Human remains were found in pits and in a crematorium in western Mexico, reports AFP. A total of 25 bags of charred bones and tissue were discovered Sunday in El Salto, Jalisco, the Mexican state with the highest number of missing people (15,000 out of nearly 100,000 officially registered).

“I immediately came across a makeshift oven,” Indira Navarro of the Guerreros Buscadores collective told AFP. “After looking around a bit, we started to find bones and pieces of skin, burnt human flesh and a foul smell.” The stove was still smoking, she said.

The prosecutor’s office, which is investigating these complaints, has not yet issued its opinion.

In the same state of Jalisco, five bodies – four men and one woman – were discovered on the road between the municipalities of Encarnacion and Lagos de Moreno.

Research groups say that drug cartels and other organized crime groups use the ovens to burn their victims and erase all traces.

In October, another group – often mothers searching for their children – found human remains in an oven on a wasteland in the same state of Jalisco.

Mexico has nearly 100,000 people missing, according to the latest government figures as of March 19.

Most of the disappearances have been recorded since 2006, when the then government declared war on the cartels with the participation of the army.

According to the NGO Movimiento por Nuestros (Movement for Our Missing), there are 52,000 unidentified bodies in the country.

Jalisco is a stronghold of the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel, one of the most violent criminal organizations in the country, along with the Sinaloa cartel.

In the Pacific state of Sinaloa (northwest), eight people are still missing after 66 were abducted and 54 released.