Since the March 5 revelation, Mexican media have published a wave of testimonies from those who claim to have survived or escaped Rancho Izaguirre.
Many of those who came forward chose to remain anonymous. They identified as impoverished youths from Guadalajara and explained they were lured to the ranch by false promises of work in online advertisements — or simply kidnapped.
One young man said the ranch was described as “hitman school”. Those who complained, questioned the cartel leader’s orders or failed to pass the brutal tests were executed.
Indira Navarro, the head of the Warrior Searchers of Jalisco, said in a radio interview that one survivor dubbed it “a little school of terror”.
Other documents have emerged suggesting that local authorities may have known about the site but failed to act.
On March 12, the advocacy group Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity published a report showing that National Guard members discovered burned bodies in the same area in August 2019.
It also found that a local police commissioner sent the National Guard a message in March 2020, disclosing an act of attempted bribery.
According to the internal document, an anonymous female caller said that National Guard personnel “would be given a sum of money” in exchange “for reducing the intensity of the operations” in the area.
Jalisco has the highest official rate of forced disappearances in Mexico. Since the government began collecting statistics on disappearances in the 1950s, more than 15,000 people have been reported missing in the state alone.
In the wake of the recent uproar, the state attorney general, Salvador Gonzalez de los Santos, said heavy machinery had been deployed to the Teuchitlán site but that the area was too big to search in its entirety.
That has led the federal government to point the finger at local authorities for not investigating thoroughly enough.
“They failed to track down the evidence or identify anything found abandoned at that location,” Mexico Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero said at a March 19 news conference. “A full examination of the site was not conducted, nor were fingerprints taken.”
A day later, on March 20, federal and state authorities organised a tour of the site for journalists, officials and members of the search brigades. More than 12 buses arrived, some carrying social media influencers.
But the visit was widely criticised, not least for letting the public access an ongoing crime scene.
Family members of the disappeared also questioned why the influencers were reportedly allowed to access the ranch before they were. Some of the influencers later published accounts online denying the existence of crematoriums on the site.
President Sheinbaum, meanwhile, has assigned federal prosecutors — led by Gertz Manero — to take up the case.
“The first thing we need to do is investigate, because the images are painful, and the first thing we need to know is what happened there, before anything else,” she said.
Some critics, however, fear the federal authorities cannot be trusted to helm the investigation. The National Guard, after all, was created in 2019 under former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum’s mentor.
Still, on Monday, federal authorities announced progress in their investigation.
They confirmed that they had detained a recruiter for the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación in a low-income neighbourhood in Mexico City, where he allegedly sought out youths to be brought to the “extermination site”.
Two former police officers from a village near Teuchitlán were also arrested in relation to the ranch.
But academics and investigative journalists have suggested that the ranch in Teuchitlán is part of a vast archipelago of training centres in the hills to the west of Guadalajara.
Nor is the problem limited to one state: On March 12, a separate search brigade said it had discovered another “extermination site”, this time in Reynosa, Tamaulipas.
At the recent protest at the Zócalo, tensions started to boil over as evening fell. Some demonstrators broke through barricades and brawled with the police holding riot shields in front of the National Palace.
“Mercenaries! Killers!” they shouted towards the palace, the official residence of Mexico’s president.
Sebastián Arenas, a journalism student from the National Autonomous University of México, explained that many of his fellow protesters saw Teuchitlán as indicative of a federal security strategy that has allowed mass murder.
“In the press, it’s said that things have changed in Mexico, that there aren’t disappearances, or that they’re going down, that the judicial reform is going to bring justice,” he told Al Jazeera.
“But here are the results: a clandestine grave, an extermination camp that looks like Auschwitz.”
