The anonymous calls were frequent and said that near Teuchitlán they would find something.
They claimed that in that municipality located one hour on the way to the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco, in western Mexico, there was a property called Rancho Izaguirre in which there were criminal activities and that the search engines disappeared by violence should go there.
Thus, members of Jalisco seek warriorsa group that formed last year in that state ravaged by the violence of organized crime, decided to go see what there was.
“People send us messages and we have to go, because we cannot keep the doubt,” says BBC Mundo Raúl Servín Garcíaa member of that group.
With a group of about 40 people they reached the Izaguirre Rancho. They knew that six months before there There was a National Guard confrontation with criminals and that the Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office conducted some investigations.
“The place had no cordoning ribbons, or government stamps, or chains or locks. We play it, really. Because there could be armed people inside…. But fortunately there was no one, ”explains Servín.
The 53 -year -old has been looking for his missing son, Raúl Servín Galvánsince 2018. Since that year there was an increase in disappearances in Jalisco, a state that accumulates more than 18,000 people not located In the last six years.
Like other fathers, mothers and activists, they go to these types of places with the hope of finding some clue to the whereabouts of their loved ones.
But what they found at the Izaguirre Rancho, a site with indications of having been an organized crime training site, was not something they had seen in the past.
“It causes us impact, pain, sadness. Because many we cry at the thought that maybe our relative can be, ”says Servín.
“Men and women are broken”
Upon entering the Izaguirre Rancho, the group of the seekers were divided between the three wineries they found.
“I found many bullet caps. Others saw apprehensive rings and arms loaders. And others warned us that there were a lot of footwear, a lot of clothes, of all kinds, ”he explains.
As a collective, search engines have received basic instruction on excavations, location of signs and human anatomy. They only use peaks, blades and a “seer rod”, an instrument that helps them know if a land has been excavated and if there is something unusual in it.
“A partner first found burned human remains and said that there would be more. And then we gave ourselves the task of digging more, ”says Servín.
Making findings like these, even for those who have had similar experiences such as members of Warriors seekers, is something that shocks.
“Men and women are broken. So many things we are going through our heads. I not only for my son, but for others. How a complete body is reduced and burned. You can’t imagine everything we feel at that time, ”explains Servín.
On the site more than 400 personal objects were found, between shoes, clothing and backpacks. According to the investigation of the Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office, there were six groups of bone remains “in four spaces.”
It was corroborated “a modality that had not been used by the criminal group: in addition to calcining the remains, they were hidden under a brick slab and a layer of land,” according to the authorities.
What happened there?
The dimension of what happened at the Izaguirre ranch is something that is not fully clarified so far.
The property had been the scene of an operation against the crime of the national lair last September that resulted in 10 detainees and the release of two kidnapped people. Then it was under shelter from the Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office, which made a several weeks investigation to find more evidence of crimes in the place.
The site had been abandoned since then. The state prosecutor Salvador González said that there are no indications that there was criminal activity since last October until the finding of the search engines on March 5.
That has generated more anger and frustration among the collective of Jalisco seekers, because they with little work found the human remains.
“It’s the saddest. That the Prosecutor’s Office had traveled the land inside and did not realize that there were burned remains. They had to have stepped on. We were walking there, ”says Servín.
While search engines found a large number of shoes, clothing and other personal objects, it is not yet clear how many people were there or since when. Due to the characteristics of the place, with physical training spaces, armament remnants and nickname lists, it is believed that it could have been a recruitment site for crime.
“The anonymous call told us that about 280 people had passed, but we don’t really know how many people they took their lives. The bones are reduced almost to nothing. But they may have been buried in the ranch or on the perimeter of outside, ”says Servín.
Therefore they have cataloged this site as a field of “training and extermination.”
There were also signs of who were responsible. In the September confrontation, the National Guard faced members of the Jalisco New Generation cartel, according to reports of that moment.
The Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office informed Thursday that they have found indications of bone fragments on the site, but that their teams of experts confirmed “that there are no structures that serve as furnaces.”
The search engines, on the contrary, say that they found a type of pit that, although it has no capacity to create a body, does have the objective of getting rid of evidence.
“We call them ovens because we find a place where they burn people. They expected to see other types of oven. But we saw that they built on earth, with brick walls, and there they burned them on earth and then covered them, ”says Servín.
Faced with the doubts about the authorities of the authorities, the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum announced that the Attorney General’s Office will take over the case.
Meanwhile, members of Jalisco seekers say they want to continue doing their work in the place, to prevent new “mistakes” such as last investigations.
“We want to take the concern that there are people buried around the ranch,” says Servín.
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