Breathe
By Sandra Romandía
A hundred or so sneakers piled up, worn out by time, orphaned of their owners. Bags with IDs that nobody found. Juvenile clothes scattered among the charred remains of a clandestine crematorium. Objects speak when the bodies have been reduced to ashes.
And then there is the letter. Handwritten, in blue ink and desperate words. It is from a young man from Cortázar, Guanajuato, who once dreamed of getting out of the nightmare in which he ended up trapped. His last trace is that piece of paper, found in what appears to be another extermination camp in Mexico. One more in the long list of horrors that the country accumulates without learning anything.
The horror in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, has given us back the image of a Mexico that seems to be revealing its true form: a country turned into a gigantic cemetery, a concentration camp where extermination and forced labor coexist in the shadows. But this is not new, nor is it exclusive to a state, much less to a political party.
Eight years ago, under the editorial direction of La Silla Rota, we published the report "El campo de exterminio que el gobierno de Veracruz ocultó" (The extermination camp that the government of Veracruz hid), something similar to what we see today in Jalisco. But the story of how we got there is key to understanding what is happening today.
In 2017, a search collective in Veracruz sought out reporter Miguel Angel Carmona to confess that they had evidence that a mass extermination had occurred on a ranch. They themselves handed over human remains to the authorities that they had rescued, evidence that, in any so-called civilized country, would have set off all the alarms. But the Prosecutor's Office did nothing. Neither investigated, nor analyzed, nor safeguarded.
Faced with this criminal omission, the editorial team that then directed La Silla Rota decided that we could not keep the testimony to ourselves. We had to go. We organized a security protocol and went to the site with the search groups. What we found there was horrifying.
The images of that ranch were a catalog of hell: baby shoes, identification credentials, human remains scattered like garbage. Each object was valuable evidence for thousands of families searching for their missing loved ones. And the worst part: there were the skulls, the bones, the remains of bodies that were ignored by the Veracruz Prosecutor's Office.
The reason? Perhaps the same reason we see today in Jalisco. It was not omission, it was collusion. In Veracruz, the government of Miguel Angel Yunes, then PAN and today co-opted by Morena, not only did not investigate, but had been there months before; personnel from the state prosecutor's office, in theory autonomous but in fact coordinated with the state, picked up bodies that had not yet been burned and decided that there was nothing more to see. They did not want to analyze the bones or look for who they belonged to until the collectives insisted and we published the report in alliance with Imagen Televisión, on Ciro Gómez Leyva's nightly program.
Today history repeats itself thanks to the searching mothers who went to a site plagued with horror abandoned by the state, without investigating.
Who is responsible for this atrocity that should be a worldwide scandal, and will it be investigated until the culprits are found?
Today, the reporter María del Carmen Gutiérrez, in a text published in Emeequisreveals the names behind the chain of impunity in Jalisco. And there are no surprises: all levels of government were aware, all are responsible.
Teuchitlán is not a ghost town, nor a town lost in the jungle. It is a small place, with a mayor, councilors, municipal police who knew or should have known what was going on in that ranch. But silence is profitable and complicity is the norm. None of them have come forward.
The Emeequis report exposes Luis Joaquín Méndez Ruiz, Jalisco state prosecutor, who is now investigating "omissions" in the case, as if his own prosecutor's office were not part of them. It also points to Salvador González, mayor of Teuchitlán, who so far has been silent.
But the most serious fact of the investigation is the presence of the National Guard at the ranch on at least two occasions prior to the media finding, searching the place without opening a formal investigation. What did they see? What did they decide to ignore? The silence of this corporation, which answers directly to the federal government, is as scandalous as its presence in a place where extermination was evident.
And at the federal level? Nothing. Claudia Sheinbaum's government reacts with empty phrases, while the narrative is to highlight that this is a local problem. The López Obrador government did the same with the massacres in Guanajuato, Tamaulipas and Guerrero. The strategy is clear: turn a blind eye and let time do its work.
This is not a case of organized crime against the State. It is organized crime with the State.
