MEXICO CITY – After police found 49 dismembered bodies strewn on a Mexican highway leading to the Texas border, it took the army just a week to parade an alleged drug trafficker before journalists as the man who purportedly oversaw the body dump.

Yet two months after the grisly discovery in Nuevo Leon state, authorities have not identified a single victim.

The 49 bodies now appear headed for an increasingly common fate in this drug war-wracked country: They could join the growing ranks of the unidentified dead.