Mexican police have arrested two men suspected of murdering a mother and son, who were killed while they searched for her other missing son, prosecutors said Thursday.
Maria del Carmen Morales and her 26-year-old son Jaime Daniel Ramirez Morales were shot dead last week in Jalisco state. Together, they had been searching for another son who went missing last year.
The 43-year-old mother belonged to the Guerreros Buscadores collective, a group that searches for missing relatives. The group’s discovery of bones, shoes and clothing at a suspected drug cartel training camp in Jalisco in March shocked Mexico.
In a statement posted to social media after the arrests were announced, Guerreros Buscadores said: “Although nothing can alleviate the pain, it is a step towards justice.”
Near midnight on April 23, the attackers opened fire on mother and son from a motorcycle near their home, investigators said, adding that Morales had been trying to defend her son when she was targeted.
The prosecutor’s office in the western Jalisco state named the alleged murderers as Juan Manuel N., 27, and Jose Luis N., 24, and said they were suspected of links to a dozen other killings. The prosecutor’s office also released images and video of the arrested suspects on social media.
Jalisco State Prosecutor’s Office
The search group’s grisly find at the cartel training camp in Jalisco shone a spotlight on forced recruitment and other tactics employed by criminal gangs in Mexico, where more than 120,000 people are missing.
Disappearances soared after the government declared war on drug trafficking groups in 2006. Around 480,000 people have been murdered in a spiral of violence since then.
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.