53 Bags Of Human Remains Found After Dog Seen Carrying Severed Hand

About 53 bags of human remains have been found since late October in Irapuato in Guanajuato, Mexico, after a dog was seen walking around with a human hand in its mouth.

Bibiana Mendoza, 32, was the one who uncovered the body parts in bin bags after digging a makeshift gravesite in Irapuato during an international arts festival, Fox News reported.

Mendoza, who founded a women's organization that searches for missing persons, told Agence France-Presse that she came to Irapuato to find her brother after hearing several reports of a dog carrying around a severed human hand.

"While people from all over the world were celebrating the Cervantino festival, we were digging up bodies, and at the same time I thought it was useless because they were burying more people elsewhere," Mendoza told the news agency.

The remains have been exhumed and analyzed. Mendoza is cooperating with forensic experts to identify the human remains that were discovered in the 53 bags. It is unclear how many of those remains have been identified as of this writing.

Guanajuato reportedly has the highest homicide rate among Mexico's 32 states. The violence is primarily because of the lifelong war between the Jalisco cartel and the Sinaloa cartel.

The state of Guanajuato, in central Mexico, has seen turf wars and violent clashes between cartels and law enforcement in recent months. According to NDTV, around 300 victims of gang violence have been found dead in similar circumstances in the past months in Guanajuato.

Cartel wars have made Guanajuato Mexico's most violent state, with a record of more than 2,400 murders between January and September this year, which is almost 10% of the national total.

Nearly 3,000 more people disappeared in the same period.

"Gang violence, often associated with the theft of petroleum and natural gas from the state oil company and other suppliers, occurs in Guanajuato, primarily in the south and central areas of the state," the U.S. Department of State wrote in a travel advisory last month. "Of particular concern is the high number of murders in the southern region of the state associated with cartel-related violence."