The Jalisco Cartel Extermination Camp

The horrors described take the Mexican tragedy to a new level of Hell

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Covering the cartel wars, a painful truth periodically returns to punch me in the gut: how Mexico can be so beautiful and yet also be a land where such barbaric evil takes place. Perhaps this just reflects the human condition.

The discovery of a cartel training and extermination camp in Teuchitlan, Jalisco, comes as Mexicans have been rallying to face a foreign super-power that has threatened tariffs that could tank the economy and military strikes into their territory. But the horrors uncovered in Jalisco state were inflicted by Mexicans on Mexicans. As people process how this terror was allowed to take place, an anger swells up across the country.

(Photos Top 1, Credit Fiscalia de Jalisco, Photo 2 (above), 3, (below) Credit: Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco)

Amid the many terms that have emerged amid Mexico’s cartel wars of the last two decades is “buscadores” or “searchers”; it describes regular citizens who band together to look for their loved ones who have been “disappeared” (another painful word in the cartel-war vocabulary). The searchers traipse round fields, abandoned houses, garbage dumps combing for any sign of their sons, daughters, husbands, sisters, who were often last seen dragged away by gunmen.

On Wednesday, March 5, the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco, or Jalisco Warrior Searchers, went to the Izaguirre ranch, a terrain of about 1,000 square meters in an area of sugar cane, corn and agave fields, an hour from Guadalajara. They had information from a source that there could be corpses buried there in the municipality of Teuchitlan, which means “place of divinity” and is home to an ancient pyramid known as the “Iguana.”

It could have been another day where they found nothing; searchers often get false leads and this ranch had already been raided by National Guard soldiers on Sept. 20. The Jalisco state “fiscalia” (an office that handles investigations and prosecutions) had supposedly secured the property after that but the searchers found they could just walk in.

Over days, however, the searchers scoured through the ranch and its rudimentary buildings and dug into the earth, finding secrets that have shaken the nation. They discovered signs of life, hundreds of pairs of shoes, t-shirts, jackets, backpacks, key-rings, ID cards, letters to loved ones; they discovered signs of weapons, ammunition clips, spent bullets and most sinister of all, three large cremation ovens; and they discovered signs of death, what appeared to be human bones, decayed, charred, fragmented.

“This brings to mind going to the concentration camps in Poland, Auschwitz,” said Lorenzo Meyer, a prominent Mexican political scientist. “Something similar went on at this ranch in Jalisco.”

The ranch was alleged to be run by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and one if its over-zealous local warlords as a “training and extermination camp,” and people briefly went into Google Maps and labeled it as such. It adds credence to the U.S. State Department action in February to designate the Jalisco mob as a terrorist organization.

Mexico has been scarred by mass graves and massacres since at least 2010, and I make a list of the worst atrocities here. Yet there are indications this could take the tragedy of Mexico’s conflict to a new level of Hell.

First is the scale. Information is scattered and confused so we have to be careful coming to concrete conclusions. Mexican federal prosecutors are just in the process of taking over the case. But a source who spoke to the searchers claimed the ranch had been operating since 2012 and had killed over 1,500 victims. The number could sound too incredible to believe, except that that Jalisco is the worst state in Mexico for disappearances, with over 15,000 missing people according to some counts.

A second factor is the intense cruelty described to have taken place on the ranch that can only be called evil. Several people spoke to the searchers and to some Mexican media outlets claiming they had survived the camp and gave horrific accounts of what took place. Again, these testimonies need to taken with caution but they paint a picture that fits in with some other information.

Many of the victims were alleged to have been recruited through adverts for jobs such as security guards and traveled from across Mexico to bus stations in the Guadalajara metro area, especially one in Tlaquepaque. They were said to be kidnapped from there and taken to the ranch where they were forced to train as foot soldiers for the Jalisco Cartel’s paramilitary forces. Those who resisted or couldn’t handle the training, which included brutalizing other prisoners, were…

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