250 skulls found in clandestine Mexican graves

MEXICO CITY — More than 250 skulls have been found over the past several months in what appears to be a drug cartel mass burial ground on the outskirts of the city of Veracruz, prosecutors said on Tuesday.

Veracruz state’s top prosecutor, Jorge Winckler, said the clandestine pits appeared to contain remains of cartel victims killed years ago.

The news came as no surprise to Lucia Diaz, one of the mothers of people who have disappeared whose group is known as Colectivo Solecito.

The mothers pushed authorities to investigate the fields where the skulls were found because they suspected more than a year ago that the wooded area known as Colinas de Santa Fe was a secret burial ground.

In the face of official inaction, the activists themselves went to the fields, sinking rods into the ground to detect the telltale odour of decomposition, and then digging. When they find what they believe are burial pits, they alert authorities, who carry out the final excavations.

“We dig holes, but we try not to touch the remains,” Diaz said.

Winckler, in the first official recognition, seemed to say the burials occurred before the new state administration took office in December.

“For many years, the drug cartels disappeared people and the authorities were complacent,” Winckler said, in apparent reference to the administration of fugitive former Gov. Javier Duarte and his predecessors.

Duarte resigned as governor two months before his term ended last year and disappeared. He faces charges that include money laundering and organized crime.

So far only two sets of remains — a police detective and his assistant — have been identified, Winckler said.

The coffin of Pedro Huesca, a police detective missing since 2013 and whose remains were recently found in a mass grave, is carried to the cemetery for official burial in Palmas de Abajo, Veracruz, Mexico.