Mexico reports over 61,000 people missing, discovery of
873 burial pits amid raging drug war

The Mexican government released “statistics of horror” on
Monday that showed nearly 62,000 citizens have vanished
since the government began its increasingly violent
offensive against ruthless drug cartels in 2006.
Karla Quintana, head of the National Registry of Missing or
Missing Persons (RNPED), revised the number of missing to
61,637 people, a figure far surpassing a previous estimate
of 40,000 from June.
“We have to remember we’re talking here about lives and
families and people who are still missing,” Quintana said
during a press conference in Mexico City. “These are
statistics of horror behind which lie so many stories of such
great pain.”
While the statistics date back as far as the 1960s, more
than 97.4 percent of the total have disappeared since 2006,
when the country first waged its drug war against the
cartels. Women represent 25.7 percent of the missing,
Quintana said.

In 2006, then-President Felipe Calderon had his army take
the fight against drug traffickers to the streets — a move
that fragmented the cartels and made it more difficult to
oppose them, Reuters reported.
The revised numbers come as Mexican President Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador has faced criticism for his policy of
using “hugs, not bullets” when fighting drug cartels amid a
skyrocketing murder rate during his first year in office.
In November, new figures from Mexico's Secretary General
of National Public Safety showed that the country's
homicide was on pace to reach its highest overall annual
total since the government started tracking in 1997. The
data showed that there had been 29,414 homicides in 2019
— that's nearly 100 people killed each day.
In 2018, there were a total of 36,685 murders in Mexico, the
most since the office started gathering data on the crime
more than two decades ago. This year, the number of
homicides is expected to surpass that figure.

MEXICAN MOTHERS DISCOVER DOZENS OF BODIES
BURIED IN MASS GRAVE NEAR RESORT TOWN SOUTH OF
ARIZONA BORDER.

Mexico has tasked its National Search Commission with
locating the tens of thousands of missing citizens.
In its first 13 months of work, officials on Monday said it
uncovered 1,124 corpses and 873 clandestine burial pits.
The unmarked pits are frequently used by drug and
kidnapping gangs to dispose of the bodies of their victims
or rivals.

Last October, a group of mothers uncovered searching for
missing loved ones discovered a mass grave in Sonora.
The initially found 42 bodies, but the count continued to
increase in the ensuing weeks. (Sonora Attorney General's
Office)
The commission said about a third of the corpses found
the last 13 months were located in just three of the
country's 31 states: the northern state of Sinaloa, the Gulf
coast state of Veracruz and the Pacific coast state of
Colima.
But many of the most recent cases of disappearances have
been centered in the western state of Jalisco, home to the
drug cartel of the same name, and Sonora.
Last October, a clandestine burial site containing dozens of
bodies was discovered in Sonora near the resort town of
Puerto Peñasco, located south of the Arizona border. Some
Mexican officials have suggested the mass grave held the
victims of a raging gun battle six years ago between
government forces and the Sinaloa cartel.

As Mexico faces a crisis of unidentified bodies piling up,
the country has set up DNA databases to help with the
identifying process. However, the majority of bodies found
in clandestine burial pits still go unidentified.
Fox News' Greg Norman and The Associated Press
contributed to this report.


https://www.foxnews.com/world/mexico-missing-people-mass-graves-drug-cartels?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20foxnews%2Fworld%20%28Internal%20-%20World%20Latest%20-%20Text%29