Mexico's "missing" found in mass graves

Just days after government officials slammed UN figures about the number of "forced disappearances" in Mexico, authorities in the northern state of Tamaulipas have uncovered a gruesome series of clandestine mass graves.

Many of the 116 bodies are thought to be innocent victims of Mexico's bloody drug war in the north that has pitted the notorious Zetas gang against its rival Gulf Cartel in a battle for control of the lucrative transit routes to the United States.

Last week, Mexican authorities were led to 10 pits that contained 72 corpses in the town of San Fernando, about 145 kilometers south of Brownsville, Texas. After the weekend arrest of a man who had been under suspicion for taking part in the kidnapping and killing of bus passengers, the suspect led military authorities to another set of mass graves that contained 16 bodies.

On Tuesday, another grave was found containing 28 bodies. So far, 17 people have been arrested in the inquiry.

Relatives who have reported their loved ones missing over the past year have begun giving DNA samples in nearby Matamoros, Brownsville's sister border city, hoping they do not match any of the bodies recently found. They come from all parts of Mexico.

Rebecca Cruz, 19, has been searching for her 20-year-old brother Moisés, a student in Monterrey, since he went missing on April 30, 2010.

"Not a word. Nothing. His phone didn't work any more. He just disappeared," Rebecca Cruz said in an interview published on Sunday in the San Antonio Express-News . Another woman from Reynosa, who is afraid to give her name, also told the daily how her 47-year-old husband also disappeared on November 30. "He was going to the store and just never returned," she said. "Because of all these bodies - I just want to rule out the possibility; see if he's here. I hope he's not."

Authorities discovered the first batch of graves while investigating reports of people being abducted in March from buses and cars on open highways. Witnesses have told police that armed gunmen board buses, point out male passengers and take them away.

Last week, President Felipe Calderón's deputy chief of staff, Felipe de Jesús Zamora, and Juan Manuel Gómez Robledo, deputy foreign minister, slammed a recent UN report that says that more than 3,000 people have been forcibly disappeared in the country since Calderón took office in 2006.

The unofficial figure was contained in a report by a working group from the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, which traveled to Mexico and was given the numbers by the local human rights groups.

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) also told the UN group that complaints have increased from four in 2006 to 77 last year.

The bodies that have been found over the past week have been placed in a morgue in Matamoros as forensic identification continues.