The Jalisco Attorney General’s Office reported yesterday that 23 bodies and four bags of remains were discovered on July 13 in a clandestine grave in the municipality of El Salto, just blocks from the police station and 33 kilometers southeast of Guadalajara.

The corpses were buried on a farm in the El Pedregal neighborhood. To date, only three bodies have been identified. 

The case is being investigated in collaboration with Jalisco’s missing persons unit.

In the past 18 months, 428 bodies have been discovered in hidden graves across the state, with 215 found between January and May of this year alone.

The majority of victims were found near Zapopan, Tlajomulco and Tlaquepaque.

Missing persons activist groups, including Jalisco’s Families United for the Disappeared, were invited by the police to assist in the discovery of the El Salto mass grave. The group stated that the 23 bodies were unearthed intact, which would help in identifying them.

In Jalisco, 9,413 people have been reported missing, according to the state’s database. 

Since 1964, 73,249 people have gone missing in Mexico, and bodies have been discovered in 3,978 clandestine graves, the Ministry of the Interior (Segob) reported last week. That number has increased by 11,564 since January, the National Search Commission (CNB) reports.

Jalisco ranks fifth in Mexico for homicides, with a murder rate of 37.7 per 100,000 inhabitants.

Source: El Universal (sp), Animal Político (sp), ABC Noticias (sp)