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 destined for an increasingly common fate in this drug war-wracked country: They could join the growing ranks of the unidentified dead.

That group has become legion as nearly 16,000 bodies remain unidentified, says the National Human Rights Commission, an independent government agency. In total, 24,000 people have been reported missing. Many say the country’s police are simply overwhelmed by the number of drug war casualties — at least 47,000 since 2006 — as they struggle with poor forensic capabilities and the reluctance of some witnesses and victims’ relatives to help.

The most recent discovery of corpses shows just how hard it is to put names to often heavily mutilated bodies.

Although the 49 corpses all lacked heads, hands and feet, police performed DNA tests on them and compared the results, without luck, to hundreds of Mexicans reported missing.

The authorities captured Daniel Elizondo, the alleged cell leader for the hyper-violent Zetas drug cartel, and pinned the atrocity on him. But he and two other suspects arrested in the case apparently haven’t offered information that could help investigators.