Horror is once again sweeping through Mexican society, which is why the popular sectors, workers, young people and women of this country have been filled with indignation and rage in the face of the maelstrom of violence that invades every corner of the country.
On Sunday March 9, a group of seeker mothers (“Madres buscadoras”, women searching for their disappeared loved ones) from the Guerreros Buscadores collective found a ranch in Teuchitlán, in Jalisco after an anonymous call tipped them off. A few days later, another one was found in Tamaulipas. Both cases revealed a macabre landscape: hundreds of shoes, backpacks, shirts, pants, and, most unsettling, gigantic crematoriums with hundreds, if not thousands, of human remains.
What sparked the anger was the fact that everything points to these remains to be mostly from young people. Folks who were being tricked into thinking they were going to a job interview to gain an honest living were in fact falling into a trap and heading straight into a recruitment and training centre for the Jalisco Cartel. There, they received beatings, forced to literally fight for their lives, torture and be tortured, with whoever wished to leave as soon as they stepped out of their transport trucks after being told they would be working for the cartel was executed immediately.
The anger increased when people found out the terrain, a piece of land called “Rancho Izaguirre”, had been previously searched by Mexico’s National Guard and had even rescued two kidnapped people. Today, however, people are asking how could they not tell about the horrors that were unfolding in that same place they had allegedly searched. The Guerreros Buscadores collective stressed that everywhere they stuck a shovel, remains would appear all over the ranch; the Mexican media is labeling this “the Mexican Auschwitz”, a “death factory” and an “extermination camp” akin to that of the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Tens, if not hundreds of cases, have appeared with people identifying their loved ones through their shirts, packpacks and shoes. Some say the centre had been in operation since 2012, others speculate it can be more. Objects have appeared of people whose whereabouts had been unknown even since 2003; many of the victims were single mothers or unemployed youngsters looking for an honest way to support their families.
In all these years, multiple collectives of mothers and relatives looking for their loved ones, many of them independent from the government and the right wing, have raised their voices and have begun their search for their relatives, exposing the sewer of collusion between organized crime groups and authorities of all security forces and all levels of government, which involves each of the parties in Congress.
In the latest count there are more than 116,000 disappeared people, 88% of this number was registered between 2006 and 2024, the years of the misnamed “war on drugs”, and although this registry pulled out thousands with a dubious methodology to make the status of disappeared valid, the figure is still shocking.
We cannot stand idly by, waiting for misfortune to knock on our door. It is necessary to set up a huge and massive democratic movement in the streets, independent from the government and the right wing, to organize ourselves in our unions, workplaces, schools and neighborhoods, to put an end to the security strategy of this government—which, although seeking to distinguish itself from that of the neoliberal governments, was based on maintaining and deepening militarization—, and to demand that the military return to their barracks immediately and unconditionally.
Who is responsible for this?
There are names and surnames of those responsible for the situation the country is going through. As well as institutions that have taken part in and encouraged the wave of violence. In the 1960s and 1970s they were responsible for the dirty war that exterminated hundreds of leftist militants, peasants and union activists.
While it is true that organized crime has advanced in its training and military might, its training was not by chance, and it has been documented how hitmen were trained by the CIA, the U.S. and Mexican military, in addition to operating under the cover of and in collusion with all of these security agencies.
Despite the fact that President Claudia Sheinbaum seeks to whitewash the security forces by repeating that they are “uniformed people”, as her predecessor López Obrador did, we cannot avoid denouncing the Mexican army, the National Guard, the Navy and the police corporations, who are directly responsible, and the repressive forces of U.S. imperialism. Above all, characters like Omar García Harfuch, Secretary of Public Security and Citizen Protection of the current government, who is linked to the disappearance of the 43 normalistas of Ayotzinapa and whose family was one of the orchestrators of the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968 (through his grandfather, Marcelino García Barragán, as Secretary of Defense, i.e. head of the army) and the dirty war (with his father as head of the secret police in the 1970s).
Sheinbaum, for her part, has simply stated that the government will “investigate” the events and that those responsible will be dealt with after the General Prosecutor has finished its investigation. But it has been the state prosecutors and the General Prosecutor’s Office that have left unpunished the material and intellectual perpetrators of dozens of massacres, many of them linked to and protected by local and state governments, so it is necessary to demand punishment for the culprits.
The authorities, at best, are omissive, at worst, they are accomplices, as was seen in the Ayotzinapa case, where to this day the government protects the army, whose top commanders on active duty in 2014 were involved in the forced disappearance of the 43 normalistas, such as Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, Secretary of Defense (head of the Army) at the time, as well as the General Attorney (now General Prosecutor), an institution whose role has been denounced as complicit by erasing evidence to let the people responsible remain unpunished. In the current case, the Teuchitlán ranch is very close to the municipal seat and the 32nd Infantry Battalion in Ameca—about 27 kilometers away—, and the Military Air Base N°5, located in Zapopan—about 38 km from the site—and roughly an hour away from Guadalajara. Jalisco has been governed by the orange-clad “Citizen Movement” party since 2018. It is impossible that they were not aware of what was going on there.
In view of this, it is necessary that the social movement, with the unions at the forefront, imposes on the authorities to provide all the material and economic resources to the families and mothers searching for their disappeared relatives in order to carry out the investigations, searches, excavations and studies necessary to continue finding the clandestine graves that plague the country. The disappeared sons and daughters are the sons and daughters of the working class and popular sectors.
To put an end to the impunity of yesterday and today, we propose that independent investigative commissions be organized, made up of the collectives of family members, social fighters, human rights organizations and trade unions, to fight to find out the whereabouts of our relatives and seek to arrive at the truth about the crimes committed and the people implicated in them.
A way forward to put an end to institutional and criminal violence
Although the above measures are necessary to pave the way to achieve justice for the hundreds of victims of organized crime and state violence, it is not enough unless we banish once and for all the security model based on the militarization of public security, which for almost two decades has had disastrous results and which continues today—with reactionary phenomena such as femicides, disappearances and forced displacements—it doesn’t matter if it is no longer called the “war on drugs”. The creation and arrival of the National Guard by López Obrador and its implementation throughout the country has made one of the most reactionary dreams of the right wing come true.
That is why we cannot ignore the fact that with the arrival of Trump as US president and the sending of 10,000 troops to the National Guard, in reality the security strategy has been intensified, even though in Sheinbaum’s statements we maintain ourselves as an “independent and sovereign country”, but one that is subordinated to the measures that imperialism demands of it.
Ending the juicy illegal market that organized crime implies involves legalizing each and every drug. Addiction is a health problem, not a security problem. Ending illegality means ending the million-dollar businesses of a few drug lords and various officials who line their pockets at the cost of the lives of hundreds of young people.
Instead of trusting the security forces, the state courts and their institutions, we must demand that the trade union federations that claim to be democratic and militant take the lead in organizing the resistance against this barbarism, end their truce with the government and set up a broad decision-making body where we can deliberate on how to confront the bloody situation we are experiencing.
Not a single peso for the military and the National Guard, instead let all those resources be applied to health, culture and education, let the pension coffers, which have been emptied for decades, be refilled.
Only from this perspective can we bring about the end of horror, but for this to happen our individual efforts, however valuable, are only the first step. Decaying capitalism is the father of social decomposition, horror and barbarism. The democracy of Mexico’s dependency manages the capitalist businesses of magnates like Slim and the transnationals, while encouraging militarization and violence to facilitate the plundering of the natural commons and the disciplining of the population.
For this reason, thousands took to the streets in Mexico and other cities last Saturday, March 15, to demand justice for the victims, immediate identification of their remains, punishment for the perpetrators and an end to violence and militarization.
In the face of this, while we promote a broad democratic movement against militarization and forced disappearances, we need to forge a political tool of the workers of the countryside and the city, which fights to banish once and for all the economic system that perpetuates terror, by imposing, through the revolutionary mobilization of the masses, a government of workers and the people that will build a world where the life of a young person does not end buried in a grave or a clandestine crematorium oven because they were looking for a job.