Since the revelation on March 5, Mexican media has collected numerous testimony from those who claim to have escaped Rancho Izaguirre or survived.
Many of those who spoke out made the decision to remain anonymous. They described how they were lured to the ranch from Guadalajara by false job promises in online advertisements or simply kidnapped.
One young man claimed that the ranch had been “hitman school.” Those who criticized, questioned, or failed to pass the harsh tests were put to death.
One survivor referred to it as “a little school of terror,” according to Indira Navarro, the leader of the Warrior Searchers of Jalisco, in a radio interview.
Other documents have emerged that suggest that the town’s local authorities may have been unaware of the site’s existence but ignored it.
A report released on March 12 by the advocacy group Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity revealed that National Guard personnel had burned bodies in the same area in August 2019.
Additionally, it discovered that a regional police commissioner had attempted to bribe the National Guard by sending them a message in March 2020.
An anonymous female caller claimed that National Guard personnel would receive money in exchange “for reducing the intensity of the operations” in the area.
The highest official number of forced disappearances in Mexico is found in Jalisco. More than 15, 000 people have been reported missing in the state alone since the government began collecting data on disappearances in the 1950s.
The Teuchitlán site has been heavily inspected, but the state attorney general, Salvador Gonzalez de los Santos, claimed the area is too large to search in its entirety because of the recent uproar.
The federal government has since pointed the finger at local authorities for failing to conduct thorough investigations.
At a press conference on March 19th, Mexico Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero stated that “they failed to locate the evidence or identify anything that was discovered abandoned there.” No fingerprints or a full examination of the site were taken.
Federal and state authorities conducted a tour of the site for journalists, officials, and search team members on March 20. More than 12 buses, some with social media influencers, arrived.
However, the visit received a lot of negative reviews, not the least of which were for allowing the public to enter a persistent crime scene.
The disappearing family members also questioned why the influencers allegedly had access to the ranch before they were. Later, some of the influencers wrote online accounts disputing the existence of crematoriums on the site.
Meanwhile, President Sheinbaum has ordered federal prosecutors to begin the investigation under the leadership of Gertz Manero.
“The first thing we need to do is investigate, because the images are painful, and what happened there, before anything else,” she said.
However, some critics worry that the investigation’s leadership can be attributed to the federal authorities. After all, Sheinbaum’s mentor, former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was the man who founded the National Guard in 2019.
Federal authorities announced progress in their investigation on Monday, though.
They confirmed that a recruiter for the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación was being detained in a low-income neighborhood of Mexico City and that he had allegedly arranged for youths to be transported to the “extermination site.”
In addition to the ranch, two former police officers from a nearby village were detained.
However, reports from academics and investigative journalists suggest that the Teuchitlán ranch is a large network of training facilities in the mountains west of Guadalajara.
A separate search team announced on March 12 that it had discovered another “extermination site,” this time in Reynosa, Tamaulipas.
As the evening dipped, tensions started to escalate at the most recent protest at the Zócalo. In front of the National Palace, some demonstrators fought with police who were holding riot shields, breaking through barricades.
“Mercenaries! ” Killers”! They yelled at the president of Mexico’s palace, which is its official residence.
Sebastián Arenas, a journalist at the National Autonomous University of México, claimed that many of his fellow protesters believed Teuchitlán to be a sign of a nationwide mass murder plot.
According to him, “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.”
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