A mayor of a city in western Mexico was arrested as part of an alleged investigation Drug cartel training camp When human bones and clothes have been found, said a federal official.
The mayor of Teuchitlán, José Muryuía Santiago, was arrested as part of an investigation by government prosecutors on probable omissions or a complicity of the authorities with the Cartel Jalisco New GenerationA federal source told AFP on Saturday.
The source requested anonymity because they were not allowed to speak to the media.
Murguía was arrested late Saturday afternoon, according to federal arrest files.
The Office of the Attorney General of Jalisco via AP
The cartel, which, according to the US Drug, the administration Sinaloa cartel After the murder in 2010 of the Cartel Sinaloa Capo Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel Villarreal by the army.
The “Ranch of Horror”, as some local media called it, in the Izaguirre Ranch in Teuchitlán in the western state of Jalisco, was discovered in September 2024. Six months later, people who are looking for missing parents found human clothes and remains, raising questions on the initial investigation, including a failure to search for the site.
Human Rights Watch described it as “apparent mass killing site”.
The cartel would have used the ranch to train newly recruited armed men, said senior officials.
The Guerreros Buscadores Collective, a group dedicated to the location of the missing parents, described the Teuchitlán Ranch as an “extermination center” with “clandestine crematoriums” where forced recruits would have been held by the cartel.
Alfredo Moya / AP 
The Minister of Security, Omar Garcia Harfuch, told journalists at the end of March that there was “no evidence that it was an extermination camp”.
But he also declared that an alleged recruiter – who had been arrested – said that the members of the cartel had tortured and killed recruits who refused to cooperate or flee.
The prosecutor’s office, who denied that the executions were systematically carried out, resumed the investigation after a complaint from Guerreros Buscadores.
The group found buried bones, clothes, shoes and other Ranch objects, which went unnoticed during a search in September by authorities who attacked it following gunshots.
Alfredo Moya / AP 
According to the office of the Jalisco state prosecutor, 10 people were arrested, two captives released and a corpse found with skeletal remains in September.
In addition to Mayor Murguía, a dozen other people were arrested in the case, including a police chief of a neighboring municipality and two of his officers.
More than 127,000 people are recorded as missing in Mexico, most of them since 2006, when the government declared war on drug trafficking groups.
By state, Jalisco has the greatest number of cases of missing people, with more than 15,000.
