Mexico’s attorney general says ranch was used for cartel training, but no mass graves found

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — A ranch in the western Mexican state of Jalisco was used for cartel recruitment and training, but federal investigators found no evidence of bodies being burned there, Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero said Tuesday.

Gertz Manero said it was “absolutely proven” that the ranch had been used by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel for recruitment and training since 2021.

In March, relatives searching for missing family members inspected the ranch and reported finding hundreds of pieces of clothing and numerous bone fragments. They alerted that it could have been a mass killing site.

Gertz Manero said Tuesday that besides the initial body found by authorities last September, he could not confirm that there were others.

The Jalisco Search Warriors group visited the ranch in Teuchitlan, about 37 miles (60 kilometers) from Guadalajara that was originally found by National Guard troops last September.

At that time, authorities said 10 people were arrested, two hostages were freed and a body was found. They described it as a cartel training site. The state prosecutor’s office went in with a backhoe, dogs and devices to find inconsistencies in the ground, but then the investigation inexplicably stalled.

The search group had gone to the Izaguirre ranch in March after receiving an anonymous call.

Inside they went to work with simple tools — picks, shovels and metal bars — doing the work that state investigators supposedly had done six months earlier.

What they found embarrassed state authorities and shook Mexico: dozens of shoes, heaps of clothing and what appeared to be human bone fragments.

Eventually, the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office published photos of the shoes and other clothing items found at the site on a web page where families searching for relatives could see them.

Following the uproar, the federal government took over the case.

Gertz Manero said his office would make those pieces of evidence available to those looking for missing relatives.

He said the state Human Rights Commission had formally told local authorities about the ranch in 2021, but nothing was apparently done.

The group of volunteer searchers expressed disappointment with Gertz Manero’s statements Tuesday.

Raúl Servín, a member of the Jalisco Search Warriors, said that things had only gotten worse since they raised the alarm about the ranch in March. Last week, he said, a member of their group, María del Carmen Morales, was killed.

He said his group had sufficient evidence that bodies were burned at the site. “They want to let the days pass and the people to forget all of this, and we can’t forget this,” he said, and mentioned the possibility of taking the case to the United Nations to seek support in the investigation.

So far, some 15 people have been arrested, including three local police from the neighboring town of Tala and a member of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel who worked as a recruiter.

Mexico has struggled with a plague of disappearances for decades and the official count now exceeds 127,000.

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