michoacan, the attorney general’s office said it also was working with Tamaulipas to determine if any of the 59 people missing from that state in the last 12 months were killed and buried in northern Mexico.
See pictures of Culiacn, the home of Mexico’s drug-trafficking industry.
