/ CBS/AP
Masked and heavily armed men have circulated a video denouncing people searching for missing relatives at the site of what authorities said was a cartel training camp in the western Mexican state of Jalisco.
In a video circulating Monday night, a man, flanked by others standing in formation, read a statement identifying them as members of the Jalisco New Generation cartel. He questioned the motivations of the searchers who said last week they had found hundreds of articles of clothing, dozens of shoes and charred bones at a ranch outside Guadalajara.
The Attorney General’s Office, which is investigating the cartel site, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Associated Press could not independently confirm who was behind the video.
Security analyst David Saucedo said Tuesday he did not doubt that the Jalisco cartel made it, citing its similarity with other videos that authorities had connected to the group. Its intention was to clean the cartel’s image and push back against the negative publicity generated by a week of exhaustive coverage of the site.
The Jalisco cartel was one of eight Latin American criminal organizations the U.S. government designated foreign terrorist organizations last month.
Cartels have made and released similar videos before as part of their public relations strategy. They frequently denounce their rivals and make themselves out to be the defenders of the people.
“It’s incredibly delicate, it’s an outrage that they try to stain our name,” said a member of the Jalisco Search Warriors, the group searching for missing relatives. She asked to use only her first name, Angélica, for safety.
“They’re washing their hands of something they created,” she said, referring to the video’s denials that the cartel was involved in forced recruitment or used the site for killings. “And where are the authorities? They haven’t come out to defend us or give their position.”
“No one protects us,” Angélica said. “We go out with this fear day after day … because the only thing we want to find out is where our children are.”
Over 120,000 disappeared people in Mexico
The search group declined to identify the criminal group that could be responsible for the camp they say was used for forced recruitment and killings in Jalisco, citing concerns for their safety. These groups, prevalent across Mexico, frequently stop short of demanding justice in their relatives’ cases and just work to find them.
The ranch in Teuchitlan, about 37 miles west of Guadalajara, was first discovered by National Guard troops in September.
Authorities then said 10 people were arrested, two hostages were freed and a body was found wrapped in plastic. The state prosecutor’s office went in with a backhoe, dogs and devices to find inconsistencies in the ground.
But then the investigation went quiet until members of the Jalisco Search Warriors, one of dozens of search collectives that dot Mexico, visited the site earlier this month on a tip.
They found the shoes, as well as heaps of other clothing and what appeared to be burned bone fragments.
Jalisco State Prosecutor Salvador González de los Santos visited the ranch personally last week. He did not provide details on why investigators had previously failed to find what the untrained private citizens did, but said the previous efforts “were insufficient.” His office posted photos of all of the evidence located hoping that relatives might identify an item of clothing.
There are more than 120,000 disappeared people in Mexico, according to the government’s tally.
Multiple mass graves have been found in recent months in Mexico. In January, at least 56 bodies were discovered in unmarked mass graves in northern Mexico, not far from the border with the United States.
A mass grave discovered last December in a suburb of Guadalajara with dozens of bags of dismembered body parts contained the remains of 24 people, authorities said. That same month, Mexican authorities said they recovered a total of 31 bodies from pits in Chiapas, a state plagued by cartel violence.
Collectives searching for missing persons say that drug trafficking cartels and other organized crime gangs sometimes use ovens to incinerate their victims and leave no trace.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.