Breathe
By Sonia Serrano Íñiguez
If we search Google Maps for the Izaguirre ranch, in the municipality of Teuchitlán, Jalisco, the legend "recruitment center" appears next to the name of the ranch. It seems a legend in bad taste, because in reality the property was an organized crime recruitment center, which also became an "extermination center," according to the leader of the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco collective, Indira Navarro Lugo.
What this collective of families of missing persons found at the farm, located less than two hours away from the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area, looks like a horror story: crematorium ovens with human remains, hundreds of shoes and clothes piled up, an altar with Santa Muerte and Saint Jude Thaddeus, remains of weapons and marijuana.
Teuchitlán is a small municipality located in the Valles region, an area that was once very important for sugar cane production. The Izaguirre ranch is near the La Vega dam, a tourist area, which has a strip of restaurants. According to the latest Inegi population count, it has less than ten thousand inhabitants.
The ranch, which some have called "Jalisco's Auschwitz" due to the similarity of the photographs of shoes and clothing found at the site to those found at the Nazi extermination center, had already been located by the state Attorney General's Office in September of last year.
The intervention, during the administration of former governor Enrique Alfaro Ramírez, resulted in the arrest of ten people and the alleged seizure of the property. However, with the new intervention it was confirmed that in reality only tapes were placed to restrict access and then the ranch was abandoned by the authorities.
Last Sunday, the Guerreros Buscadores collective began to disseminate images showing the horror of what happened at the site. They returned to the ranch because a young man contacted them to inform them that he was there and that it was used as a training center.
