Mexican police have found 18 plastic bags full of human remains at the Guadalajara metropolitan area within the western state of Jalisco on Thursday afternoon.

The state is known to be home to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of Mexico's most powerful and violent drug cartels.

In a statement, the Jalisco state prosecutor's office said that municipal police were conducting a surveillance tour in Zapopan, a part of the Guadalajara metropolitan area, when they stumbled upon a human limb near a highway overpass.

It prompted the cops to conduct a search that led to the discovery of 18 black plastic bags among the weeds in a ravine in Zapopan. Police said the bags were all tied and stuffed with human remains.

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According to a New York Daily News report, the human remains were taken to the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Sciences to examine and determine the exact number of victims and cause of death.

Other Discovery of Human Remains in Guadalajara

According to Mexico News Daily, the latest discovery was the fourth found dumped or buried bodies in the Guadalajara metropolitan area in a month.

On Jan. 13, the report said police found 17 bags of body parts on two farms in Tlajomulco de Zúñiga and a clandestine burial site on a farm in another neighborhood in the same municipality.

Police on Thursday also found a body wrapped in a tarp in the city of Tonalá. The body has yet to be identified, but social media users speculated he was the man kidnapped from a Zapopan restaurant on Monday. Police denied those rumors.

Thursday's discovery of the human remains closes out a violent week in the metropolitan area that saw the shooting deaths of 10 individuals in three separate incidents at Zapopan, San Pedro Tlaquepaque, and Guadalajara.

For years, the cartel has been fighting a breakaway faction in and around Guadalajara, Associated Press reported. In El Salto, just outside Guadalajara, a total of 189 corpses were already discovered in the town in 2020.

Last month, Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro said the violence in the state was due to organized crime groups who want to sow fear among people. More bodies have been found in secret graves at Jalisco than in any other state in recent years. 

An ABC News report said over 80,000 people are missing since the drug war began in Mexico in 2006. Last year, around 8,300 individuals were reported missing across the country. Mexican authorities said this was the highest number of missing people than any other year before.

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