AND mass grave discovered last December in a suburb of Guadalajara with dozens of bags of dismembered body parts contained the remains of 24 people, Mexican authorities said Sunday.

Six of them were identified – women and five men. They were reported missing between 2021 and 2023, the Jalisco state attorney general’s office said in statement.

“The families of these victims have already been informed and are receiving full psychosocial support from the Deputy Prosecutor for Missing Persons,” said the state prosecutor.

The remaining 18 have not yet been identified, and the search for the culprits is ongoing.

Officials said the tomb was located using drones with thermal cameras and ground-penetrating radars, as well as dog teams.

More than 450,000 people have been killed across the country since Mexico launched a major offensive against drug cartels in 2006.

The death, like the disappearance of tens of thousands of others, is largely attributed to organized crime. Some of the recent violence coincided with The new generation Jalisco cartel incursion into areas that were once strongholds Sinaloa cartelone of Mexico’s largest drug-trafficking organizations.

Jalisco is the Mexican state with the highest number of missing persons — 15,382 by the end of last year, according to authorities.

Collectives looking for missing persons they say drug cartels and other organized crime groups sometimes use ovens to burn their victims without leaving a trace.

The country’s forensic system is overwhelmed, and tens of thousands of unidentified bodies lie in morgues or mass graves.

Just last month, Mexican authorities said they found a total of 31 bodies from holes in Chiapas, a state affected by cartel violence.

Just a few days before that, the Mexican authorities discovered 12 bodies buried in secret tombs in the northern state of Chihuahua.