Officials in northern Mexico found a dozen skeletons in 11 secret graves near the US border during a three-day search of the area last week.
The clandestine graves were located in the township of Ascencion, just south of El Paso, Texas, the prosecutor for the northern state of Chihuahua said Thursday.
Hidden graves are commonly used by the Mexican cartels and other criminal organizations to bury the victims of their heinous killings.
There are currently 120,000 missing people in Mexico as a result of the cartels’ nefarious tactics.
Mexican authorities located the first pit on Dec. 18, when they decided to expand their search and found a second and third pit nearby, all of which were full of bones, according to the state prosecutor.
Over the next two days, they located eight more hidden graves filled with bones.
“The exhumations were processed by forensic anthropologists and experts from Forensic Services, who collected and packaged evidence such as spent shells of various calibers,” said the state prosecutor.
“The undetermined bones and the evidence found were transferred to the laboratories of the Forensic Medical Service in Cd. Juárez, for analysis and investigations to determine identities, cause and time of death,” the prosecutor’s office added.
Oftentimes, relatives of the missing often have to search for their loved ones themselves and form volunteer groups to look for their loved ones in the desert.
On the US side of the border, President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to designate Mexico’s ruthless cartels as terrorist organizations over their drug trafficking operations.
“We’re going to advertise how bad drugs are for you. They ruin your look, they ruin your face, they ruin your skin, they ruin your teeth,” Trump pledged during Turning Point USA’s recent conference in Phoenix.
