Mexican officials have determined that the human remains discovered in 45 bags located in a Guadalajara suburb belong to call centre employees who vanished in May.
The next of kin have been notified, according to the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Sciences (IJCF), which reported Tuesday that testing had proved the bodies belonged to the missing workers. It was unclear, though, if the bags contained the remains of all seven of the missing workers.
Sometime after May 20, the seven employees vanished from the Guadalajara metropolitan area. When bags containing human body parts were discovered in a ravine in the municipality of Zapopan last week, the search for them took a macabre turn.
Mexico’s Secretary of Security Rosa Icela Rodriguez Velazquez said last Tuesday that initial investigations suggested the workers might have been involved in “some type of real estate fraud” and “telephone extortion.”
CNN cannot independently verify the Secretary of Security’s claims.
Mexico has been troubled by an epidemic of disappearances with more than 100,000 Mexicans and migrants still missing.
More than 1,500 bodies have been found in Jalisco state since 2018, official figures show. According to the office of the Jalisco’s special prosecutor for missing persons, 291 bodies were discovered in 2019, 544 bodies were found in 2020, 280 bodies in 2021, and 301 the following year. So far in 2023, 147 bodies have been found.
In March, after four Americans were kidnapped in Mexico, resulting in the deaths of two of them, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador argued that Mexico is a safer country than the United States.
Kidnapping and human trafficking are also not unusual in parts of Mexico, particularly in border areas and Mexico’s overall homicide rate is among the highest in the world.