Mexican volunteer researchers say they found a clandestine crematorium in Mexico City

MEXICO CITY — Volunteer researchers said they had found a clandestine crematorium on the outskirts of Mexico City, although it is unclear whether evidence found at the site would support that claim.

It is the first time in recent memory that someone has claimed to have found such a body disposal site in the capital. In northern Mexico, drug cartels often use drums filled with diesel or caustic substances to burn or dissolve bodies, but so far there is little evidence of this in Mexico City.

Ceci Flores, leader of one of the groups of so-called “seeking mothers” in northern Mexico, announced on social media on Tuesday night that her team found bones around a charred well on the outskirts of the city.

Flores said the team found bones, clandestine graves and identity cards at the site, in a rural area in the south of the city.

Ulises Lara, Mexico City’s chief prosecutor, later said that police went to the addresses listed on the cards and “discovered that both people to whom these cards belonged are alive and in good health.”

Lara said one of them, a woman, said she had her card and cell phone and had been robbed about a year ago when thieves stole her phone and ID card from her hands while she was stuck in traffic.

While this ruled out the possibility that the woman’s body had been dumped there, it suggested that criminals used the location to dispose of evidence.

Lara said experts are investigating to determine the nature of the remains found and whether they were human. Prosecutors said they were also reviewing security camera footage and looking for possible witnesses.

The discovery, if confirmed, would be a political embarrassment for the ruling party, which has long governed Mexico City and claims the capital has been spared much of the drug cartel violence that has afflicted other parts of the country.

This is largely due to the city’s dense population, notoriously difficult traffic, extensive network of security cameras and large police force, which presumably make it difficult for criminals to act in the same way as they do in provincial areas.

But although the city has 9 million inhabitants and the greater metropolitan area has around 20 million, much of the south is still a mix of farms, forests and mountains. In these areas, it is not uncommon for criminals to abandon the bodies of kidnap victims, but they rarely burn or bury them.

Volunteer researchers like Flores often conduct their own investigations, sometimes relying on tips from former criminals, because the government has been unable to help. Investigators have been angered by a government campaign to “find” missing people by checking their last known address to see if they returned home without notifying authorities.

Activists say this is just an attempt to reduce the politically embarrassing numbers about the missing.

Investigators, especially the mothers of the missing, generally do not try to convict anyone of the kidnappings of their relatives. They say they just want to find his remains.

The Mexican government spent little searching for the missing. Volunteers must replace non-existent official search teams in searching for clandestine graves where cartels hide their victims. The government did not adequately fund or implement a genetic database to help identify the remains found.

Victims’ families rely on anonymous complaints, sometimes from former cartel gunmen, to find suspected dumping sites for bodies. They plunge long steel rods into the earth to detect the scent of death.

If they 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. But such systematic searches have been rare in Mexico City.

At least seven of the activists searching for some of the more than 100,000 missing people in Mexico have been killed since 2021.