TIJUANA – Two years after a man confessed to dissolving at least 300 bodies in acid at a country house in the outskirts of the city, the property has been abandoned by the authorities. Only the skeletal remains of ten bodies were found at the site, a federal agency said.

But relatives of people missing suspect that more victims could be buried in the property and at eight others in the semi-rural area east of the city they believe were used as safe houses by drug traffickers.

The investigation of the 234 official cases of people who were reported missing in Tijuana in the last six years has become tangled in bureaucratic red tape and false leads from anonymous sources that have further confused matters.

A visit to the country house with Fernando Oceguera, the secretary of a civil organization of family members of people who have disappeared, revealed no one is working there.

The property, which covers about 800 square meters and is located on a hill, is surrounded by a concrete fence and the front gate is locked. It's no longer guarded by federal police officers who camped outside of it for months.

Inside, thorny weeds have grown over the trenches investigators dug to search for remains. The walls are tagged with graffiti.

An underground container two meters deep is still there as are several drums where Santiago Meza confessed, following his arrest on Jan. 22, 2009, to have used to pour acid on the bodies to dissolve of them.

According to federal authorities, "El Pozolero," as Meza was nicknamed, was carrying out orders of Teodoro García Simental, who, along with Raydel López Uriarte, commanded a bloody criminal cell supported by the cartel from Sinaloa state.

The cartel declared war on the local Arellano Félix organization for control of trafficking in the lucrative border region.

In 2008 and 2009, this conflict left a toll of 1,507 dead, and 390 people reported missing in Tijuana alone.

García Simental and López Uriarte were arrested January and February of last year, but the violence has continued.

That's why the 300 victims Meza referred to during his detention are not a myth, said Oceguera. He has been looking for any clue of that will help him find out what happened to his son, Fernando Oceguera Ruelas, 23, who was kidnapped Feb. 10, 2007, from his house by a squad of armed men claiming to be federal officers.

He and members of his group, called the Citizens' Association against Impunity, believe that bodies also were disposed at houses near where Meza worked in the same area, called Ojo de Agua, where streets are nothing more than dirt paths and police presence is rare. They say they have been told, off the record, that these other properties were used as safe houses by traffickers.

Some neighbors of the country house privately agree. Speaking anonymously, for fear of reprisals, they said that the wall that surrounds the house was put up seven months before Meza was arrested, and that he was not always in that location.

They said that they continually saw trucks arrive that appeared to have been delivering water but that authorities believe were ferrying bodies.

José Guadalupe Borbón, 74, joined Oceguera in the visit to the property. He's been looking for his son, Quirino Borbón, who disappeared at age 24 on May 16, 2004.

The father said that state authorities have practically closed the book on the case under the argument that his son was a drug dealer.

"I have given them all the names of suspects and of people who threatened me because I continued looking for my son and they don't do anything," he said.

"That's why we don't trust what they tell us because we see the evidence like we are seeing it right now, in this abandoned house."

Baja California's deputy prosecutor against organized crime, Fermín Gómez, said the state has not turned its back on the investigation of missing people. As proof of that he pointed to meetings his office had last fall with the leaders of the Citizens' Association against Impunity.

Gómez said his department had solved 10 cases where the whereabouts of the victims were ascertained and suspects were detained and are being prosecuted.

"This does not give them peace, because not all cases have been solved like we would like, but it shows the interest of the state government has," he said in an official statement following one of the meetings with the association.

For his part, the state Attorney General, Rommel Moreno, said that personnel from the FBI is collaborating with the state in an effort to find out what happened to those who disappeared.

Oceguera, of the organization of family members, said such statements from state officials are nothing but rhetoric that have yielded nothing; that's why they decided to stop working with local authorities and seek federal help.

They convinced the federal agency that targets organized crime, known as SIEDO, to take DNA samples of family members to check them with the skeletal remains found at the property where Meza worked and from other locales. And they successfully lobbied to unite the 234 cases of people missing into only one to speed up the investigations.

In fact, it was during the process of collecting the DNA that the federal agency revealed that the remains of only ten victims had been found at the property where Meza worked.

In mid-December, agency investigators searched a site near Rodriguez Dam after Oceguera received anonymous tips that indicated that a clandestine gravesite was there. They found nothing.

"The local authorities have not done anything for us because they have stigmatized us," Oceguera said. "It's as if all the family members we're looking for had participated in organized crime and they were taken in retaliation."