Jaime Castañeda said he identified the body of his 43-year-old geologist brother on Sunday by looking at photographs presented to him by officials at the local state attorney’s office in the coastal Mexican city of Mazatlán, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa.

José Manuel Castañeda Hernández worked for the mining company Vizsla Silver Corp. based in Vancouver when he was kidnapped on January 23, along with nine other employees, from Concordia, a municipality located about 50 kilometers east of Mazatlán.

“Really, it was very painful to be here, in a place where we don’t want to be,” Jaime said Castañeda, in a phone interview with CBC News.

José Manuel Castañeda Hernández, originally from the state of Guerrero, was a husband and father of two children, a 14-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter.

“It’s so hard to see … them suffering,” he said Jaime Castañeda. “There is no justice in what is happening.”

The identities of two more kidnapped workers of Vizsla Silver Corp., from Zacatecas state, were also confirmed by a family member and a federal politician on Sunday.

All three men were found dead late last week by federal authorities near the rural village of El Verde, about 15 kilometers north of Concordia.

Their bodies were discovered into what local media have widely described as a mass grave.

The kidnapping and the discovery of multiple bodies in the mountainous area around Concordia took place against a backdrop of a spike in violence fueled by an 18-month civil war between factions of the Sinaloa cartel — one of the world’s most powerful organized crime groups.

One of the factions, called Los Chapitos, remains loyal to the sons of the now imprisoned Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzman. They are fighting a faction known as La Mayiza that is loyal to the son of Ismael (El Mayo) Zambada, who once led the Sinaloa cartel with El Chapo.

Mexican Security and Civil Protection Minister Omar Harfuch said a cell linked to Los Chapitos was suspected of being behind the kidnapping of the mining company’s employees.

The State Attorney’s Office confirmed in a statement from Friday that the authorities found bodies and human remains in The green ones place, without specifying the number or using the term mass grave. The statement said one of the bodies had “characteristics” of one of the missing Silver Vizsla workers.

“We are devastated by this outcome and the tragic loss of life. Our deepest condolences go out to the families of our colleagues, friends and co-workers and the entire Concordia community,” Vizsla Silver said in an emailed statement to CBC News.

“As we grieve, our focus remains on the safe recovery of those who remain missing and on supporting all affected families and our people at this incredibly difficult time.”

Jaime Castañeda said he met at least seven other families at the local federal attorney general’s office who were there to identify the bodies taken from the site.

The families of two Vizsla Silver employees from Zacatecas state were among those asked to identify the bodies in Mazatlán, Zacatecas state attorney Cristian Paul Camacho said.

“We are in communication with both families … and one of the families just told us that they are already in the process of doing the proper identification,” Camacho said in a phone interview with CBC News.

Ignacio Aurelio Salazar Flores, 40, of Zacatecas was one of the employees whose body was identified, his wife, Dayanara Nataly Esparza, confirmed Sunday.

Eparza told CBC News in a text message that it was the “hardest day” of her life, adding that she was too distraught to speak.

The identity of the other worker from Zacatecas, José Ángel Hernández Vélez, 37, he confirmed in a post on social networks Sen. Geovanna Bañuelos, who is from the same country and a member of the Labor Party which is affiliated to the government.

Canadian mining company Capstone Copper also issued a condolence notice for Hernandez Velez.

Abductions can be a message: analyst

David Mora, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, traveled to the Concordia area in mid-January, a few days before the kidnapping, to gather testimonies from families who had been displaced by the violence and were returning home.

Mora said he was told that Los Chapitos had been driven out of the region and that the La Mayiza faction had told the families that it was safe to return.

“Assuming, as the government says, that the group behind the kidnapping is Los Chapitos, I would say it is a show of strength, to send a message that they are not out of the picture in that part of Sinaloa,” Mora said.

Targeting workers associated with a foreign company, such as Vizsla Silver, may have been part of their calculations, he said.

“These people have connections with a Canadian company and this area is very strategic because of the minerals but also the logging industry,” he said. “It raises the political angle of this particular attack.”

There have been 2,776 cases of deliberate killings and 3,290 people reported missing since the war between the factions broke out in 2024, according to statistics compiled by News organization Noroeste in Sinaloa.

Now José Manuel Castañeda Hernández has moved the bars on this grim stat chart.

“He loved mining, he loved being out in the camps, exploring,” Jaime Castañeda said. “And this occupation, it was passed down through the generations, because our father was also a miner.”

Castañeda said he last saw his brother on January 7 after dropping him off at a bus stop in the city of Cuernavaca, which is south of Mexico City. His brother needed to take a bus to the capital so he could catch a flight to Mazatlán and return to work.

“He was younger than me and I would look after him when he was a child. It was like he was my son – I raised him,” he said.

“I have the memory of a good person who always helped people. He always spoke the truth. Always, always, always. He was like that all his life. Noble.”