A Mexican mother belonging to a group searching for missing relatives was murdered along with her son in a western region plagued by criminal violence, authorities said Thursday.
Maria del Carmen Morales was shot late Wednesday in Jalisco state, the prosecutor’s office said, adding that initial indications were that the crime was unrelated to her activism.
Morales, 43, belonged to the Guerreros Buscadores collective, whose discovery of bones, shoes and clothing at a suspected Jalisco drug cartel training camp in March shocked Mexico. The cartel is led by Nemesio Rubén “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, for whom the U.S. government has offered a $15 million reward for information leading to his capture.
The grisly find shone a spotlight on forced recruitment and other tactics employed by criminal gangs in a country where more than 120,000 people are missing.
Morales was killed when she came to the defense of her 26-year-old son Daniel Ramirez when he was attacked by two men on a motorcycle, the prosecutor’s office said.
Another one of her sons had gone missing last year.
The prosecutor’s office said there was no evidence so far linking Morales’s murder to her search for missing persons.
In a statement posted to social media, Guerreros Buscadores called for an “immediate and thorough investigation.”
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Civil society groups formed by relatives who denounce government inaction risk their own lives searching for remains in unmarked graves, often in areas where cartel gunmen are active.
In addition to the discovery at the ranch, other mass graves have been found in recent months in Mexico. In January, at least 56 bodies were discovered in unmarked mass graves in northern Mexico, not far from the border with the United States.
A mass grave discovered in December in a suburb of Guadalajara with dozens of bags of dismembered body parts contained the remains of 24 people, authorities said. That same month, Mexican authorities said they recovered a total of 31 bodies from pits in Chiapas, a state plagued by cartel violence.
Collectives searching for missing persons say that cartels and other organized crime gangs sometimes use ovens to incinerate their victims and leave no trace.
