A group of volunteers looking for their missing relatives first received a tip last week for a mass grave hidden in West Mexico.
When they arrived at an abandoned farm outside La Estanzuela, a small rural village outside Guadalahara, they discovered three underground burning ovens, burned human residues, hundreds of bones and rejected personal belongings, along with Santa Muerte figurines.
The Mexican authorities, who were informed of the frightening discovery, said in several statements that they later found 96 enclosures of hells of various caliber and metal rings on the ranch. Until last Friday, the discovery dominated local newspapers and television reports and the search team refers to the site as “extermination camp”.
It is not clear how many people died in the area and none of the residues have been identified. Authorities have not yet said who took advantage of the camp, which crimes were committed there and for how long. But this week, the Attorney General’s office undertook the investigation at the request of President Claudia Sheinbaum.
The photos taken by the authorities and the volunteer team, searching for Jalisco warriors, on the abandoned ranch showed more than 200 shoes accumulated together and piles of other personal belongings: a blue summer dress, a small pink backpack, notebooks. Most of 700 personal belongings were a cold hint at the number of people who may have died there.
In a country, it was apparently ran into episodes of violent violence by drug cartel, where illegal tombs emerge, the images shocked the Mexicans and prompted the outraged groups of human rights to ask the government to put an end to the violence that has been destroyed.
“The number of victims that could probably be buried there is huge,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a security -based security analyst. “And reappeared the nightmare reminder that Mexico is plagued by mass graves.”
More than 120,000 people have been violently disappeared in Mexico since the record began in 1962, according to official data. Human rights groups and volunteer collections looking for their missing relatives have warned that the number could be higher.
The discovery in the farm is coming at a time when Ms. Sheinbaum is facing strong pressure from President Trump to break organized crime in order to avoid invoices to exports to the United States and even the possible US military intervention to chase its members.
In part because of Mr Trump’s threats, Ms Sheinbaum has shifted security issues back to the central stage of her daily order and has adopted a more aggressive approach to combating crime by her predecessor, experts and analysts. But its government faces significant challenges as it faces strong criminal groups that control large areas of the country.
One of the most violent criminal organizations in Mexico, the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which appeared in early 2010, is now an important producer and trainer of synthetic drugs, especially fentanyl and methamphetamine. The team, which operates in the state of Jalisco and throughout the country, has been differentiated in other criminal activities such as illegal logging, human trafficking and blackmail.
Authorities said the ranch could operate from the Jalisco cartel. The team’s dominance and its rapid expansion in recent years coincided with a growing number of homicides, forced disappearances and discoveries of mass tombs in the state of Jalisco.
Indira Navarro, leader of Jalisco’s warriors search, who found that the site had interviewed local media this week that many people had contacted the team to say that they had been hired and trained in the use of weapons and techniques. But the ranch, they said, was also used as a place of murder where criminals usually ruled out their victims.
Ms Navarro, who could not be approached for comments, told news agencies that, according to testimonies, young people from other states were hired through false work bids published in social media. As soon as they accepted the jobs, he said, they were called to a bus station in Guadalahara, the state capital, and from where they were transferred to the ranch.
Mrs Navarro talked about how a young man told her that young recruits were forced to burn their victims in their training. If they opposed their trainers’ commands, the recruits were sometimes fueled into wild animals, such as lions, he said.
“This is not a horror movie. This is our reality and people need to know it,” said Navarro, whose brother was missing nine years ago, in an interview with a national radio show.
The New York Times could not verify the accounts independently.
Local authorities were familiar with the ranch, detecting it last September and finding weapons, shells and bone fragments there, according to official reports, but further investigations were stopped for reasons that are unclear. During the same inspection, officials found and rescued two people who had been abducted and held in the ranch, and also discovered a body wrapped in plastic.
Because the authorities did not discover the heap of shoes, clothes and remains vague then.
The Attorney General, Salvador Gonzalez, told local media since then that we could not look for the whole ranch in September “because there are many hectares in the area”.
Ms. Sheinbaum proposed during a press conference this week that local authorities could be misleading in their original research.
The Attorney General “is right, stating that it is not reliable that a situation of this nature would not be known to the principles of this municipality and the state,” he said. “But the first thing to do is to investigate.”
