Investigators found 17 bodies in an abandoned house in a central Mexican region plagued by cartel violence, the state prosecutor’s office said.

The remains were discovered when the property in Irapuato in Guanajuato state was searched as part of a missing persons investigation, according to a statement released late Monday.

Five of the victims have been identified as missing persons, it said.  

Guanajuato is a thriving industrial hub and home to several popular tourist destinations, but it is also Mexico’s deadliest state, according to official homicide statistics.

The violent crime is linked to conflict between the Santa Rosa de Lima gang and the Jalisco New Generation cartel, one of the most powerful in the Latin American nation. The cartel is one of several that has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administrarion.

Guanajuato recorded the most homicides of any state in Mexico last year, with 3,151, 10.5% of murders nationwide, according to official figures.

Since 2006, when the military launched an anti-drug operation, Mexico has tallied about 480,000 violent deaths.

Recent violence in Guanajuato

Innocent bystanders and police officers are often casualties amid cartel turf wars in Guanajuato.

Earlier this month, officials said gunmen opened fire and killed seven people, including children, in Guanajuato, and officers found two banners with messages alluding to the Santa Rosa de Lima gang. Messages are often left on victims’ bodies by cartels seeking to threaten their rivals or punish behavior they claim violates their rules.

In February, five women and three men were shot dead in the street in Guanajuato. The month before that, security forces clashed with gunmen in the state, leaving 10 suspected criminals dead and three police officers injured.

Last December, eight people were killed and two others wounded after gunmen pulled up to a roadside stand in Guanajuato and opened fire on customers.

Two months before that, the bodies of 12 slain police officers — all bearing signs of torture and left with messages by cartels — were found in different areas of the region. The state prosecutor’s office also said the perpetrators left messages in which a cartel claimed responsibility.

The bodies were found less than 24 hours after gunmen attacked a residential center for people suffering from addictions in the same municipality, killing four people.

Mexican authorities on Wednesday arrested a former senior judge in connection with the disappearance and presumed murders of 43 students a decade ago.

Lambertina Galeana, who faces charges of forced disappearance, is accused of helping to conceal videos that allegedly showed the incident unfolding, a government statement said.

Security camera videos allegedly captured the moment the students were kidnapped by armed men right in front of a judicial building, El Pais reported. In 2022, a commission concluded that Galeana ordered the videos destroyed because the images “were not clear due to technical problems,” the outlet reported.

The case, one of the violence-plagued country’s worst human rights atrocities, has become emblematic of a missing persons crisis that has seen more than 120,000 people disappear.

Galeana, now retired, was president of the Superior Court of Justice in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, where the students from a rural teacher training college disappeared in September 2014.

So far, the remains of only three of the missing students have been found and identified, and relatives denounce impunity.

The students from the Ayotzinapa school — whose members have a history of political activism — had commandeered buses to travel to a demonstration in Mexico City when they went missing.

Investigators believe they were abducted by a drug cartel with the help of corrupt police, although exactly what happened is unclear.

In 2022, a truth commission set up by former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government branded the case a “state crime” and said the military shared responsibility, either directly or through negligence.

That same year, federal agents arrested former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, who oversaw the original investigation. 

The commission found that the army was aware of what was happening and had real-time information about the kidnapping and disappearance.

One theory the commission put forward was that cartel members targeted the students because they had unknowingly taken a bus with drugs hidden inside.

The incident drew international condemnation and shocked a nation where criminal violence, much of it linked to drug trafficking, has claimed around 480,000 lives since 2006.