MEXICAN AUTHORITIES have announced that they have found another clandestine grave holding ten bodies in the northern state of Durango.

Soldiers found the ten bodies last week in a field on the outskirts of the state capital, also called Durango, said Raymundo Enriquez, the spokesman for the Durango state prosecutors’ office.

The total number of bodies believed related to drug gang violence found so far this year in clandestine graves in Durango now stands at 287, including the most recent discovery.

The sheer number of bodies overwhelmed the Durango forensic examiner’s storage facilities, forcing authorities to rent a refrigerated truck. Authorities have so far been able to identify only about two dozen of the bodies; most have been buried again in common graves, after no relatives claimed them.

Police in the city of Durango have offered no motives in the killings, but officials have said the killings are the result of an internal power struggle within the Sinaloa drug cartel, Mexico’s most powerful gang.

Drug cartels

Also yesterday, prosecutors said two mutilated bodies were found scattered in the plaza of a central Mexican town while a boy was killed around the same time in what police say may have been a related crime.

The Morelos state Attorney General’s Office said a young man’s torso was found early yesterday on a basketball court in the town of Pueblo Viejo south of Mexico City. The rest of his body and the other victim’s remains were found in the town’s plaza. Authorities said they found a knife-carved message on the torso but didn’t reveal the content. Drug gangs often use grisly displays of violence to intimidate rival groups.

A news statement said the attack may be related to the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old boy also found early yesterday morning.

Mexico’s tax service, which controls customs operations, said yesterday that authorities had found 480 drums containing almost 100 metric tons of precursor chemicals used to make methamphetamines at the Pacific coast port of Lazaro Cardenas, in western Michoacan state.

The service said in a statement the chemical, methylamine, had arrived in a shipment from Shanghai. Its final destination, according to shipping documents, was the Guatemalan port of Puerto Quetzal.

The port is located in the home territory of the Knights Templar drug cartel, but the Sinaloa and Zetas cartels have been more active in Central America.