Mexico finds 222 clandestine graves and 337 bodies in 5 months

Mexican authorities

have discovered 337 bodies in clandestine graves since December 1, when President López Obrador took office, Alejandro Encinas, the Deputy Interior Minister , said on Tuesday.

Deputy Interior Minister Alejandro Encinas

said that 337 bodies had been found in 222 graves . At least 72% of the bodies were found in the states of Veracruz, Sonora, Sinaloa, Colima, Zacatecas, Tabasco, Jalisco, Guerrero, and Nayarit .

Veracruz

is at the top of the list with 72 corpses. In Guerrero , criminals groups used prefabricated graves or repeatedly reused the same clandestine graves.

Additionally, 35 graves were found in Sonora ; 23 in Sinaloa ; 20 in Guerrero ; 12 in Colima , and 11 in Tabasco .

Encinas

, who leads the human rights office within the Interior Ministry , said it was the new government’s first official count of bodies in clandestine graves .

Moreover, Encinas announced that the Interior Ministry is updating and reviewing the so-called national missing persons registry because it doesn't exist, nor does it contain reliable information, therefore, a new registry is being created.

This new registry will be made public every two weeks, along with a national forensic diagnosis to face the forensic crisis in Mexico .

Enforced disappearance, Mexico's worst tragedy

The list Encinas provided did not seem to include the 38 bodies recently found around the metropolitan area of Mexico’s second-biggest city, Guadalajara .

More than 200,000 people have been killed and t ens of thousands disappeared since Mexico’s government launched a war against drug cartels in 2006.

The new administration defined the search and identification of missing persons and bodies as one of its top priorities, therefore, the federal government will allocate MXN $500 million for this program.

Two more mass graves found in the city of Guadalajara

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