Mexican authorities said Wednesday that 393 bodies were found in clandestine graves in the first half of 2021 as part of the search for thousands missing in the violence-wracked country.
Alejandro Encinas, deputy interior minister responsible for human rights, said 174 clandestine graves were discovered, compared with 297 in the same period of the previous year. “There was a downward trend in the discovery of clandestine graves, which is an optimistic result, although the phenomenon persists,” he told reporters. The decline does not reflect a decrease in efforts to find the 89,488 people reported as missing in Mexico, Encinas said. Discoveries of clandestine graves are common in a country where more than 300,000 people have been murdered since the government deployed the military in the war on drugs in 2006.