When the new governor of Veracruz began his term last December, the state’s official figure for the number of missing was in the low hundreds. Upon the most basic review, the governor revised it — to nearly 2,600.

In the last year alone, the remains of nearly 300 bodies have been unearthed from clandestine graves in Veracruz, unidentified fragments that only begin to tell the story of what has transpired in the state, and more broadly the nation, over the last decade.

“There are an infinite number of people who are too scared to even say anything, whose cases we know nothing about,” said the state’s attorney general, Jorge Winckler.

Not that the state could handle many more. In March, Veracruz announced that it didn’t have money to do DNA tests on the remains that had already been found, leaving parents like Mr. Saldaña to panhandle in the street to raise it themselves.

Overwhelmed, the state also decided to temporarily halt all new searches for clandestine graves. There was simply nowhere else to put the bodies.

“The entire state is a mass grave,” the attorney general said.

For more than a decade, cartels across Mexico have taken out their rivals with utter impunity, tossing their remains into unmarked graves across the country. Soldiers and law enforcement officers often adopt the same approach, leaving many families too terrified to ask for help from a government they see as complicit.

It is both highly efficient and cruel: Without a body, there can be no case. And the disappearances inflict a lasting torture on enemies — robbing them of even the finality of death.