In 2026, the Laboratory for Studies on Border Violence (LEVIF, at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte), together with the Center for Research on the Norm and Contemporary Image (CINIC, at Universitat Jaume I), launched the section “Border of the Absent” to explore the strengths and limitations of artistic disciplines and academic fields in addressing the issue of disappearance and other related topics, through essays and literary works.
The author of this text, an academic who has supported groups of families searching for their missing loved ones through the Sangre de mi Sangre Zacatecas initiative, recounts in the first person what the mass graves located by families reveal and their connection to violence such as homicides, disappearances, and displacement.
In March 2025, a group of women—mothers, sisters, and wives of missing persons from Zacatecas—formed the independent forensic search team “Escarabajos” (Beetles). Tired of what they call bureaucratic charades and mistreatment, they decided to search the rugged landscape of the Zacatecas semi-desert. According to them, no matter how many key locations they provided to the authorities, their requests were dismissed or simply not properly carried out the necessary searches (excavations to look for bodies, body parts, or any piece of evidence or proof of the missing person’s whereabouts). Despite the dangers, in less than a year they have located the skeletal remains of at least 26 people in clandestine graves located in the municipalities of Jerez (Monte de los García and La Cañada), Fresnillo (El Tule and Cerro Colorado), Valparaíso (Santa Ana and Mimbres), Villanueva (Laguna Rosas), Villa de Cos, Mazapil (Cañón del Cobre), and Tepetongo (El Caquixtle).
According to the report by the Citizen Platform for Graves in Mexico, between 2023 and 2024, state prosecutors reported the location of 1,451 clandestine graves, the Attorney General’s Office reported 94, while a press record yielded at least 1,006 during this period [1]. In this reflection, I focus on one of the main findings of the independent search team in Zacatecas: a series of graves containing the skeletal remains of at least 11 people, in the town of El Caquixtle in the municipality of Tepetongo, in the southern part of the state.
The first discovery was made on October 2, 2025, and although “Escarabajos” announced that the remains belonged to eight people, the Zacatecas State Attorney General’s Office stated that they belonged to six [2]. According to the testimonies of the participating searchers, the bodies found showed clear signs of torture; Furthermore, they described the scene as deeply disturbing because several of the remains were scattered. In the words of one of the group members, “It was a terrible feeling to think that where I was standing, there could be someone and I wouldn’t know it. To imagine how they got there, how they were tortured, how long they were there, and so on…” (Personal communication).
Once the initial findings were secured, the families insisted on continuing the search in the area, but the authorities responded that they had already conducted the necessary surveys and found no further leads. Undeterred, the group returned more than a month later, on November 28 and 29, this time accompanied by the “Hasta Encontrarte” collective from Guanajuato. During these searches, they located two more bodies on a nearby property in the same community of El Caquixtle. On December 17, they returned to a spot in the area, finding more skeletal remains. These scenes are repeated throughout the country: women unearthing bodies in clandestine graves, sites and plots of land used for irregular burials where bodies are repeatedly found despite authorities being alerted. The horror is repeated.
What do these scenes tell us about the geographies of violence in Zacatecas?
The corridor encompassing the municipalities of Jerez and Tepetongo (less than 80 kilometers from the city of Zacatecas) has been key to criminal disputes in the state, given its border with Jalisco and its location as an entrance to the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range. This region is dedicated to small-scale agriculture and livestock farming, with intense dynamics of international migration and a collection of small rural communities (between 500 and 2,500 inhabitants) scattered across a wide geographical area. Over the past ten years, the area has been the scene of multiple acts of violence associated with disputes between groups linked to the so-called “Sinaloa Cartel” and “Jalisco New Generation”, which had a period of intensification between 2020 and 2024 [3].
These individuals were identified through photographs of clothing found at the site. A gray sweatshirt and a white plastic rain boot were the only clues families had to see on social media to know their loved ones were among those found. As documented in the report “Clothing Speaks,” published on the first anniversary of the Rancho Izaguirre site, clothing and belongings are crucial traces for identification. Despite this, authorities persist in destroying or storing them away without publicizing them [10]. Here, once again, independent searches overcome bureaucratic barriers through what we might call a counter-archive, contained, for example, on the Facebook pages of collectives conducting independent searches, where photos of clothing and objects are posted—a record they cannot maintain when actions are coordinated by state institutions.
Border areas further complicate the search and location work carried out by collectives, given that the Mexican State has yet to implement a policy of coordination and centralization for forensic identification. While they have the genetic profiles of the individuals whose remains were found in El Caquixtle, they have not been able to match them with relatives in the genetic databases of Zacatecas, and the concealment is reinforced by bureaucratic obstacles and inefficiencies. The bodies were located, but now they remain in a new stage of disappearance: in state laboratories.
What the mass graves of El Caquixtle, like so many others in the country, reveal is that in the geographies of violence in Mexico, the disappearance of people is intertwined with homicides, displacement, massacres, extortion, and human trafficking. This violence intensified between 2020 and 2024 in the Jerez and Tepetongo region, and impunity persists.
As specialists like Rossana Reguillo, Rita Segato, María Victoria Uribe, and Elsa Blair have argued, this type of violence has a communicative purpose, serving as messages of control and terror amidst disputes between criminal groups. The mass graves not only represent a landscape of horror but are also vestiges of how violence and death have been established as a form of regulation and violent order in these territories. When I asked one of the searchers her impression of the scale of what had been found, she replied: “It’s a safe space for them [the perpetrators] because they are isolated places, where no one else goes, where they have total control with the authorities and the State, because they are constantly coming and going and there is obvious activity” (Personal communication). In the words of another member of the team:
“What we see is that they grabbed people on the road, or they took others and put them in the same place because they could do whatever they wanted. These are places where there is constant violence, because the authorities know that’s where these burials take place” (Personal communication).
The last statement refers to the harm caused to families when authorities have clear knowledge of the locations where the disappeared are buried and, through malice or negligence, do nothing to rectify the situation.
The accumulation and intersection of violence is evident. Years after the crisis that ravaged the Jerez and Tepetongo region, in southern Zacatecas on the border with Jalisco, the families searching for their loved ones resist being forgotten. Each independent search reveals that there are places the authorities didn’t want to go. Each discovery demonstrates that slow bureaucracies are also ways of keeping bodies hidden and perpetuating enforced absence.
The question then arises of how to respond to such atrocious violence that leaves deep scars on the affected regions. Until now, state institutions have addressed the issue of disappearances as a matter of individual cases, even though the contexts and geographies of violence tell us that we are facing collective grievances in territories where cruel violence has been reproduced, leaving its mark on their inhabitants. When families searching for their missing loved ones organize and prioritize the collective goal over the individual, they offer us a clue. Therefore, intervention in these areas must be conceived from the perspective of collective reparations.
Source: adondevanlosdesaparecidos
