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Mexican authorities said Friday that federal forces had found what appeared to be the body of one of 10 employees of a Canadian mining company who were kidnapped three weeks ago from a city in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.
The attorney general’s office issued a statement Friday evening saying that “bodies and human remains” were found during the ongoing search for the abducted employees of Vizsla Silver Corp.
The statement said that one of the bodies “shares characteristics similar to one of the individuals reported missing” and that work was underway to confirm the identity. It did not say how many other bodies had been found.
According to the statement, so far, four people have been arrested in connection with the kidnapping.
The 10 employees of the Vancouver-based company were kidnapped on the morning of Jan. 23 from the city of Concordia, which sits about 50 kilometres east of the tourist coastal city of Mazatlán.
Vizsla Silver told CBC News in an emailed statement Friday evening that it was “in contact with the Mexican authorities leading the investigation and with the families of those affected.”
The company’s statement said it could not comment further.
Vizsla Silver has previously faced security concerns with its silver and gold mining exploration project called Panuco in Sinaloa.
It paused field work on April 4, 2025, due to “security conditions in the area,” according to a company filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The United Nations Committee on Forced Disappearances is watching developments in Sinaloa following the review of a case involving a 26-year-old engineer who worked for a different construction company, but was kidnapped the same morning and in the same city as the Vizsla employees.
The UN human rights body sent a petition to Mexican government representatives in Geneva on Feb. 2 requesting “urgent action” in the case of Pablo Osorio Sanchez, from Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca.
In the petition, which was provided to CBC News, the UN committee also makes reference to “the disappearace of the ten [Vizsla employees] due to the interrelation and relevance of the facts to the search and investigation” of Osorio Sanchez’s case.
The petition says that based on information the UN committee gathered as part of its review of the case, it found there were “allegations of collusion between state agents and criminal actors, including in relation to the disappearance.”
There are currently 79 people registered as missing in Concordia, with 30 reported missing since Jan. 1, 2025, according to the UN document.
There are about 6,835 people who have disappeared in the state of Sinaloa, according to the Mexican federal missing persons registry. Sinaloa has a population of about three million people.
The state has recorded about 1,557 disappearances between Jan. 1, 2025, and Feb. 2, 2026, according to the UN petition. The UN body linked the numbers of missing persons to the ongoing violence caused by a civil war within the Sinaloa cartel, one of the most powerful drug trafficking groups in the world.
The war, which began in September 2024, was triggered after one of Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán’s sons betrayed Ismael (El Mayo) Zambada García and handed him over to U.S. authorities.
El Mayo once co-led the Sinaloa cartel with El Chapo. Now, those loyal to El Chapo’s sons, called Los Chapitos, and those loyal to El Mayo’s son, called La Mayiza, are engaged in a brutal war that has engulfed the state.
Federal Security and Citizen Protection Secretary Omar Harfuch has said that it’s suspected that Vizsla’s employees were kidnapped by a cell linked to Los Chapitos.