Police in Ciudad Juarez, northern Mexico, have unearthed 381 corpses stacked in a private crematorium, the local prosecutor’s office announced Sunday, attributing the grim discovery to negligence.
“Preliminarily, we have 381 bodies that were deposited irregularly in the crematorium, which were not cremated,” Eloy Garcia, communications coordinator for the Chihuahua state prosecutor’s office, told AFP.
Garcia described the corpses as “stacked” in no apparent order across various rooms within the crematorium building. They were “just thrown like that, indiscriminately, one on top of the other, on the floor,” he stated. All the bodies had been embalmed. Instead of ashes, relatives were reportedly given “other material,” Garcia added. Authorities estimate that some of the remains might have been there for up to two years.
Garcia pointed to the “carelessness and irresponsibility” of the crematorium owners, emphasizing that all such businesses “know what their daily cremation capacity is.” He stressed, “You can’t take in more than you can process.” One of the crematorium’s administrators has already surrendered to prosecutors.
Authorities did not specify whether the corpses belonged to victims of criminal violence. Mexico, a country significantly impacted by organized crime, has been grappling for years with a crisis in its forensic system, which is overwhelmed by the high volume of bodies to be processed, a lack of personnel, and budgetary constraints.
