Authorities in northern Mexico uncovered more than 300 corpses abandoned on the floor of a private crematorium Sunday, citing sheer neglect as the primary cause of the gruesome find.
“Preliminarily we have 381 bodies that were deposited irregularly in the crematorium, which were not cremated,” Eloy Garcia, communications coordinator of the Chihuahua state prosecutor’s office, told AFP.
Garcia said that the corpses were “stacked” on top of one another at random through various rooms with no clear system or order in the building housing the crematorium in Ciudad Juarez, which is just over 10 miles south of El Paso, Texas.
He added that the bodies were largely “just thrown like that, indiscriminately, one on top of the other, on the floor.”
To make matters stranger, all of the bodies were embalmed like they would typically be for a funeral or long-distance transport. Authorities estimated some had been lying there for up to two years.
Questioning kin of the deceased were given “other material” in lieu of ashes, Garcia said. It is unclear what exactly those items were.
Authorities didn’t specify if the corpses in repose belonged to any victims of criminal violence.
Garcia surmised that the “carelessness and irresponsibility” of the crematorium’s owners came down to an underestimation of their “daily cremation capacity.”
“You can’t take in more than you can process,” Garcia said.
Some of the crematorium staff had jumped ship long before the site was raided. One administrator had even turned himself over to the prosecutors.
Mexico has long struggled to keep up its forensic efforts as its system is bogged down by the high number of bodies needing processing, lack of workers and stiff budgetary restrictions.
Many of these heaps of deceased stem from the slew of organized criminal gangs that terrorize states in Mexico.
Just today, 20 dead men, including five who were decapitated and four hanging from a highway bridge by their feet, were found in the Sinaloa state.
In early March, nine students visiting Oaxaca for vacation were found dismembered on the side of a highway with ten pairs of hands arranged nearby. Authorities later concluded that the group had likely been lured to the location by a gang leader, who was also found dead at a separate site.
