DURANGO, Mexico - The backhoe finally fell silent, and investigator Jesus Salvador Romero stepped out of the compound of Mexico's latest mass grave site, tugged off a surgical mask and issued a matter-of-fact report on the ghastly scene: The site had yielded 11 bodies in a few hours.
"None of them had bullet wounds. None were stabbed. They all seem to have been strangled using a rope tourniquet and a stick," Romero said.
In less than a month, the upturned killing fields of this colonial city had given up 180 bodies by Tuesday, by official count, a horrific tally that has forced the local morgue to rent a Thermo King refrigerator truck.
And the ground keeps offering fresh bodies, making it seem likely that Durango's mass graves soon will eclipse what previously had been the largest set of unidentified corpses uncovered in Mexico: last month, in northeast Tamaulipas state, where 183 bodies piled up.
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Never have such massive killing fields been found in such a short time in Mexico - or anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, for that matter. The victims were lost to violence that only seems to intensify in a nation where prosecutors treat evidence shoddily and rarely bring mass murderers to justice. Most of the victims are likely to remain unidentified.
"It's appalling," said Joy Olson, the executive director of the Washington Office on Latin America, a social-justice advocacy group. Mexicans are vanishing at an increasing pace, she added. "They are disappearing, and where's the outrage?"
Last month, a journalistic tally by the newspaper Reforma determined that 156 mass graves have been uncovered since President Felipe Calderón came to office in late 2006. Mass graves that once held a dozen or two corpses now yield much higher body counts, all of them probably imprecise.
Such mass killings have only a few parallels in this hemisphere. One would be Argentina's "dirty war," when thousands of leftists died or disappeared during the 1976-83 military rule.
Another might be the El Mozote massacre in 1981 in El Salvador, when U.S.-trained troops killed hundreds of villagers.
International experts urge Mexico to exhume the mass graves with an eye to building legal cases and to act more vigorously to identify and search for citizens declared missing.
"The fact that we're seeing all kinds of people turn up in mass graves underscores the need for Mexico to create a national database for people who have disappeared," said Nik Steinberg, the Mexico researcher for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group. No such database now exists.
