25 Bodies Recovered From The Clandestine Grave Los Negritos

 "Ivan" for Borderland Beat 

For the past three weeks, a small group of forensic agents, supported by a canine team, have been digging up at least 25 bodies from a gigantic clandestine grave located on the borders of Michoacán and Jalisco, where residents estimate "there are up to 500 corpses".

Between June 18 and 19, the State Attorney General's Office (FGE) reported that, together with the Federal Attorney General's Office (FGR), it located 10 bodies in an illegal deposit in a property known as "Los Negritos", in the municipality of Villamar.

From that date until now, the number of victims has been increasing; the majority are inhabitants of this region surrounding Lake Chapala, an apex between Michoacan and Jalisco where disappearances are the "bread" of every day and presumably was the clandestine cemetery of the criminal group called "Pájaros Sierra".

Isis del Rocio Macias Graciano, founder of the collective of families of the disappeared "San Pedro Caro in Search of Angels", born in the municipality of Venustiano Carranza, says that in this 'Bermuda Triangle' made up of a corridor of 12 municipalities, one to three people disappear every day.

"The families are fed up with the fact that there are hundreds and hundreds of investigation files and there is no response, nothing is known. The families began to make blockades (in the face of the constant disappearances), I feel that that is when the Prosecutor's Office made the decision to see the possibility that there could be remains (on the property), they already had knowledge, but we were not given the opportunity to dig and remove them," shared the woman, sister of Jesús Macías, a young 21-year-old musician kidnapped and murdered in 2019.

According to the locals themselves, the communal land of approximately 70 hectares where an ecological park is located, has been used by criminals as a clandestine grave for eight years. Some of the bodies are underground, but others, they say, were thrown into boiling wells and a lake, making it impossible to recover them due to the depth.

A farmer and father of a family - who requested anonymity for his safety - is certain that his son, brother and nephew, who disappeared between December 2019 and April 2021, are in the "Los Negritos" grave.

"Unfortunately or fortunately, the people who looked when my son was picked up say that all the trucks went there, so I believe that my son is there, that is why I ask to be allowed to enter but they do not want to, it is a helplessness because I know the property, I am sure that we can find more people than what has been found," he says.

Of the 25 bodies that have been extracted, eight of them have already been identified. They are six men and two women ranging from 16 to 60 years of age. Three of the deceased were from Jiquilpan, one from Sahuayo, one from La Barca, Jalisco and two from the State of Mexico.

ALERTA JALISCO