Mexican police investigate site of mass burials

MEXICO CITY — More than 250 skulls have been found over the last several months in what appears to be a drug cartel mass burial ground on the outskirts of the city of Veracruz, prosecutors said 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 starting in August 2016, sinking rods into the ground to detect the telltale odor 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, because DNA may be the only hope of identifying the dead and touching the bones might contaminate them.

So far, Diaz said, searchers have found about 125 pits that contain 253 bodies. Nobody knows when the burials began, but Diaz said some were quite recent.

“Some of the bodies had a lot of connective tissue. You could see an ear, or recognize part of a face,” she 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 an interview with the Televisa network, in apparent reference to the administration of fugitive former Gov. Javier Duarte and his predecessors.