The objective of this article is to analyze the phenomenon of clandestine graves in northern Chihuahua as an expression of atrocious violence and forced disappearance in Mexico, in order to understand how these spaces operate as necropolitical mechanisms that articulate practices of extermination, silencing, and territorial control. The study involved reviewing statistical data and local and national news reports, as well as conducting semistructured interviews with members of the Paso del Norte Human Rights Center (cdh Paso del Norte). It was found that the northern region of the state accounts for more than half of the mass graves recorded between 2008 and 2024, which points to a systematic pattern of violence, impunity, and institutional collapse. These clandestine graves contain not only bodies but also territorial markers that instill a culture of terror throughout the region.

Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched the war on drugs in 2006 as a strategy to dismantle vast drug trafficking networks. That war has cost the lives of thousands of people, many of whom are buried in mass graves. By focusing on a single day in the search for bodies, this ethnography describes and analyzes one of the brutal aftereffects of this security strategy. One key topic is the different ways in which actors stake out the rights of the lifeless bodies in these graves, from the mothers who dig into the earth to find treasures to the state apparatus that attempts to control the process.