A abandoned ranch in the west of Mexico that groups who were looking for missing family members had claimed that it was a “extermination camp” – because of Disapped Personal Items And Burned Leaves Found there – was a training hub for a large cartel, the attorney general of Mexico announced Tuesday. But he said, “There is no evidence to prove” that the ranch was the place of human cremations.
At a news conference that presents the findings of his office so far in the controversial matter, said attorney general Alejandro Gertz that the Izaguirre Ranch in Teuchitlán, a village near Guadalajara in Jalisco State, was “fully proven”, one of the recruitment, training and operation. He said that conclusion was based on testimonials and documents.
But in a deviation from earlier comments, Mr. Gertz insisted that there was no evidence of cremations on the ranch.
Mr. Gertz said that a container with very small bone fragments was found by the authorities who originally discovered the Ranch in September. He said that studies from a University of Mexico City on evidence, dirt and other materials did not find heat levels over 200 degrees Celsius. Cremations, he said, require levels of more than 800 degrees.
Earlier this month, Mr. Gertz said that researchers had not found any evidence From crematoria on the ranch, but that some human remains there were “traces of a kind of cremation”. And the Minister of Security of Mexico, Omar García Harfuch, said Last month that, based on the testimony of a detained person, the cartel went as far as killing those who opposed training or tried to escape.
On Tuesday, Mr Gertz said, beyond the body that the authorities found in September, when the National Guard exchanged fire with people on the ranch, researchers had no longer found bodies or bones.
The ditches and holes in the ground – of which a search group had believed to be cremation ovens – were bonfires, said Mr. Gertz.
Héctor Flores, a leader of a search group in the state of Jalisco, said in a telephone interview that search groups still believed that the ranch had been a destruction site and that people there had been cremated, given what they thought last month. He said that civil servants used technical language in an attempt to change the story.
“The government can call it what it wants, but I think the Mexican society is mature enough and is aware of this entire Izaguirre topic so as not to believe the lies of the federal government,” he said.
Mr. Gertz said that the authorities had no idea how many people could be recruited or disappeared on the ranch. He said that the forensic team still studied the bone fragments to identify them, a task that is complicated by their small size.
Several times on Tuesday, Mr Gertz reminded the public that the investigation was underway and that since the end of March his office only had control of the case, when President Claudia Sheinbaum asked him to take over.
After a group of volunteers who were looking for their missing family members received a tip at the beginning of March about a possible mass grave hidden in western Mexico, photos of a huge number of shoes and clothing shocked a country that was already drawn by many episodes of brutal violence and clandestine graves.
More than 120,000 people have been missing in Mexico since the country began to keep in 1962, according to official data. More than 15,000 have disappeared into the state of Jalisco, with many of the things that are assumed to be related to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
Last month, Mr Gertz criticized the investigation carried out by the local authorities and said it was steeped in irregularities. Local officials did not succeed in securing the site after it was first established in September, and it was abandoned until the search group arrived last month.
On Tuesday, Mr Gertz said that a state committee in Jalisco told the local authorities in 2021 about illegal activities on the ranch “but they did nothing.” Of the 14 people currently held in connection with the case, Mr. Gertz said that there are three local police officers, including a police chief, as well as a person who have identified the authorities as A cartel leader That supervised the training center.
“We go after them who deepened or participated,” said the operations of the cartel on the ranch, Mr. Gertz said, and noted that this included officials. He also said that his office investigated other possible “narco ranches” in the area.
Regarding the bags of clothing found on the ranch – but who were not studied by the local authorities – Mr. Gertz said that he did not know who they belonged to. But he said that federal researchers were planning to work with search groups to help identify the items and then to link them to their owners through forensic tests.
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