Mexico: 150 Unclaimed Corpses Discovered in a Truck

Tlaquepaque Residents complained about a rotten odor coming from a local warehouse—it was a refrigerated truck with 150 dead bodies.

“The odor would come in waves,” Guadalupe Vázquez told CNN. “Something else that was suspicious was that patrol cars were always there guarding and at night dogs would bark and a lot of flies.”

In the Mexican state of Jalisco, officials discovered the truck during a routine inspection on Sept. 14. They discovered that state officials have been using it as a morgue since their morgues ran out of space.

Tlaquepaque Mayor María Elena Limón wanted to close down the warehouse due to the smell but her request was denied.

“When we wanted to close it down we were told we couldn’t by state security officials because a truck with bodies was inside,” Limón said, CNN reported.

Limón requested the Jalisco officials to move the truck elsewhere, and so they did—to another area where neighbors and local officials told them to move it again.

The truck is now located close to the state attorney general’s office.

Jalisco State Attorney General Roberto López Lara said on Twitter that he wanted to open an investigation into the incident and criticized the officials for their “severe inaction, insensitivity, and negligence to take action by various authorities.”

In 2017, Jalisco suffered from 1,369 homicides while drug-related violence has dramatically  increased, CNN reported.

State officials said that the morgues ran out of space because it is currently illegal to cremate unclaimed deceased victims of violence, The Los Angeles Times reported.

The truck began shifting corpses to different areas some time last week.

Who Is Reponsible

Aristóteles Sandoval, the governor of Jalisco, fired the morgue chief for “grave omissions” and violating “protocol” used to handle the deceased.

The fired morgue chief, Luis Octavio Cotero, said in an interview that he was being blamed for everything and feared for his life.

Although the morgue chief had been fired, it is still unknown who gave the order for the corpses to be moved around.

The other mystery is why the deceased remain unclaimed, since officials have records of their fingerprints, DNA samples, and photographs of their face, according to the Jalisco state attorney general.