Volunteer searchers say they uncovered at least 1,600 baby teeth at a cartel-tied property in western Mexico, a find state prosecutors reject as never reported to them.
Parents hunting Mexico’s missing people reported the discovery this week in Zacapu, Michoacán. The volunteer group Buscando Cuerpos en Todo México, founded by former congresswoman Margarita López, said the teeth turned up on a property allegedly owned by a Sinaloa drug trafficker. The New York Post reported the group’s account and the swift official pushback that followed.
López’s team has spent years canvassing the grounds after a 2021 search. That earlier visit, she said, was accompanied by an investigator from Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office known only as “Braulio.” The group spotted smoke from a hillside, entered the property, and found what looked like human remains. López said Braulio cleaned one tooth and concluded it belonged to a child.
She kept returning. Over the years she said she unearthed bone fragments at the same location. On Wednesday the group reported finding what appeared to be sets of baby teeth, at least 1,600 of them. López has suggested, so far without evidence, that the teeth could belong to children ages 1 to 12 and might relate to organ trafficking or sexual exploitation. Authorities have not linked the items to any specific victims, and no independent forensic testing has confirmed the find.
Mexico’s missing-persons crisis forms the grim backdrop. López has pointed to more than 130,000 people listed as missing nationwide, including 18,104 children. Her own daughter disappeared in 2011; the remains were recovered two years later in another part of the country. That personal loss drove her to found the volunteer search group and keep pressing officials for answers.
For the last two weeks the group has rallied outside Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office in Mexico City. They demanded genetic testing and identification of the teeth. So far they have not obtained it. López has also asked the International Committee of the Red Cross to step in.
On Thursday the Michoacán State Attorney General’s Office rejected the claims in a public statement. “From 2021 to the present, no complaint, referral to authorities, or request for forensic intervention related to these events has been received,” the office said. It added that Mexico’s federal Attorney General’s Office had not received any reports either.
López answered on Facebook the same day. She accused authorities of trying to minimize what happened and insisted the recovery was not a private freelancing effort.
She wrote: “They want to downplay the incident, but the operation to recover the 1,600 baby teeth involved officers from the Michoacán State Attorney General’s Office, acting under an official assignment order to provide perimeter security, and everything is documented in the preliminary investigation.”
She added another line about custody of the material: “(They handled) the chain of custody for the recovered remains, I am not lying.” López also said a federal prosecutor and forensic personnel were present. She has blasted both the state office and federal authorities for staying silent or denying the discovery ever since the story broke, and she has criticized President Claudia Sheinbaum for the same silence.
The gap between the volunteers’ account and the official denial is stark. López describes an operation with perimeter security under an assignment order, a preliminary investigation file, and chain-of-custody handling. The Michoacán office says it has no complaint, no referral, and no request for forensic work spanning from 2021 to now. Mexico’s federal attorney general’s office, per the state statement, likewise shows nothing on its books. The Post reached out to both offices for comment.
Families chasing remains and answers know this pattern of delay and denial too well, including those left reeling after a Tennessee killer’s final words offered no real reckoning for the people he destroyed.
Cartel violence and trafficking networks keep producing new missing-person cases across the region. Federal cases on this side of the border have shown how those networks move people and poison with equal ruthlessness, as when two Honduran nationals drew long prison terms for fentanyl trafficking in North Carolina.
Nothing in the public record yet closes the loop. No accredited lab result has verified that the items are human deciduous teeth or fixed their number at 1,600. No case number, assignment order, or chain-of-custody log has been released to match López’s description. Property ownership details and the evidentiary basis for tying the land to a Sinaloa trafficker remain thin in the available accounts. The International Committee of the Red Cross has not publicly answered the intervention request in the material reported so far.
Political violence and official opacity in Latin America have produced other high-stakes accountability fights, including the deportation of a former Ecuadorian official tied to an assassination case that ICE carried out after the suspect’s arrest.
López continues to insist the teeth are real, the recovery was witnessed by state and federal personnel, and the paperwork exists. Michoacán prosecutors continue to say their files are empty on the entire episode. President Sheinbaum’s office has not issued a detailed public reply beyond the silence López condemns. The teeth, if they are what the volunteers claim, still sit without genetic identification while more than a hundred thousand Mexican families wait for any news of their own missing relatives.
Corruption and cover stories are not unique to one country; even celebrated figures can face hard charges when the books are opened, as in the case of Minnesota’s “Outstanding Refugee” award winner now accused in a multimillion-dollar Medicaid scheme.
Until someone produces verified lab results, a case file, or a clear official explanation that matches the physical claims, the Zacapu site remains a contested pile of assertions: volunteers holding up baby teeth and a long search history, prosecutors holding up empty intake logs, and a national missing-persons emergency that keeps growing while institutions argue over whether they ever showed up.
When parents dig up what look like children’s teeth and the state answers with a shrug and a denial, the message to every family still searching is the same, your dead may not even earn a file number.