Twenty skeletons have been found in a hidden cemetery in Mexico near the US border

Mexico City – Mexican authorities have found 12 bodies buried in a hidden cemetery in northern Chihuahua, Mexico, officials said Thursday.

Authorities found 11 graves containing 12 bones in the municipality of Ascension near the US border, the state attorney’s office said in a statement.

“This was discovered during the tracking campaigns that took place on December 18, 19 and 20,” it said.

“The bones and unidentified evidence have been transferred to the Forensic Medical Service laboratory” in the city of Ciudad Juarez to identify the possibility of determining the cause of his death, the statement said.

Drug cartels and gangs in Mexico often use these underground mortuary sites to dispose of the bodies of their victims or rivals. This bad practice has contributed to the huge problem of missing persons in Mexico, which is now estimated at 120,000.

Relatives of many of those missing people are largely left to search for their loved ones on their own, and often form volunteer search parties that go out into the desert to look for secret graves. It is not yet known whether any of those groups of volunteers helped the authorities in finding the Ascence cemetery.

Chihuahua has been plagued for years by violence related to organized crime such as drug trafficking and migrant smuggling to the United States.

It has recorded 3,927 missing persons since 1952, according to official figures. Jalisco and Tamaulipas, the states hit hardest by the violence, recorded more than 13,000 missing persons each during the same period.

Mexico has seen more than 450,000 people killed in drug-related violence since the government sent in troops to fight human trafficking in 2006, according to official figures.