The family of Pablo Osorio, a 26-year-old engineer, is waiting by the phone. Osorio is one of 10 workers kidnapped from a silver mine in northern Sinaloa, and on Friday Mexican authorities said a body matching at least one of the missing men had turned up in a clandestine grave.
The grave is in Concordia, some 45 km (28 miles) east of the Pacific coast city of Mazatlan. Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office said it was moving to confirm the victim’s identity and gather evidence at the site, where remains of several other bodies were also found. Police had not yet formally identified any of them.
“We can’t believe it,” Osorio’s uncle, Jaime Lopez, said in tears after hearing of the mass grave. He was waiting to hear whether his nephew was among the remains. The family is poor, Lopez said, and could not have afforded a ransom. He had not wanted Osorio to go to Concordia because it was dangerous, but it was the only place that answered his job applications when he finished his degree three years ago. “We are going to do everything in our power to find him,” he said.
Threats before the kidnapping
The mine belongs to Canada’s Vizsla Silver Corp. Relatives told Reuters that some of the missing workers had been threatened by organized crime groups in the area, among them the Chapitos, a faction of the Sinaloa cartel led by the sons of ex-drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. Security Minister Omar Garcia confirmed last month that the Chapitos control the area where the miners disappeared. The mine has been shut since the kidnapping.
Authorities have not established why the group was taken on January 23.
Mexico’s government sent more than 1,000 troops, soldiers and elite marines among them, to search for the miners over the weekend. On Thursday, four suspects were arrested in the case.
