After nearly 12 hours of work, a collective of relatives of missing people named “Standing Until I Find You” and “A Light On My Way” reported discovering the remains of 19 people in clandestine graves in Celaya, Guanajuato. The collectives reported their discovery in the community of Sauz de Villaseñor on February 20, and warned that the gravesites could be bigger than that discovered in Salvatierra last year that contained the remains of 79 people.
The groups reported arriving at the site after receiving an anonymous call. They then alerted the Guanajuato Attorney General’s Office and municipal police. The following day, the collectives gathered again to begin exhuming the sites, now accompanied by two additional collectives, “Until We Find You” and “Project Search.”
One member of the collective reported that the municipal police threatened to arrest her and demanded that she reveal where she received the information. The other members of the collective accused Guanajuato’s state and local authorities of being uncooperative, hostile, and incompetent in assisting them with processing the site. Once pressed to exhume the remains, the authorities exhumed the remains in a way that made them “totally inadmissible [as evidence],” a member said.
Since 2021, 250 homicides have been committed in Guanajuato. Territorial disputes between the Cartel Santa Rosa de Lima (CSRL) and the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) have made Guanajuato the most violent state in Mexico for over a year. In 2020, Celaya and León had among the highest recorded homicides in the state, and at least four municipalities in Guanajuato rank among the 15 deadliest in the country. The war between the rival cartels originated in 2017 after the CJNG encroached on the CSRL’s fuel theft monopoly in the state and attempted to cement its control over a faster route to its northern trafficking routes. The main conflict area was dubbed the “Bermuda Triangle,” which encompassed Apaseo El Grande, Leon, Salamanca, Irapuato, and Celaya.