After charred bones, shoes, and clothing were uncovered at a suspected drug cartel training ground, protesters across Mexico took to the streets on Saturday, demanding justice.
Demonstrations were reported in Mexico City, the country’s capital, Tijuana, Veracruz, San Luis Potosi, and the western state of Jalisco, where the training ground was located.
“I came to speak out for my son and for all the disappeared,” said Aurora Corona at a demonstration in Mexico City, per CBS News. Corona has been searching for her son, who went missing in March 2024 in Mexico’s northeastern Nuevo Leon state.
More than 100,000 people are reportedly missing in Mexico.
Families of some of these individuals have formed the Guerroros Buscadores collective, a group focused on locating missing people. The group discovered the bodies on March 5 at a ranch that is believed to have held forced cartel recruits.
The collective described the grisly site as an “extermination center” with “clandestine crematoriums.”
Since October 2023, seven clandestine crematoriums have been discovered in Jalisco alone, with hundreds of additional graves in other parts of the country.
Violence continues to plague the country, where 124,059 people are officially registered as missing. Most of the missing people have been reported since 2006, when the Mexican government began waging a war on the country’s cartels.
“Hopefully they’ll pay attention to us now they see the horrors of the country we live in,” said Corona.
The United Nations Human Rights Office released a press release on March 14, describing the discovery as “deeply disturbing.”
Captives at the site “were subjected to harsh treatment and those who showed resistance or failed to meet the cartel’s demands were killed, consistent with the presence of bone fragments and charred human remains on the site,” the UN said.
“The discovery is all the more disturbing given that this site had been previously raided as recently as September 2024 by the National Guard and the Jalisco State Prosecutor’s Office, without crucial evidence being detected,” the statement continued.