How a dog helped Mexican authorities find unclaimed bodies

A dog has helped authorities to find 53 bags of human remains found scattered around a clandestine graveyard in a Mexican region, which was once riddled with cartel gang violence.

In late October, residents of Irapuato town in Guanajuato state witnessed a dog carrying a human hand in its mouth.

Since then, an NGO group andforensic experts have been converging at the grave to exhume more bodies.

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"While people from all over the world were celebrating the Cervantino festival, we were digging up bodies, and at the same time I thought it was useless because they were burying more people elsewhere," Mendoza, founder of a women's collective searching for missing persons, told AFP news agency.

The search comes in the wake of recent gang violence plaguing Guanajuato, an industrial hub home to factories of foreign auto giants. Around 300 victims of violence have been found dead in similar circumstances in recent months.

According to official data, people feel most unsafe in Irapuato among the Mexican municipalities.

Guanajuato, and its adjoining places, have seen a rise in cartel turf wars. From January to September this year, the region has witnessed more than 2,400 murders —almost 10 per cent of the national total.

Nearly 3,000 more people disappeared in the same period, reports AFP news agency.

Reports say that the violence for the turf is primarily between the Jalisco New Generation and Santa Rosa de Lima cartels.

And for them, Guanajuato is an important drug corridor, along with other routes between Pacific ports and the United States, security expert David Saucedo told the news agency.

“It's part of the fentanyl and cocaine routes," he was quoted as saying.

Though there has been a rise in the crackdown against the drug cartels, the state government has been unsuccessful to rein them in.

(With inputs from agencies)

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