500 Corpses Raise A Stink In Mexican Town Morgue, Lead To Protests

Government workers of a prosecutor's office in the Mexican city of Chilpancingo protested against the stink from rotting corpses at the municipal morgue Tuesday, forcing the office to be closed for nearly three hours, Mexican officials said.

According to various reports, at least 500 corpses were being stored in the morgue in the capital city of southern Guerrero state.

Opium poppies are the predominant cash crop in the far-flung mountains of the state, and intense cartel competition to secure the harvest has led to a wave of violence that has displaced entire communities from their ancestral homelands.

According to the New York Times, violence increased in Guerrero in the past decade as a growing number of criminal gangs fight for control of poppy crops and drug-trafficking routes.

The wave of violence has swallowed up whole mountain communities, instigating a fight back by local residents against the killings, according to a report in the TRT World.

However, this hasn't stopped the piling of bodies at the state morgue in Guerrero, and the decaying corpses had about 60 workers in the prosecutor's office up in arms.

According to the protestors, the morgue was overcrowded and therefore it was causing unsanitary conditions.

The New York Times reported that the officials have promised the protesters that in future the transfers of dead bodies to the morgue will involve better sanitary conditions.

“Workers in the prosecutor’s office will take the necessary precautions so that the situation that occurred today, in which the odor (from the corpses) arrived at the office and caused the workers to stop work, doesn’t happen again,” said the state government in a statement, the Times reported.

The situation in Chilpancingo isn't an isolated incident, and drug-related violence has made sure that over-crowding of morgues in southern Mexico has become a regular feature.

According to a report in Fox News World last year, officials revealed that a total of 342 bodies from the Pacific resort cities of Acapulco, Iguala and Chilpancingo were pending to be transferred to the state morgue in Guerrero because the ones in their cities had exceeded their capacity.

The officials had also disclosed then that some of the bodies had been held for years at the morgue in Guerrero. The morgue usually gathers DNA and other identifying information for a database used to find missing people, the Guerrero Attorney General's Office had said.

While authorities said they were moving as quickly and efficiently as possible, they were not sure how long it will take for the Guerrero morgue to process all the corpses.