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31-03-2025
MEXICO CITY: At the beginning of March, an expansive clandestine crematorium was discovered on a ranch in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, complete with burned human remains and 200 pairs of shoes. According to local officials, the apparent extermination site was likely operated by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which also reportedly used the ranch as a recruitment and training centre.
Journalist John Holman noted in a video dispatch following the discovery, the “strange thing” was that Mexican authorities had “seized the ranch five months ago, but reported none of the infrastructure” located there. Instead, it took a group of volunteers dedicated to the search for Mexico’s missing people to unearth the underground ovens.
Out of Mexico’s 32 states, Jalisco is the one with the most disappeared people, which numbered more than 15,000 as of the end of February. Countrywide, the official tally of victims of enforced disappearance and missing people reached 125,802 on March 26, although this figure is without doubt a grave underestimate given the frequent reluctance of family members of the missing to denounce such crimes for fear of reprisal.
Cases of enforced disappearance in Mexico began to soar along with homicides in 2006, the year that then-Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched the so-called “war on drugs” with the encouragement and backing of his charitable gringo counterpart George W Bush.
As has pretty much been par for the course with all ostensible global anti-narcotic endeavors orchestrated by the United States, the Mexican drug war did nothing to curb international drug traffic but much to render the country’s landscape ever more blood-soaked. After all, hyper-militarizing Mexico in the name of fighting drugs does not resolve the fundamental issue of sky-high demand for illicit substances in the US itself, the criminalization of which is what makes their trafficking so lucratively appealing to organized crime outfits.
Nor, to be sure, does the inundation of Mexico with US-manufactured weapons help matters, though it does enable the arms industry to continue making a killing off of killing. As per the official narrative, Mexico’s violence is entirely the fault of drug cartels, period. This rationalization conveniently excises from the equation the Mexican state’s established track record of killing and disappearing not to mention the lengthy history of collaboration between Mexican police and military personnel and cartel operatives.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel, alleged steward of the secret crematorium, was one of various groups recently designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the administration of US President Donald Trump, which has also been making noises about potential US military raids on Mexico to combat the cartels.
Such action by the US would take the old “war on drugs” to a whole new level and as usual, Mexican civilians would be the ones to pay the price.
In the meantime, Mexicans continue to disappear at a mindboggling rate, the country converted into a mass grave in its own right. In response to a longstanding government policy of not lifting a finger on behalf of missing people and their families, volunteer organizations have been forced to take matters into their own hands and have often faced state wrath for doing so.
For example, former Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) who last year handed the national reigns off to his ally Claudia Sheinbaum once took it upon himself to accuse Mexicans involved in the search for the missing of a “delirium of necrophilia”. According to Mexico’s National Register of Missing and Disappeared Persons, a record 10,064 people disappeared during a single year of May 2022 and May 2023. (Int’l News Desk)
