It is a country where so many people are being killed that there simply isn’t enough room to bury all the bodies.

Escalating violence from Mexico’s ongoing drug wars has seen more than 17,000 people killed this year alone.

That’s almost 80 a day - a higher rate at the height of the notoriously ferocious violence in the mid to late-2000s.

Members of the Solecito search group carry the coffin of Pedro Huesca, a police detective who disappeared in 2013 and was found in a mass grave in 2017, to the cemetery in Palmas de Abajo, Veracruz, Mexico. Huesca's remains are among more than 250 skulls found over the last several months in what appears to be a drug cartel mass burial ground on the outskirts of the city. (AAP)

Last week’s discovery of an innocuous refrigerated truck offered a gruesome portrait of the escalating crisis.

The truck, found parked near the city of Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco, was laden with 157 decaying bodies.

Locals complained about the smell of rotting flesh - but city officials said there was no room left in the morgue to store them.

Mexico expert Professor Barry Carr, from La Trobe University’s Institute of Latin American Studies, said there are several reasons behind the surge in violence which has seen 200,000 people killed by the drugs war since 2006.

In this Jan. 15, 2018 photo, released by the General Prosecutor of Nayarit, a man digs up a clandestine grave in Xalisco, Nayarit state, Mexico. Sniffer dogs led authorities to the grisly discovery of three clandestine graves containing at least 33 bodies in a sugarcane field. Some of the bodies may have been hacked up before being tossed into the pits, and authorities believe they were probably involved in the drug trade. (AAP)

“One of the many reasons why people are being killed in such large numbers is that the drug cartels are fighting among themselves,” he told nine.com.au.

“As they fragment into new cartels, the level of violence gets even greater.

“The government’s war on drugs to some degree only increases this problem.

(Nine)

“When a leader is captured, the rivals of that leader simply emerge to take over.

“In the last 10 to 12 years there’s been an increase in the fragmentation of drug cartels which has certainly led to an increase in the number of people being killed.

Prof Carr said there was 38,000 people killed last year alone – the largest since 2007.

A woman places a candle on photos of the missing students during a protest against the disappearance of 43 students from the Isidro Burgos rural teachers college, in Mexico City, Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2014. Tens of thousands marched in Mexico City's main avenue demanding the return of the missing students. (AAP)

Protesting students paste images of the 43 missing students on the walls of the main Guerrero state courthouse in the city of Chilpancingo, Mexico in 2016. (AAP)

“You can imagine how enormously difficult this is to deal with these kind of death rates,” he said.

Prof Carr said the bodies aboard the truck are likely unidentified and unclaimed and the deaths will almost certainly will go un-investigated.

The state it was found in, Jalisco, is one of the most violent in the country.

“One of the most dreadful and ferocious relatively new drug cartels is based in the state. It’s called Jalisco New Generation,” Prof Carr said.

A mother with a face mask that reads in Spanish "Where are they?" marches along with hundreds of other mothers holding images of their missing relatives during Mother's Day, in Mexico City, Sunday, May 10, 2015. Mothers and other relatives of persons gone missing in the fight against drug cartels and organized crime are demanding that authorities locate their loved ones. (AAP)

Soldiers stand guard during a media presentation of a weapons cache that includes 154 rifles and shotguns and over 92,000 rounds of ammunition, in Mexico City, in 2011. Authorites believe the weapons belonged to the Zetas drug cartel. (AAP)

And it’s not only those involved in the cartels being killed - but hundreds of innocent people too including immigrants from Central America passing through Mexico to try and get into the US.

Then there are those who simply disappear, their bodies are likely piled in a mass grave.

Official numbers of missing are around 30,000.

Every time a new mass grave is found, families hope their loved ones will be finally found - but most can’t afford DNA tests to confirm it.

“The whole country is a country now of mass graves,” said Prof Carr.

Mexico's President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador greets supporters in Mazatlan, Mexico, Sunday, Sept. 16, 2018. Lopez Obrador kicked off his nationwide tour with a new security group of 20 people who will rotate five at a time to accompany him everywhere, with the goal of allowing the incoming president to interact with voters. (AAP)

While hundreds of bodies are regularly found in mass burial pits- three weeks ago 166 skulls were unearthed in one alone - officials aren’t really looking for them.

Chief prosecutor for the Gulf state of Veracruz said last year some graves were not being investigated "because we don't have space to put the bodies that we might find."

Thousands of students marched through downtown Mexico City to protest the rising violence earlier this month, after a spate of horrific attacks on students.

They carried placards with slogans like "Being a student in Mexico is more dangerous than being a criminal."

In March, drug cartel assassins killed three film students who they apparently mistook for members of a rival gang and dissolved their bodies in acid.

A bullet ridden sports utility vehicle is taken away by authorities after a gun battle with marines in which a man identified by authorities as the leader of the Beltran Leyva drug cartel in 2017. (AAP)

In September 2014, 43 students were kidnapped and only the remains of one was ever found.

Nobody has been convicted in either case.

However, new weapons to fight the war could be on their way.

Mexico’s president elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador will officially take office in December and has proposed new measures.

Mexican drug lord Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman is escorted by the authorities to a Mexican Army helicopter in 2016, to be transferred to the prison from which he escaped on 11 July 2015. (AAP)

Security agents guard a gate to the attorney general's office for organised crime as a convoy arrives carrying Damaso Lopez, nicknamed "El Licenciado," in Mexico City last year. Mexican prosecutors said they captured Lopez, one of the Sinaloa cartel leaders who launched a struggle for control of the gang following the re-arrest of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. Lopez was long considered Guzman's right-hand man and helped him escape from a Mexican prison in 2001. (AAP)

His campaign slogan was “Abrazos, no balazos” which means “hugs, not gunfire”- despite 130 politicians and related officials being killed during the election process.

He wants to improve economic conditions so young people are less likely to be lured to cartels.

An amnesty has also been mooted- as well as reducing the intervention of the military and even legalising drugs such as marijuana.

A woman paints the name of a victim of the Mexican drug war onto a body outline as part of a memorial for those killed, on the 10th anniversary of the drug war's start, at the Monument for the the Mexican Revolution, in Mexico City, in 2016. (AAP)

It’s a huge task. Professor Carr, said: “I’m one of those people who refuses to believe it can’t be solved,”

Official government advice for Australians visiting the country is to exercise a high degree of caution.