Mexican police have arrested two men suspected of murdering a mother and her son while searching for her other missing son, prosecutors announced Thursday.
Maria del Carmen Morales and her 26-year-old son Jaime Daniel Ramirez Morales were murdered last week in Jalisco state. They had been looking for another son who went missing last year.
The 43-year-old mother belonged to the Guerreros Buscadores collective, which searches for missing relatives. In March, the group discovered bones, shoes, and clothing at a suspected drug cartel training camp in Jalisco, which shocked Mexico.
Guerreros Buscadores stated on social media after the arrests were announced: “Although nothing can alleviate the pain, it is a step towards justice.”
Near midnight on April 23, the attackers opened fire on the mother and son from a motorcycle near their home, according to investigators, adding that Morales was defending her son when she was targeted.
The alleged murderers were identified as Juan Manuel N., 27, and Jose Luis N., 24, by the prosecutor’s office in the western state of Jalisco. They were also suspected of involvement in a dozen other killings. The prosecutor’s office also shared photos and videos of the arrested suspects on social media.
The search group’s grisly discovery at a cartel training camp in Jalisco shed light on forced recruitment and other tactics used by criminal gangs in Mexico, where over 120,000 people are missing.
Disappearances increased dramatically after the government declared war on drug trafficking organizations in 2006. Since then, approximately 480,000 people have been murdered in a spiral of violence.
Aside from the ranch discovery, other mass graves have been discovered in Mexico in recent months. In January, at least 56 bodies were discovered in unmarked mass graves in northern Mexico, near the US border.
A mass grave discovered in December in a Guadalajara suburb with dozens of bags of dismembered body parts contained the remains of 24 people, according to authorities. That same month, Mexican authorities reported recovering 31 bodies from pits in Chiapas, a state plagued by cartel violence.
According to groups looking for missing people, cartels and other organized crime gangs occasionally use ovens to incinerate their victims and leave no trace.