Irma González recognized the gray backpack of the photo. It was the same as his son had used in high school, the same that had taken his first job three years ago, just before he disappeared.
When González, 43, saw the images on television of fragments of bone and personal personal belongings that had been discovered in a ranch in the West of Mexico, his heart shrunk. Would it be his son Josel Sánchez, had gone there? Would your remains be somewhere on that site? Or would you have arrived there by a criminal group just to take it to the other side?
On Wednesday, standing less than 100 meters from the entrance of the Izaguirre ranch, surrounded by sugarcane fields and sterile hills, González cried out for answers.
“I just want to find my son, alive or dead,” he said while crying and begged the local police officers who had assured the place to let her in.
González was the echo of the penalty that other Mexicans feel innumerable who seek their disappeared loved ones, a penalty shattered by a mixture of hope and misery. This emotional shock happened after, about two weeks ago, search volunteers discovered a ranch on the outskirts of the Estanzuela, a small and dusty town near Guadalajara, in Jalisco.
Within the abandoned place, members of the search group, Jalisco seekers, they found traces of unimaginable violence: crematorium ovens, burned human remains and bone fragments. There were also discarded personal belongings and hundreds of shoes.
The discovery has shaken the country to become the most recent symbol of the incessant violence of Mexico and its crisis of disappearances.
More than 120,000 people have disappeared in Mexico since the country began to take the account in 1962, according to official data. From 2018 to January 2023, the government agency that coordinates efforts to locate lost people in Mexico registered 2710 clandestine graves with human remains throughout the country.
Until now, local authorities here in Jalisco do not have many answers about the so -called “extermination field”, as the media and search groups call it.
The authorities have said that the camp could have been operated by the New Generation Jalisco poster – one of the most violent criminal groups in the country – to train recruits, torture victims and get rid of their bodies. But they still don’t say how many people died in the place and none of the remains has been identified.
On Wednesday, the Attorney General of Mexico, Alejandro Gertz, criticized the initial investigation carried out by local authorities and said he had been full of irregularities. The local authorities did not secure the place after members of the National Guard located it for the first time six months ago, and shortly after it was “abandoned,” Gertz said.
These researchers did not documented or registered properly what they found in the place, nor did they take the fingerprints that were in place, he said. The Office of the Attorney General’s Office, at the request of President Claudia Sheinbaum, has taken control of the investigation.
On Thursday, journalists from The New York Times entered the ground, the size of an American football field, lined with cement walls.
There was no evidence discovered by the search group; It was collected by the authorities and dozens of investigators, forensic experts and officers of the forces of the order. Small yellow flags splashed the desolate land, each of them marking a place where researchers had discovered a test element.
Inside a large warehouse with lamina roof, where the search group discovered lots of clothing and shoes, the space was now disturbingly empty. Three chickens wandered for silence. On the ground it blinked a single lonely candle.
The floor was covered with garbage, empty beer cans and broken glass fragments. Partially buried car tires and barbed wire marked the area where the authorities believe that the cartel could have trained their recruits.
Small holes, not older than a garbage boat, splashed the earth like a salt shaker, the trail of forensic anthropologists who excavated the ground in search of human remains or other tests.
Several larger excavation places were cordoned off with yellow police tape.
The previous day, González had finally got her to enter, just to discover that all the tests had been transferred. He left there with a mixture of relief and disappointment. “As a mother I feel relief but I want to stop suffering,” he said.
More than three years ago, González’s son, Josel, disappeared after being hired to work in a mobile phone store in Puebla, in central Mexico, through a Facebook announcement. With 18 years and to graduate, he left studies to keep his family when González became ill of pneumonia that left her incapacitated to work.
Shortly after the news of the extermination field two weeks ago, the authorities published a catalog with photographs of more than 1,500 objects found inside the ranch. González said he had recognized Josel’s backpack.
He joined enough money to buy a plane ticket to Jalisco and check for herself if the backpack really belonged to her son. Maybe, in that little confirmation, I could find some clarity, and maybe even some peace.
Numerous families from all over Mexico have scrutinized the photos, in a desperate search for signs of their missing relatives. Some have recognized objects and have been impossible to Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco, hoping to find answers.
Although the discovery of the ranch shocked the nation, the news of another common grave and buried victims has become common in the state of Jalisco, which records the greatest number of disappearances in Mexico.
Only two days before the Izaguirre Rancho, members of the Guerreros Searchers Group of Jalisco received information about a common grave in a residential property of Guadalajara. There they discovered 13 bags with human remains buried in the backyard, according to Raúl Servín, one of the leaders of the search group.
The inhabitants did not know the existence of the pit, he said.
Seven years ago, Servín was forced to become a kind of anthropologist when his 20 -year -old son, Raúl, disappeared without a trace. It was a woman from another search organization who taught her the techniques she would need: how to choose the right shovel to dig and recognize the specific hollow sound that the earth makes when stepping on it, a revealing sign that something, or someone, could be buried underneath.
Now he distributes his days working as a waiter and responding to hundreds of calls with clues about possible locations of common graves throughout Guadalajara. He goes shovel in hand, inspects the land and excavates in search of missing victims. In seven years, he says, he has found hundreds of corpses.
He does it to try to give families a little peace.
“A shoe does not give you a body that you can bury, bury and go to visit the pantheon to talk to him. It does not make you clear what happened to my son,” said Servín, 53.
His son is among the more than 15 thousand people who have disappeared in the state of Jalisco. It is believed that many of these cases are related to the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel.
As the criminal group has expanding its territory throughout the State in recent years, the number of homicides and disappearances in Jalisco has shot.
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Ulises Ruiz, a local photographer who was with the search group when they found the ranch earlier this month, compared the generalized disappearances in Jalisco with a pandemic, noting that the phenomenon has grown exponentially, affecting more and more people.
“It’s how it happened with Covid, you thought and listened that it was something that was happening in other places, in other parts of the country,” he said. “And suddenly everyone around you has a relative or knows someone who has disappeared.”