Nearly 30 Dismembered Bodies Found Along Mexico Border Across From McAllen, Texas

A search group found 27 corpses, many of them cut up into several pieces, in hidden graves along a canal in Mexico, only 4 miles south of McAllen, Texas. 

The bodies were discovered in the Mexican border city of Reynosa after an anonymous tip was called in to the search group, For the Love of the Disappeared, which is made up of relatives of missing people. 

Some had been buried so recently that bits of skin with tattoos were intact enough to be used to identify four of the bodies, searchers said.

But many were hacked into a half-dozen pieces with some covered by only one and a half feet of dirt, said Edith González, leader of the search group. 

González said some of the 16 burial pits contained two or three bodies, and that the site may have been used by drug and kidnapping gangs to dispose of bodies as recently as a month or two ago. 

The prosecutor’s office in the border state of Tamaulipas confirmed the find.

“People are starting to shake off their fear and have begun reporting” the body dumping grounds, González said, adding that some tips may come from “people who worked there (for the gangs) and are no longer in that line of work.”

The group said it has to use caution when tips like this come in as they have been used to bait investigators and searchers. 

Earlier this month, authorities said a drug cartel bomb attack used a fake report of a mass grave to lure police into a trap that left four police officers and two civilians dead in Jalisco state. 

The cartel buried improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, on the road and then detonated them as a police convoy passed. The IEDS were so powerful they destroyed four vehicles, injured 14 people and left craters in the road.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.