Violence is now reaching tourist spots that before seemed off-limits to the killers, writes WILLIAM BOOTHin Taxco

MANY TIMES, the victims in Mexico’s drug war simply disappear. Just a few miles outside this quaint tourist town filled with silver jewellery shops, Mexican authorities discovered where some ended up.

For months, maybe for years, feuding drug mafias have unloaded their bound-and-gagged victims from pick-up trucks and car trunks and thrown them down a deep, dark hole. It is one of the most macabre spectacles in a drug war that each week brings news of greater barbarities.

For the past year, locals here reported rumours of strange vehicles on the road at night. And in May, the Mexican military arrested some gunmen who revealed, under pressure, the existence of a mass grave, which is the largest found in Mexico.

It does not look like much from the surface. A simple concrete-block building, tagged with a scrawl of graffiti, covers the entrance to a ventilation shaft designed to feed air into nearby silver mines. The mines have been closed for three years by striking workers demanding better pay from the owner, one of the biggest corporations in Mexico.

State investigators rappelled down the 4.6m-wide (15ft) shaft through darkness to reach the bottom, 50 stories down, where they found a cold, dripping-wet cavern filled with noxious gases.

As they panned their headlamps around the cave, they initially thought they saw 25 bodies, then 55. But as they struggle to reassemble the bodies at the morgue in the capital city, they think they have found the remains of 64 people.

“It was like a quicksand, but filled with bodies,” said Luis Rivera, a chief criminologist, who was one of the first to drop into the mine. “We were stepping on them – it was a very challenging working environment.”

The recovery of the remains took five days, and the work of identifying the dead has just begun, a task made more difficult by the fact that some cadavers were mummified, others were dismembered by the fall, and at least four of the victims had been decapitated.

“There are headless bodies, but some of the heads don’t match the bodies,” Rivera said.

Investigators said it also appeared that many of the victims were alive when they were thrown down the mine shaft. A few might even have survived the fall before they succumbed to injuries.

Medical examiners have identified only eight bodies so far. One was Daniel Bravo Mota, a Guerrero state prison director who had gone missing in late May.

As Mexico fights a US-backed war against the powerful criminal mafias, the news headlines continue to numb. The media reported on the mass grave for a few days, and then moved on.

But increasingly, the violence is reaching popular tourist spots – safe zones that had before seemed off-limits to the killers.

In the resort city of Cancún, authorities last week uncovered the decomposing remains of 12 people lying in nearby sinkholes, known as cenotes. Earlier, they had discovered six others. Three were found with their hearts removed. Some had the letter “Z” carved onto their abdomens, a clue perhaps left by the paramilitary drug cartel known as Los Zetas.

In the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, governor Ney Gonzalez Sanchez abruptly suspended the school year three weeks early as anxious parents, upset by rumours and threats on Twitter and YouTube, demanded action while fearing attacks on children.

The hotel zone in Acapulco has been the scene of hours-long gun battles between the military and assassins, who have used grenades in the fights. A cartel leader was found and killed by Mexican marines in a luxurious condo in colonial Cuernavaca. In Michaocan, where tourists flock to see the annual migration of monarch butterflies, cartel gunmen ambushed a convoy of federal police, killing 15 of them two weeks ago.

Taxco was supposed to be a safe haven. Built to mine silver and developed in the early colonial period by the soldiers of conquistador Hernan Cortes, Taxco is a hill town of red tile roofs, restaurants with sweeping views and lots of shops selling silver jewellery to no one these days.

A few blocks from the central square, neighbours declined to speak much about an attack in which military forces, acting last week on a tip, killed 15 cartel gunmen at an apartment house on a quiet street. The street-level apartment, its windows shot out and walls pocked with bullet holes, still smells rank with blood. – ( Washington Post-Bloomberg)