How the discovery of a mass grave sparked uproar over the missing in Mexico

Mexico City, Mexico – When they got to the deserted ranch, the volunteer searchers found watches and dirty football jerseys, an applied psychology book and a copy of the Bible. There was even a heart-shaped keychain containing a cut-out photo of a young woman.

But one set of artefacts was particularly chilling: the sight of hundreds of dust-caked shoes, thought to be discarded by victims who were murdered and incinerated in nearby ovens.

The volunteers had uncovered what appeared to be a mass killing site, with suspected ties to the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), a fearsome criminal organisation in Mexico.

It was located in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, less than an hour outside the urban centre of Guadalajara — and at a site previously inspected by local authorities.

The discovery on March 5 has sent public anger rippling across Mexico, as the country grapples with a crisis of mass disappearances at the hands of criminal groups and government officials.

On a Saturday afternoon this month, indignant protesters placed 400 pairs of shoes in Mexico City’s Zócalo plaza, right in front of the National Palace.

One of the demonstrators — who shared only his first name, Juan Carlos — told Al Jazeera that the sheer size of the mass grave is part of the outrage. For him, it represents years of negligence.

Solemn, their faces swollen with tears, some of the protesters had come to the Zócalo because they too had lost loved ones to forced disappearances.

In the mass grave at Teuchitlán, they saw an echo of their own suffering. They called on the government to act decisively and root out the corruption that has allowed so many deaths to unfold for so long.

“We’re going through the same problems,” another protester, Gustavo Sánchez, told Al Jazeera. “There haven’t been advances on anything.”

Sánchez’s son, Abraham Zeidy Hernández, disappeared in the state of Nuevo León in May 2024. He gave a tearful speech at the rally accusing President Claudia Sheinbaum of failing to address the crisis.

“We want to know where they are,” Sánchez said of the disappeared.

According to the Mexican government’s statistics, at least 125,204 people have been declared missing, most of them after 2006, when the country joined the US-sponsored “war on drugs”.

That ushered in an unprecedented period of militarisation that saw hundreds of thousands of soldiers deployed to the street.

The “war on drugs” accelerated the transformation of criminal groups into paramilitary forces that operated in clear view of government officials, even collaborating with them. And it ignited an explosion of human rights abuses linked to state forces and criminals — particularly disappearances.

Many experts believe the official number of missing people to be an undercount, with many cases going unreported for fear of retribution. Some even consider the disappearances the largest case of mass abduction in Latin America since the Cold War.

“This is all because of the mal gobierno [bad government],” Monica Livier, a member of a citizen advocacy organisation called Va por Todos Mexico, told Al Jazeera.

She accused the government of failing to take action to stop the killings in Teuchitlán. “The government already knew about it, but they didn’t do anything about it.”

The mass grave in Teuchitlán was discovered by a volunteer “search collective” called the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco — the Warrior Searchers of Jalisco.

The group is dedicated to finding missing people in the state of Jalisco, on Mexico’s Pacific coast. At the start of the month, an anonymous tip arrived through social media, pointing the volunteers to an abandoned ranch: Rancho Izaguirre.

The ranch had been reputed to be a training centre for cartel members, and government officials had previously swept the ranch.

As recently as September, members of the Mexican military and National Guard raided the area, arresting 10 suspects and releasing two people imprisoned at the site.

A human body was found as well, alongside weapons and ammunition. But the authorities reported no mass graves nor makeshift crematoriums.

Six months later, in early March, the volunteers from the Warrior Searchers of Jalisco arrived with only rudimentary tools: pickaxes and shovels. They said there was no crime scene tape, nor police to guard the site.

So they set up makeshift tents and started digging. Relatively quickly, they found charred bone fragments. Teeth. A metal plate used in surgeries to fix fractured femurs. And three ovens that appeared to be used to dispose of corpses.

“We want to make it clear that these are not ordinary ovens, but crematoriums used to incinerate human bodies,” the collective wrote on social media.

“This is not a setup, it is not an invention. This is the harsh reality we have found in Teuchitlán. We want the truth to be known and justice to be done for the victims.”

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.”