Violence in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero has emptied entire villages, closed schools and forced bus companies off the road.

Now it has shut down the state’s overcrowded morgues as workers walked off the job, saying the stench of hundreds of decomposing bodies had become unbearable.

“Lots of nausea. Lots of nausea,” state employee Laura Reyna Benjamín said of the smell to Televisa. “It makes you not want to eat because the stench really sticks with you.”

Bodies have arrived in such numbers that morgues in the state have neither the space to store them nor the personnel to carry out autopsies, workers told local media.

In the state capital Chilpancingo, 200 kilometres south of Mexico City, at least 600 bodies are being stored in a space designed to take 200, according to the Reforma newspaper.

Between eight and 10 bodies have been arriving daily at morgues in the state, according to Reforma, while the state has registered 1,919 homicides so far this year – already at least 100 more than last year.

More than a decade after Mexico launched a militarized crackdown on organized crime, violence has continued to surge across the country, and 2017 looks set to be the country’s most murderous year since such statistics were first compiled in 1997.

“This problem isn’t exclusive to Guerrero. It’s national,” said Father Mario Campos, a Catholic priest and social activist in the impoverished La Montaña region of Guerrero. “Our society has been battered by the narcos and our institutions are not responding or doing their jobs.”

Guerrero sits south of Mexico City, and includes Pacific beach resorts such as Acapulco and an impoverished mountain hinterland that includes some of the country’s poorest regions.

“People are unable to make ends meet so they get involved with criminal groups because they pay them,” Campos said.

Opium poppies have long been cultivated in the state, but amid growing demand for heroin from US consumers, local crime groups have shifted to the production and sale of heroin – in turn fueling more violence as criminal groups dispute control of production zones and transportation routes to markets north of the border.

Guerrero has long suffered violence, repression, and rule by local strongmen; it has also been the setting for some of Mexico’s most notorious crimes. In 2014, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training college were kidnapped by local police and presumably killed after they were handed over to drug traffickers.

Analysts say that government tactics have also inadvertently helped fuel the violence: law enforcement efforts targeting mafia leaders have led to the splintering of the previously dominant Beltrán Leyva cartel, unleashing a new round of conflict as rival factions vie for power.

At least 50 criminal groups now operate in the state, according to Guerrero’s attorney general, Javier Olea.

Insecurity and threats against teachers – often targets for extortion – forced at least 100 schools to close earlier this month around the city of Chilapa, one of the main poppy-growing areas.

Bus services to the city have also been suspended after the murders of at least 10 drivers. Public transport is reportedly a major method of moving drugs out of the region.