Killing the site in Jalisco, Mexico is only the last of a long series of horrible discoveries

Mexico City – Prosecutors in western Mexico confirmed this week the discovery of hundreds of clothing and bone fragments by a group of people looking for relatives in a previously known poster training site, exposing important deficiencies in the original investigation.

But the discovery in the state of Jalisco was not the first such horrible discovery. The Official Registry of Mexico has more than 120,000 missing people. The discovery of such places has accelerated in the last 15 years as more relatives of the disappeared do the work that the government will often not seek their disappeared loved ones.

In this case, it was the Jalisco Search Warriors group checking a ranch in Teuchitlan, about 37 miles (60 kilometers) of Guadalajara that was found by the National Guard troops last September.

At that time, the authorities said 10 people were arrested, two hostages were released and a body was found. They described it as a poster training site. The state prosecutor’s office entered with a backhoe, dogs and devices to find inconsistencies in the field, but then the investigation was inexplicably stagnated.

The search group had gone there after receiving an anonymous call, said Indira Navarro leader.

“This ranch served as a training site and, although it sounds horrible, really hard, for extermination,” said Navarro.

The site is only the last in a worrying story of such places in Mexico. Drug posters have used these places often remote so that their victims disappear.

When Associated Press visited a place near Nuevo Laredo, through the border from Texas, in 2022, a room in an abandoned small house had become a crematorium. When the researchers arrived for the first time, the floor was covered with 20 inches (50 centimeters) of bone fragments and ashes and more bones dispersed throughout the ranch.

Here is a look at several other cases that have baffled Mexicans:

‘The Stewmaker’ (Baja California)

In 2009, Santiago Meza confessed to the authorities that he had made 150 to 300 bodies disappearing for his drug chief by dissolving them in Lye.

Meza used large oil drums and then buried the remaining bones or threw them in the currents. He was called the “pozolero”, or the one who makes Pozole, a Mexican stew. He said he was not the only one who did it.

San Fernando (Tamaulipas)

Mexico had not been used to finding great clandestine tombs. That changed in 2011, when almost 200 bodies were found in tombs on the outskirts of San Fernando, south of Brownsville, Texas. It was the same city where a year before 72 migrants had been killed in a ranch.

The authorities fought to identify and process all the victims.

The authorities said that most of the bodies found in San Fernando belonged to Central American migrants kidnapped outside the buses and killed by Los Zetas. Some were offered the opportunity to live and join the gang, if they demonstrated their worth when fighting other innocent passengers with maperies.

Piedras Negras prison (Coahuila)

In 2017, the College of Mexico shared its investigation that determined the Piedras Negras prison, through the edge of Eagle Pass, Texas was a base for the Zetas poster.

The researchers said that up to 20 people had the work of sending the victims of the poster in diesel fuel barrels.

The victims were sometimes shot at the site or beaten until death and dismembered.

La Bartolina (Tamaulipas)

Local media around Matamoros began talking about this site in the northeast corner of the Far of Mexico, where the Rio Grande throws the Gulf Mexico, in 2016. But they spent years before the authorities did something.

When the Tamaulipas search commissioner, Jorge Macías, visited for the first time “saw” pelvic bones, skulls, femurs, all thrown there … I told myself “it can’t be,” he told the AP in 2021.

By 2022, the authorities had recovered about 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) of bones in the bartoline. They had identified at least 15 “extermination sites” in the state with the bartoline as the largest. Federal researchers are still working there.