Human remains have been found in secret graves and an incinerator in western Mexico, a group that searches for missing persons announced Monday.

A total of 25 bags, containing bones and charred tissues, were found yesterday Sunday in El Salto, Jalisco, the state that has the largest number of disappeared people in the country, some 15,000 people.

“We came across a makeshift oven,” Indira Navarro, of the Guerreros Buscadores collective, explained to AFP. “Looking around a bit, we started to find bones and bits of skin, burnt human flesh, the stench was unbearable.” The makeshift incinerator was still belching smoke, he added.

The prosecutor’s office, responsible for verifying complaints of this nature, has not yet commented.

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

Groups searching for missing persons say drug cartels and other criminal organizations use ovens to incinerate their victims and eliminate all traces of them.

In October, another collective — often founded by mothers looking for their children — found human remains in an incinerator on a vacant lot in the same state of Jalisco.

Mexico counts nearly 100,000 disappeared, according to the most recent official data, updated on March 19.

The vast majority of the disappearances were recorded after 2006, when the government at the time declared war on the cartels, deploying the army at home.

Mexico counts more than 52,000 bodies that have not yet been identified, according to the NGO Movimiento por Nuestros (‘Movement for Ours’, n. disappeared).

The state of Jalisco is a stronghold of the Nea Genia de Jalisco cartel, one of the most violent gangs in the country, along with the Sinaloa cartel.

In Sinaloa state (northwest), which is washed by the Pacific, eight people are missing after 66 were kidnapped and 54 released.