Five men were arrested in connection with the discovery of 60 bodies in a rural part of the municipality of Hermosillo, the Sonora Attorney General’s Office (FGJE) said Tuesday.
The bodies were all of men who were murdered in a “settling of scores of organized crime,” according to the FGJE. They were found in early 2025 at a “search site” next to Highway 26 in a rural area of western Hermosillo, a large municipality that includes the state capital and coastal communities such as Bahía de Kino.
In a statement, the FGJE acknowledged that the discovery of the bodies “between late January and early February” had been reported by a local news outlet, which obtained the information from “a collective of searching mothers.”
In response to the news, the FGJE announced that five of seven people suspected of committing the murders had been detained.
It identified those suspects as Sergio Andrés “N”, Roberto “N”, Ángel Ubaldo “N”, Jesús José “N” and Daniel Antonio “N”.
The FGJE said that the five men “are already facing criminal proceedings.”
It said that warrants for the arrest of two other people on charges of homicide and abduction have been issued.
The FGJE also said that every one of the 60 victims was identified through scientific testing and that their bodies were returned to their families.
Jesús Francisco Moreno Cruz, Sonora’s deputy attorney general for investigations, said that the FGJE had established that the homicides were related to organized crime.
“Up to this moment, these homicides are attributed to a single [crime] group,” he said without identifying it.
Moreno also said that the victims were originally from Sonora, a northern state that borders the United States.
Neither he nor the FGJE said when the murders occurred. However, the El Universal newspaper reported that some of the victims disappeared several years ago.
Sonora’s ‘Peace Seekers’ collective found the bodies
The collective Buscadoras Por La Paz Sonora (Sonora Peace Seekers) said on Facebook on Jan. 28 that it had found 26 graves containing “27 skeletons or bodies” at the rural site in Hermosillo.
The collective subsequently made a number of other posts to Facebook that included updates on the number of bodies found as well as photos of the searchers and the human remains they had discovered.
On Feb. 7, Buscadoras Por La Paz said that it had found 41 skeletons, seven bodies and “two bone remains.”
Additional human remains were found at the same site after that date, bringing the total number of bodies and skeletons to 60.
Clandestine graves are dotted across Mexico
The discovery of clandestine graves where crime groups buried people they killed is common in Mexico. As was the case in Sonora earlier this year, many of the makeshift graves are uncovered by search collectives made up of the relatives of missing people and others. Such collectives exist across Mexico.
More than 130,000 people are classified as missing in Mexico, and disappearances have increased during the presidency of Claudia Sheinbaum.
In March, Sheinbaum said that “attending to the problem of missing persons” is a “national priority” for her government, and announced six “immediate actions against the crime of disappearance,” including the strengthening of the National Search Commission and legislative reform.
More than 150 search collectives, activists and relatives of victims of abduction and enforced disappearance expressed profound concern about the president’s proposal to address Mexico’s missing persons crisis, saying that it demonstrated “a lack of knowledge about the institutional mechanisms and procedures that already exist in the country in search and investigation matters.”
With reports from Infobae, El Sol de Hermosillo and El Universal
