MEXICO CITY — Even in Mexico, where stories of massacres, kidnappings and clandestine graves provide daily news fodder, the recent revelations in western Jalisco state have caused a commotion.
Gruesome online images from a ranch apparently once used as a drug cartel training camp show hundreds of discarded shoes, backpacks, pants, shirts and other items, along with pictures of charred bones, bullet casings and clips from high-powered rifles.
Among the handwritten entries found in a notebook were numbered columns of nicknames — purportedly a coded ledger of ex-captives — and a farewell letter from someone that read: “My Love if Some day I don’t Return I only ask you to remember how much I Love you.”
Inside one cinder-block building at the ranch was a candle-bedecked shrine to Santa Muerte (Holy Death), a female folk saint whose cult is often associated with Mexican organized crime.
Disseminating the disturbing images on social media this month were members of a search group that entered the ranch seeking missing loved ones among Mexico’s more than 120,000 “disappeared.” Even the veteran searchers — accustomed to violence, threats and secret graves — were aghast.
“It was a tremendous shock,” recalled Raúl Servín García of Warrior Searchers of Jalisco, one of many volunteer collectives nationwide dedicated to finding vanished loved ones, mostly victims of organized crime. “The first thought that occurs to you is to hope that no relative — a son, a husband — had ever been in this place, had ever been tortured or murdered there.”
Warrior Searchers of Jalisco located three human crematoria while searching for missing relatives at Rancho Izaguirre.
(Ulises Ruiz / Getty Images)
Headlines called the ranch an “extermination camp,” home to underground “crematoria and, even, the “Mexican Auschwitz.”
The abandoned shoes have emerged on social media as a symbol of outrage about the discovery. Memorials for the victims and protests against forced recruitment by cartels were planned this weekend in Guadalajara, Mexico City and elsewhere.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said that federal and state authorities were investigating. “We have isolated photos, but we don’t know exactly what was found, how it was found,” Sheinbaum told reporters Thursday at her daily news conference. “We have to determine responsibilities based on the information and the investigation.”
Mexican Atty. Gen. Alejandro Gertz Manero hinted at collusion between organized crime and officials in Jalisco state. It was “not credible,” Gertz told reporters, that “a situation of this nature wasn’t known by local authorities.”
The troubling images were captured at Rancho Izaguirre — an arid, two-acre rectangular patch with sheds and other structures situated amid irrigated farmland just 37 miles from downtown Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city.
The fate of those whose clothing was found at the ranch — and how many are dead or alive — remains publicly unknown.
Media accounts have alternately labeled the ranch a training facility, a torture center, a killing field and a body-disposal site for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of Mexico’s major, and most violent, organized crime syndicates. Mexican officials have not confirmed any of those characterizations.
The clothing belonged to young men and women lured to the camp by cartel operatives via bogus job offerings, according to the searchers, who say they have spoken to several survivors and their relatives. Many captives were recruited at a bus station in Tlaquepaque, a Guadalajara suburb, said Servín of the Warrior Searchers of Jalisco.
“They met these young people at the bus terminal with phony promises of work,” he said. “Many had no idea what they were getting into.”
Captives who tried to escape, or who didn’t measure up to the physical training, faced death, according to Indira Navarro, head of the searchers’ collective. In a radio interview, Navarro quoted one anonymous survivor saying that prisoners were forced to kill fellow captives.
Cartel operatives have been known to recruit young people with supposedly legitimate opportunities advertised in social media and via word of mouth.
On occasion, officials throughout Mexico have busted clandestine cartel training facilities. In January, Jalisco’s governor touted the liberation of 36 captives at an organized crime camp in Teuchitlán — the same township where Rancho Izaguirre is situated.
Despite the searchers’ detailed accounts, officials have provided little insight about what went on at Rancho Izaguirre. Prosecutors say the site included a “tactical” training area and a physical conditioning zone, along with burial lots. Photos of one area show a kind of obstacle course, crafted of wires lashed onto logs, and another site with tires spaced along the ground — both presumably used for training exercises.
According to the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office, investigators now combing over the ranch have discovered six groups of charred human bones, some hidden beneath earth and bricks. But officials have provided no estimate on how many people were buried there. Nor have forensic teams identified any of the dead — a task likely to take a long time.
In a bid to match items found at the ranch with missing people, prosecutors released photos of almost 500 personal effects, including jeans, T-shirts, blouses, skirts, backpacks and bags.
Even before the mass photo dump, relatives of the missing throughout Mexico had been pouring through the images posted online.
“We’ve received various calls from families saying: ‘I think that T-shirt was my son’s,’” Servín said. “But we have to tell them: ‘Remain calm. Don’t jump to conclusions.’ Because it’s very hard to think your loved one was murdered in this way, or passed through such profound pain.”
A major question in the case is why state authorities didn’t follow up aggressively when the National Guard entered Rancho Izaguirre last September. On that occasion, according to Jalisco prosecutors, authorities arrested 10 suspects, who remain in custody—though authorities have not clarified what charges they face. Investigators also found a body, wrapped in plastic, and liberated two captives.
Among those apparently freed was the author of the love letter-last testament found in the notebook at the ranch. Prosecutors say the individual — who was not identified — is back home.
In September, forensic teams immediately began to search for bodies at the ranch, Jalisco prosecutors said in a news release this week. But state authorities — now under extreme pressure from the federal government— conceded that that earlier efforts were “insufficient” and suffered from “possible omissions,” which are now under investigation.
There has been no criminal activity at Rancho Izaguirre since September, prosecutors said. According to unconfirmed media reports, the cartel ranch had been in operation since at least 2018.
It was an anonymous tip that led the searchers to Rancho Izaguirre on March 5.
“The sensation that runs through your body when you see hundreds and hundreds of shoes piled up like that is indescribable,” said Servín. “And of course you imagine the worst.”
A restaurant waiter by profession, Servín still seeks the remains of his son, who disappeared in 2018, at the age of 20.
“You see the clothing, the shoes, and you can’t control yourself,” said Servín. “The tears come running down your eyes just thinking of the suffering that those poor people endured. One can only pray to God that your loved one was not in that place.”
McDonnell is a Times staff writer and Sánchez Vidal is a special correspondent. Special correspondent Liliana Nieto del Río contributed to this report.
