MEXICO CITY -- Officials confirmed the discovery of up to 45 bodies at clandestine burial sites in Mexico, with an estimated 30 cadavers found in one spot in the northern state of Sonora and 15 buried under the patio of a multifamily house on the outskirts of Guadalajara in Jalisco state.
On Monday, prosecutors in Jalisco said they were led to the patio burial site in Zapopan, a suburb of Guadalajara, earlier this month by an anonymous tip that bodies might be buried there. Jalisco state prosecutor Gerardo Solis said that the process of finding the bodies of one woman and 14 men had taken more than a week and that the cadavers had apparently been buried weeks ago.
Solis said neighbors had reported that the property -- a kind of low-income, multifamily dwelling known in Mexico as a "vecinidad," where people often live in single rooms -- had been used as a site for drug sales.
Authorities in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero reported Monday that gunmen barged into a restaurant in the town of Cuautla and attacked two families who were dining in a private room. The statement said three children were killed in the shooting Saturday. It gave no information on injuries, but local media said about a dozen people were injured.
On Sunday, in central Guanajuato state, the Red Cross chapter in the city of Salamanca briefly suspended operations after a gang dragged a wounded patient out of an ambulance at gunpoint.
Earlier this month, a woman with gunshot wounds was executed inside an ambulance in Mexico's Pacific state of Guerrero, and paramedics were reportedly beaten by the perpetrators.
On Saturday, the Sonora state prosecutor's office said in a statement that it sent forensics experts into the field to accompany a volunteer search group that helped discover what was estimated to be 27 sets of human remains. Late Sunday, the group called "Guerreras Buscadoras," or "Warrior Searchers," said it found three more sets of remains in a field near the northern city of Cajeme.
The group is comprised of mostly women who organize their own digging teams for missing relatives in the face of official inaction.
Volunteer searchers often act on tips about where burial grounds are located and then walk through fields plunging rods into the earth to detect the telltale odor of decomposing bodies. Searchers in Mexico generally count the dead by the number of skulls, but not all heads are always present at the time of burial, suggesting death tolls could be even higher.
A Section on 04/16/2019