A group of volunteers looking for their missing relatives first received a tip last week on a serious hidden mass in western Mexico.
When they arrived in an abandoned Ranch outside the Estanzuela, a small rural village outside Guadalajara, they discovered three ovens of underground cremation, burnt human remains, hundreds of bone shards and thrown personal objects, as well as Santa Muerte – the Santa Muerte figurines.
The Mexican authorities, who were informed of the macabre discovery, said in several statements that they had then found 96 shell envelopes of various calibers and captivating rings in metal at the Ranch. Last Friday, the discovery dominated local newspapers and television reports, and the research group referred to the site as an “extermination camp”.
We do not know how many people died on the site, and none of the leftovers have been identified. The authorities have not yet said who exploited the camp, what crimes have been committed there and for how long. But this week, the Prosecutor General’s office resumed the investigation at the request of President Claudia Sheinbaum.
The photos taken by the authorities and by the group of volunteers, Searching Warriors of Jalisco, in the abandoned Ranch showed more than 200 chases piled up and lots of other personal items: a blue summer dress, a small pink backpack, notebooks, pieces of underwear. The more than 700 personal items were a scary index on the number of people who may be dead there.
In a country apparently in episodes of brutal violence of drug cartels, where clandestine graves emerge every month, the images shocked Mexicans and invited human rights groups to demand that the government has ended the violence that has ravaged the nation for years.
“The number of victims who could probably have been buried there is enormous,” said Eduardo Guerrero, security analyst based in Mexico City. “And this has resurfaced the nightmarish recall that Mexico is plagued by mole tanks.”
More than 120,000 people were forced Disappeared in Mexico Since this registers has started in 1962, according to official data. Human rights and volunteer rights groups looking for their missing relatives have warned that the number could be higher.
The discovery on the Ranch site arrives at a time when Ms. Sheinbaum faces President Trump’s intense pressure to repress organized crime in order to avoid export prices to the United States and even a possible American military intervention to track down the members of the cartel.
Partly because of the threats of Mr. Trump, Ms. Sheinbaum raised the security problems towards the scene of her program and adopted a more aggressive approach to the fight against crime than his predecessor, say experts and analysts. But her government faces important challenges as it approaches the powerful criminal groups that control large areas of the country.
One of the most violent criminal organizations in Mexico, the cartel of Jalisco New Generation, which emerged in the early 2010s, is now a large producer and a trafficker of synthetic drugs, in particular fentanyl and methamphetamine. The group, which operates in the state of Jalisco and across the country, has diversified in other criminal activities such as illegal logging, trafficking in human beings and extortion.
The authorities said that the ranch could have been exploited by the Jalisco cartel. The domination of the group and its rapid expansion of recent years have coincided with an increasing number of homicides, forced disappearances and discoveries of massive pits in the state of Jalisco.
Indira Navarro, chief of the Jalisco research warriors, who found the site, said in interviews with Local information media This week, several people had contacted the group to say that they had been recruited and trained on the site in the use of weapons and torture techniques. But the ranch, they said, was also used as a murder site where criminals have regularly eliminated their victims.
Ms. Navarro, who could not be attached to comment, told the media that, according to testimonies, young people from other states have been recruited by false job offers published on social networks. Once they accepted the jobs, she said, they were summoned to a Guadalajara bus station, the state capital, and from there taken to the Ranch.
Ms. Navarro told how a young man had told him that young recruits had sometimes been forced to burn their victims as part of their training. If they opposed the orders of their coaches, recruits were sometimes fed on wild animals, like lions, she said.
“It is not a horror film; This is our reality, and people should know it, “said Navarro, whose brother disappeared nine years ago, in an interview with a national radio program.
The New York Times could not independently verify the accounts.
Local authorities knew the Ranch, locating it for the first time last September and finding weapons, shells and bone fragments, according to official reports, but additional surveys were arrested for reasons that are not clear. During the same inspection, officials found and rescued two people who had been kidnapped and held in the ranch, and also discovered a body wrapped in plastic.
Why did the authorities not discover the pile of shoes, clothing and remains is not clear.
The state prosecutor general, Salvador González, has since declared to the local media that it had not been possible to search the entire ranch in September “because there were a lot of hectares in the region.”
Ms. Sheinbaum suggested during a press conference this week that local authorities could have been omitive in their initial investigation.
The Attorney General “is right to declare that it is not credible that a situation of this nature would not have been known to the authorities of this municipality and the State,” she said. “But the first thing we have to do is investigate.”
