A group of citizens found shoes, clothes and bones at a ranch in the west Mexican state of Jalisco. The site is thought to have been used by the Jalisco New Generation cartel.
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A group of people searching for their missing relatives have uncovered a possible clandestine crematorium in Mexico’s western state of Jalisco.
At a ranch in Teuchitlan, 60 kilometres west of Guadalajara, the country’s second largest city, the Jalisco Search Warriors discovered heaps of clothing, dozens of shoes and some bone fragments last week.
The location is thought to have been used as a recruitment and training centre by the Jalisco New Generation cartel, the state’s dominant criminal organisation, according to Mexican media.
The site was seized in September by Mexican authorities, who said at the time that they had arrested 10 people, freed two hostages and found a body wrapped in plastic.
However, their investigation then went silent.
After receiving an anonymous tip-off, members of the Jalisco Search Warriors, one of dozens of collectives looking for disappeared people across Mexico, entered the ranch and made their discovery.
“A lot of families have stepped forward to identify items of clothing,” said Maribel, a member of the search collective.
“What we want is to stop all of this, the disappearances,” she said. “We hope that this time they'll [the authorities] do the work as they should.”
The Jalisco Search Warriors' leader Indira Navarro said: “This ranch served as a training site and — even though it sounds awful, really harsh — for extermination."
Groups like the one she leads have filled the void left by the state in the search for the country’s more than 120,000 disappeared people.
Jalisco State Prosecutor Salvador González de los Santos, who visited the site on Tuesday and confirmed that six groups of bones had been uncovered there, admitted that previous efforts from the authorities were “insufficient”.
It remains unclear how a group of private citizens were able to discover so easily what the authorities had not.
Pablo Lemus, the governor of Jalisco, announced on Wednesday that the federal Attorney General's Office — at the request of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum — would take over the investigation.