The ‘Mexican Auschwitz’ is just the beginning: Violence and silence are the norm in Jalisco

No one can get the image out of their heads: hundreds of abandoned shoes, discarded clothes, backpacks, nail polish, toothbrushes... These are some of the items that were found at the Izaguirre ranch in Teuchitlán, one of the many training camps used by organized crime to recruit young people.

The ownerless items have sparked a chilling sense of unease in the minds of Mexicans, leaving a more profound impact than the recurring discoveries of dismembered bodies in black bags.

Mothers who have spent years searching for their missing children in dangerous drug trafficking territory faced the scene with dread. The gray T-shirt with a duck, the top with the number 23, the blue backpack, the pink shoes — these items could identify their loved lost ones. Like a scene from a horror movie, they didn’t know whether to tightly close their eyes or open them to the painful truth.

Teuchitlán, in the heart of the state of Jalisco — that is, in the heart of the bloodthirsty Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) — has become the new symbol of terror in Mexico. It’s no coincidence that it’s been dubbed the “Mexican Auschwitz.” But in these lands where the law of silence reigns, everyone knows that the Izaguirre ranch — where young people were taken to be dehumanized by enduring and watching torture and crime — isn’t the only cartel training ground where bones are found among the ashes. It’s just one of many.

In many parts of Mexico, children are taught to be quiet and to try not see or hear anything. They are instilled with the same fear of neighborhood gang members as they are of the police. The blame for this social decay doesn’t lie with the family or the school, but with the public spaces that have been lost.

The wolf lurks everywhere — from school to home, from the nightclub to the house — and sometimes, the wolf is even in uniform. The scandal over the Teuchitlán ranch and the pressure on politicians to deliver answers have exposed a rancid network that stretches its tendrils across several states. The youths who left their clothes behind at the ranch came from all corners of Mexico, arriving one day at the Guadalajara bus station, only for their trail to vanish forever.

Today, authorities in other state capitals are being accused of luring these kids with false job offers, and arrests are being made in Mexico City of alleged recruiters who prey on the “fresh meat” — the term used for newly arrived youths in these fields.

“Where are the hitmen?” asked a Jalisco prosecutor a few years ago when he encountered the police officers who had carried out a raid. How could he have possibly known that the hitmen where the kids standing in front of him?

In some municipalities, local police are barely useful for organizing traffic during a bicycle race or for dealing with minor offenses. But even these latter situations can be used as opportunities to spot which petty criminals have the potential to graduate to becoming murderers. Recent reports indicate that some uniformed officers in Tala, a town near Teuchitlán, are working for the Jalisco Cartel, specifically kidnapping young men to turn them into killers.

But who isn’t working for the Jalisco Cartel in this region? Two years ago, Science magazine published an article identifying cartels as the fifth-largest employer in Mexico, with an estimated 180,000 people in its service, and issued a call to end recruitment. The 124,000 missing persons listed on Mexico’s official registry suggest that the disease is continuing to spread — probably with more virulance than ever before.

Let’s call him José. Once a hitman for the Sinaloa Cartel, he spent 13 years in prison and is now a barber in Guadalajara. He managed to escape the grip of crime, but for many, it remains a looming presence, waiting for them on the other side of prison bars — with debts to pay and few ways out.

José joined the ranks of those working for Rafael Caro Quintero, the head of the Sinaloa Cartel. “Back then, they invited you to go, and you went of your own free will — maybe because of family hardship, or maybe they saw you liked narco corridos, or luxury things,” he says. “They traded you a knife for a gun, a bicycle for a pickup truck.”

And then, they sent them to kill. The pay? 3,000 pesos (about $140), to eliminate “10 or 15 dudes.” “A son of mine also went voluntarily to Zacatecas,” José adds. “He didn’t like what he saw and turned back.”

“Now there are no invitations, now there are kidnappings,” he says. “[The cartels] themselves have scared kids away with so much violence — with dismembered bodies. There aren’t as many people who want to get involved anymore. It used to be different.”

Organized crime is responsible for most of the 30,000 homicides a year in Mexico. Cartels are no longer just about drug trafficking. While small-time drug dealing helps finance their armies of hitmen, organized crime now extends its reach into nearly every profitable venture: fentanyl, yes, but also beer and shrimp, tourism boats south of the capital, fruit and sock markets (where vendors must pay a fee to sell), as well as agriculture and livestock.

Business is booming and in recent years, the cartels have expanded their power by placing their own people in local governments — mayors, police chiefs, HR officials, treasurers. Like the Italian mafia, they are the ones that dispense justice, and citizens turn to them if they need to punish a petty thief, take out a loan, or pay for medical treatment.

The public, grateful but always fearful, accepts gifts from Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes — the cartel boss of Jalisco — whether it’s toys for children, roscón to eat on Three King’s Day, or food during the pandemic. Experts warn that the cartels aren’t just a parallel state; in some places, they are the only state there is.

Teuchitlán has dragged this reality into the spotlight once again, with brutal force. Six months ago, police from the Jalisco Attorney General’s Office raided the same ranch, arrested 10 people, rescued two kidnapped victims, and removed a body. What is known about the operation? Almost nothing. The ranch held all the evidence, but fingerprints were never properly taken, two vehicles seized by the police have since been stolen, and statements from the survivors were completely ineffective. To this day, no one knows who owns the ranch.

The Jalisco Attorney General’s Office didn’t do its job, and prosecuting anyone will be extremely difficult. The public already knows why: the police aren’t fools — they’re simply at the service of organized crime. And it’s not by choice but under the weight of threats. No one wants to make a wrong move, and the cartels have laid traps everywhere.

“How do we dismantle something so deeply embedded in society?” asks Augusto Chacón, from the organization Jalisco Cómo Vamos, which uses data to analyze life in the state, including crime, arrests, the budget, and social support. “Poverty is a factor, but it doesn’t explain everything. If kids were joining voluntarily, there wouldn’t be these kidnappings,” he says. “What’s missing is the state.”

There are 15,000 missing persons in Jalisco alone, but the lack of state authority is visible across large parts of the country — from Tamaulipas to Sinaloa, Michoacán to Chiapas, Nayarit to Coahuila.

The green lung of Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco, is known as La Primavera: it’s a wooded area where the wealthy live. It’s here that El Mencho’s brother, Doble R, has his ranch — his name can be seen on the gate of his estate, where armored vans come and go, and thoroughbred horses parade. La Primavera is also home to a state governor’s bodyguards, in a place where residents live in eerie harmony. It’s a quiet area, where the rule is “dog doesn’t eat dog,” though that didn’t stop 119 body bags from being discovered in a forest ditch one day in 2019, or the body of an engineer being found practically on the same path that children use to go to school. Waiters were seen one morning walking around one of the bars near the Vega dam, a picturesque location, counting wads of cash. The neighbors are well aware of all this, though only a few dare to speak, fearing retribution. Some of these events don’t even make the news, which, as is well known, could also lead to journalist deaths.

In places where drug traffickers and their families reside, neither the army nor the police dare to enter. “You can sleep with your doors open in these places,” one neighbor summarizes. But every now and then, they exchange a message on WhatsApp: “Did you see that the army took X this morning? They dragged him out of the house.” This is what life is like, side by side with the cartels. Everyone knows that any spot they step on every day could be a hidden cemetery.

On the way to Tala, another town near La Primavera, trucks transport sugarcane to be processed at the sugar mill. The fields of blue agave for tequila stretch across the hills, their blades resembling a thousand blue swords. Another 18 miles further is the beautiful town of Tequila, renowned for its distilleries and a popular tourist spot. Beyond that lies the sea — Puerto Vallarta, where Ava Gardner once bathed in The Night of the Iguana. Today, experts point to Puerto Vallarta as the headquarters of the vast enterprise that is the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. “That’s why nothing ever happens there,” says Eduardo Guerrero, one of Mexico’s top experts on the country’s criminal mafias. People still flock there to safely enjoy the waves and luxury.

The town of Tala, next to the forest, has also been home to forced recruitment camps and mass exterminations, which came to light in 2017. Foresters who venture past the forbidden line to put out fires in the mountains are politely asked to leave, and the fire remains burning, according to a woman who knows the situation well. “There are drug labs,” she says. “The smell is unmistakable when you get close.”

In the same tequila-producing state are El Grullo and Villa Purificación, two towns where El Mencho spends time. He is one of the most wanted drug lords in the United States. The locals laugh: “They can’t be looking for him very hard because he even has his own private hospital there for kidney treatment.” Why don’t they arrest him? “Only they know why.”

Security expert Augusto Chacón wonders how organized crime’s grip on Mexico, which has tightened and expanded over decades, can be dismantled. “It takes a lot of courage, money, and building trust,” he says. It’s the infighting between rival cartels that periodically erupts in terror, with shootouts, burning vehicles, and roadblocks. Only these disruptions break the false sense of tranquility people live under. That’s why some experts believe that with only one cartel controlling Mexico, the fight would be easier. “That’s what many governments have sought: to leave one cartel in power and attack the others, but nothing has been achieved,” Chacón says.

The Jalisco Cartel now has around 80 allied organizations and another 80 subordinate cells, explains Eduardo Guerrero. What the mothers searching for their missing children discovered in Teuchitlán has exposed a horror that was chilling even for a population inured to it. According to the expert, the scandal has made it more difficult for the cartels to sell themselves as the ones providing peace and justice. In some cases, lower-level members make mistakes without the top being aware.

“There’s been a reputational cost, and I think they’ll punish the cell,” says Guerrero, from Lantia Intelligence. Politicians are also being called to account. At the time of writing, the police are reporting arrests in Mexico City connected to the Teuchitlán horrors. Meanwhile, Roberto Rodriguez, the secretary of security in the city of Tulum, died after being shot six times. Crime doesn’t take weekends off. After the noise settles, calm will return, and big business will resume. The cartels need personnel to manage all their operations, and recruitment is crucial.

Social anthropologist Danielle Strickland conducts her research at the Jesuit University of Guadalajara (ITESO). She has worked with many incarcerated drug traffickers and children from Cerro del Cuarto, one of the many impoverished neighborhoods in Mexico where the social consequences of poverty can be deeply studied.

“When you’ve had nothing and someone offers you 5,000 pesos [$250] a week, you feel for the first time like you’re the king of the neighborhood. It’s a question of adrenaline — guns, trucks, women, and drugs. But one day, they’re ordered to kill, and there’s no turning back. Sometimes, they get out of prison and return to the organization, but I’m certain that if they were sent to another country, they’d gladly live a normal life.”

“The real addiction is money,” explains José, the hitman-turned-barber. “You can get out and work legally, but you’ll never make as much money as selling drugs.” These kids defend their choices. “They don’t want to be seen as victims. They don’t want their parents or the neighborhood to be blamed. They defend their own decisions, even though they can’t leave the life. Their dream is to never have entered, but now they can’t leave.”

But not all of them are volunteers — far from it. If they were, there wouldn’t be thousands of missing persons in Mexico. “When they recruit a kid to a gang, they do it by force. They know that if he doesn’t join, some police officer will plant drugs or false evidence on him and throw him in jail,” Strickland explains.

There are no other options. Big business never has enough. That’s how thousands of boys, in the midst of puberty, end up in recruitment centers, where they are forced to witness atrocities without turning away and are coerced into participating in the violence.

“They talk to them nicely, seduce them,” says José. “Do you want to be a commander, or just a dog?” They grab kids from rival cartels and kill them in front of them. Then, they offer them the knife. “If they don’t want to use it, they let them watch for a while longer, how they have fun with the enemies. When your mind has adapted, they give you a gun. That’s the reward — the power.”

The barber doesn’t know exactly what happened at that ranch, but he has some theories. “Maybe other enemy forces arrived and killed them all; I had to do that.” Regarding the crematoriums the mothers observed there, he’s certain: “First, they burn them in underground empty pools, and then they use special mills to crush the bones — or just simple hammers on steel plates.” Yes, whoever named Teuchitlán “Auschwitz” was certainly not wrong.

The reality of Mexico is like a horror movie that people have become accustomed to watching while lying on the couch. But it’s also different: it’s the reality of millions of peaceful citizens whose idea of well-being is simply not being attacked while walking from work to home, from school to the gym, from the bar to home.

Guadalajara is one of the most prosperous capitals in Mexico. The highway to Teuchitlán is lined with international companies, upscale housing developments, and excellent educational institutions. These are the two faces of Mexico, and they turn their backs on each other to avoid seeing or hearing anything. Silence is the law. The same neighbor who asks you if you haven’t noticed a strong smell of gasoline is also the one trying to get you to say that, yes, there are criminals trafficking fuel right next door. Don’t fall for it. Just stay quiet — that’s something you learn since you enter school.

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