BBC visits Mexican cartel ‘extermination’ site

The doors of the Izaguirre Ranch are very similar to all the others that you could find in the state of Jalisco. Two horses practicing on the front, perhaps a nod to the surrounding cattle and sugar cane fields.

However, what is behind the black iron doors would be proof of some of the worst drug violence in Mexico in recent times.

After an opinion on the possible location of a mass grave, a group of militant parents of some of the thousands of people who disappeared from Mexico went to the ranch, hoping to find a sign of their missing relatives.

What they found was much worse: 200 pairs of shoes, hundreds of clothes, dozens of suitcases and backpacks, rejected after the owners themselves were apparently eliminated.

Even more frightening, several ovens and fragments of human bones have been found in the ranch.

The site has been used, the activists say, by the new generation Jalisco Cartel (CJNG) for the recruitment and forced training of their foot soldiers, and to torture their victims and cremate their bodies.

“There were children’s toys in there,” explains Luz Toscano, member of the Buscadores Guerreros de Jalisco collective.

“People were desperate,” she recalls.

“They would see the shoes and said:” These resemble those that my missing parent wore when they disappeared. ”

Toscano believes that the authorities must now go through all the personal effects element by piece and make them available to families for a more in -depth inspection.

For many, however, the worst part of the horrible discovery is that the local police went down to the Ranch, near the village of Teuchitlán, so recently last September.

While at the time, they made 10 arrests and released two hostages, they did not find or revealed any evidence of the apparent magnitude of the violence carried out there.

Although the complete photo is still to come on what action, if necessary, was taken by the municipal and state authorities after the exploitation of last year, the families of criticism and victims openly accuse them of complicity with the cartels of Jalisco.

State governor Pablo Lemus replied in a video message.

His administration cooperated fully with the federal authorities, he said, and insisted that “no one in Jalisco was washing his hands”.

For Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Jalisco’s events threaten to overshadow a good start to the presidency.

Given the serious doubts concerning the actions of the local police and the Office of the Attorney General of the State, she ordered federal investigators to take charge of the case.

She urged people not to draw conclusions while the investigation is underway.

“It is important to investigate before drawing conclusions,” she said in her morning press point earlier this week.

“What have they found on the site? Before something else, we must hear the office of the attorney general of the State, which is the responsible agency, and they will make the whole country know what they have found.”

However, most Mexicans will believe that the official version of events is another question.

The place is now crawling with police, federal investigators and forensic teams in the dust overalls.

Whatever they conclude, however, Mexico’s media calls the Izaguirre Ranch an “extermination” site.

Meanwhile, more research teams for relatives of the victims came to the state capital, Guadalajara, before a protest march this weekend to urge the authorities to do more to find the disappeared people from Mexico.

Rosario Magaña was among them. She is the mother of Carlos Amador Magaña, who disappeared in June 2017. He was only 19 years old.

“I always feel desperate, because it’s been eight years and I am still in the same situation,” she said-speaking of her endless research of her son who was kidnapped with her best friend.

“It is a very, very slow process with regard to the Office of the Attorney General of the State and the investigation.”

“I always have faith and hope to find it,” she said. “But I am in a situation that is not going forward, and it’s discouraging.”

While she had left a religious service for the unknown victims of the Ranchitlán Ranchitlán, Rosario said that allegations of errors, surveillance, collusion and negligence in the case had stressed that mothers of the fight against people as they have faced for years to obtain answers to the most fundamental questions about their children.

“There are so many massive cavities in Jalisco, so much safe from the cartel, the authorities know the CJNG Modus Operandi. So what is the government doing?” she asks rhetorically.