The bodies lay buried in an open field in El Verde, a village in the hills of Concordia, northern Sinaloa. On Friday, 6 February 2026, Mexican authorities said they had found human remains there, and that they believed them to belong to the ten workers who vanished from a gold and silver mine operation weeks earlier.
The Sinaloa state prosecutor’s office placed the discovery in the community of El Verde, in the municipality where the mine is located. Federal prosecutors did not give the exact number of bodies recovered. They said one of them had the “characteristics of one of the people reported as missing”, and that no victim had yet been formally identified. The office said it was taking steps to confirm identities and gather evidence from a grave in Concordia where remains of several other people had also turned up. It added that four people suspected of ties to the disappearances had been arrested.
What happened at the mine
Vancouver-based Vizsla Silver reported on 28 January that ten of its people had been kidnapped, and said it had told the authorities and was working on a search. The raid itself came earlier. CBC News later reported that armed men, allegedly aligned with a Sinaloa cartel faction, stormed a gated compound called La Clementina in Concordia between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. on 23 January. The company used the compound to house workers and park vehicles. Concordia lies roughly 50 kilometres east of the Pacific coast city of Mazatlan.
Security Minister Omar Garcia confirmed that the area where the miners disappeared is controlled by the Chapitos, a Sinaloa cartel faction led by the sons of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. DW noted that officials had not established why the group was taken. Reuters spoke to relatives of the missing workers, who said organized crime groups in the area, the Chapitos among them, had threatened them.
The state is in the middle of a turf war. Two rival factions have fought each other there for more than a year, DW reported. Mexico’s government sent more troops to Sinaloa and began an operation to find the workers.
Graves, and a larger count later
Later reporting filled in the picture. CBC News wrote that nine of the ten kidnapped workers were found in the clandestine graves at El Verde, about 19 km northwest of Concordia, with the remains uncovered on 6 February. The whereabouts of the tenth, Francisco Antonio Esparza Yáñez, who handled community relations, remained unknown. A 26-year-old engineer, Pablo Osorio Sánchez, kidnapped in the same town around the same time, was buried in one of the graves too.
Federal authorities said a cell linked to the La Chapiza faction was behind the kidnapping and killings. A local boss was arrested in June in connection with the case.
Sources
- Mexico: Authorities find bodies of missing mine workers
- Family wants killing of young engineer linked with case of kidnapped Canadian mining firm workers | Radio-Canada.ca
Sources
- Mexico: Authorities find bodies of missing mine workers – DW News
- Remains found in search for missing workers from Canadian-owned …
