After hunt for clandestine crematorium in Mexico City, police say bones found were ‘animal origin’

MEXICO CITY (AP) — María de Jesús Soria Aguayo and more than a dozen volunteers, followed by search dogs and police, walked cautiously through fields of weeds and dry land with their eyes fixed on the ground Wednesday.

On the outskirts of Mexico City, the group was searching for human remains and other evidence after volunteer searchers said the site may be the site of a secret crematorium.

The search came after Sissy Flores, the leader of a group searching for the bodies of missing people in Mexico, announced on social media late Tuesday that her team had found bones, secret burial pits and identification cards around a charred pit on the city’s southern outskirts.

However, Ulises Lara, Mexico City’s public prosecutor, denied the allegations on Wednesday night, saying officials had found 14 bones and all of them were of “animal origin.”

He added: “We can confirm that it is not a crematorium, nor is it from a secret grave.”

Flores’ announcement on social media the day before received a lot of attention, because it was the first time in recent memory that anyone had claimed to have found such a body disposal site in the Mexican capital.

If such a site were found, it could be a blow to Mexico’s ruling Morena party in the run-up to the June 2 election. Morena says the violence in Mexico did not spread to Mexico City while he controlled the local government.

Wednesday’s search highlighted the difficulties many Mexican families face as they search for body remains 110,000 people Declared missing amid cartel violence.

Volunteers, like Soria Aguayo, are often mothers of the disappeared. They formed their own independent groups to search violence-torn areas of Mexico.

“madres buscadoras” – “seeking mothers” – usually do not try to convict anyone of the disappearance of their relatives. They say they just want their remains found. Many families say that not knowing the specific fate of a relative is worse than knowing that a loved one has died.

“I started my search on my own, tracking with my hand and searching alone in the countryside,” said Soria Aguayo, 54, whose son’s remains were recovered in Veracruz state in 2022. “I can’t do more… because there are still a lot of (bodies) that we haven’t found.”

The Mexican government has spent little searching for the missing, so volunteers conduct their own searches for secret graves where cartels hide their victims.

If volunteers find something, the most authorities will do is send a police and forensic team to recover the remains, which in most cases are never identified. The government also has not adequately funded or implemented a genetic database to assist in identifying remains.

Searches have increasingly deadly consequences. At least seven activists searching for some of those missing in Mexico since 2021 have been killed.

This angered volunteer groups Government campaign to “find” missing persons by checking their last known address to see if they have returned home without notifying the authorities. Activists say it’s just that An attempt to limit politically embarrassing figures On missing people.

Discussing some of the evidence found earlier at the site, Lara, Mexico City’s public prosecutor, said Wednesday morning that police went to the addresses listed on the ID cards found and “found that both the people to whom these cards belong Alive”. And in good health.”

Lara said one of them, a woman, told officers that her ID card and mobile phone were stolen about a year ago, when thieves snatched them from her while she was stuck in traffic. While this rules out the possibility that the woman’s body was dumped there, it does suggest that criminals used the site to dispose of evidence. In the wooded and rural outskirts of Mexico City, it is not uncommon for criminals to dump the bodies of kidnapping victims.

After hours of searching fields on the rural outskirts of the Mexican capital, volunteers found nothing but frustration.

While some in the group doubted they would find any bodies, Flores said they intended to continue searching, adding that they had already spent two days searching the area after an anonymous tip. Volunteers like Flores often conduct investigations based on tips from former criminals.

“If they don’t look, they’ll never find anything,” Flores said.