MEXICO CITY - Officials in Nogales, Sonora, pulled four bodies from two pits, bringing to 122 the number of bodies found in pits in regions near the U.S. border, authorities said Wednesday.
The Sonora pits were discovered Wednesday, Sonora state police said in a statement. One pit contained the body of a man and the second held the corpses of three men.
All the victims appeared to be about 30 to 35 years old, and the bodies appeared to have been buried between 10 and 15 days ago, the statement said.
Mexican drug cartels have been blamed for a number of such mass graves, in which gangs deposit the bodies of kidnap victims or executed rivals.
Mexican investigators also found a clandestine grave with six bodies in Tamaulipas state, authorities said Wednesday.
Tamaulipas state Interior Secretary Morelos Canseco said investigators are searching for more bodies at the pit found late Tuesday. The bodies were taken to a morgue in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas.
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Hours earlier, investigators in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa found at least a dozen skeletal remains in a series of pits.
The graves in Sinaloa were discovered by a farmer who reported unusual odors coming from a field in the township of Ahome, near the state line with Sonora, state prosecutors' spokesman Martin Gastelum said.
He said that seven pits were found late Tuesday and excavations continued Wednesday. Two sets of remains appeared to belong to women who had been reported missing in October.
The state is the home base of Mexico's most powerful drug gang, the Sinaloa cartel.
