They have already thrown dirt on the case of Rancho Izaguirre

There are issues that politicians prefer to get around. And even more so when they are uncomfortable and when they can splash filth on characters of singular relevance and from different political and partisan origins. Without even blinking, they agree not to make waves and hope that time and social amnesia erase the traces of their laziness, irresponsibility or complicity, as is the case with the painful case of Rancho Izaguirre, in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, identified as a site for training recruits for organized crime and an alleged site of extermination, in which the authorities have no longer wanted to delve.

The most recent news about the case emerged on July 9, 2025, when it was reported that the 10 alleged members of the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel who allegedly operated the Rancho Izaguirre, were sentenced to 141 years and three months in prison. There is no point in even mentioning the names of the alleged convicts, because in the end, the question that all people ask themselves is:No public official, from the three levels of Government, will be thoroughly investigated and subjected to proceedings for their possible negligence, omissions or complicity with the dominant criminal group in Jalisco? Was there really no authority involved? Did no public official know what was happening in that Dantesque place?

The 10 sentenced people, detained on September 18, 2024 at Rancho Izaguirre, in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, were found guilty of the crimes of disappearance committed by private individuals, aggravated disappearance committed by private individuals and qualified homicide, this with respect to the only three victims located in that place of torture and extermination.

After Rancho Izaguirre was secured by authorities in September 2024, no agency of the state or federal government was responsible for adequately safeguarding evidence of crimes that may have been committed there.

It was not until March 2025 when members of the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco collective announced that they found three crematoriums of bodies, remains of teeth, clothing and hundreds of abandoned shoes at the site.

A person who participated in the exploration of Rancho Izaguirre told the newspaper Mural of Guadalajara, in a publication dated March 6, 2025, that they located buried stone and brick structures that were used as crematoriums to burn bodies. “Apparently they dug the wells, burned the bodies and covered them up again,” said a member of the Guerrero Buscadores de Jalisco collective.

In March 2025, the Attorney General of Jalisco, Salvador González de los Santos, said that the Rancho Izaguirre, in Teuchitlán, where the Guerreros Buscadores collective found crematoriums and bone remains, was not well inspected in September 2024 because the property was very large.

At that time, the person in charge of the Attorney General’s Office of Jalisco, in the administration of Governor Enrique Alfaro Ramírez, was Luis Joaquín Méndez. Blanca Trujillo was the Prosecutor for Missing Persons and currently serves as head of the Deputy Prosecutor’s Office for Missing Persons.

On March 20, 2025, when listing the failures and omissions surrounding the Rancho Izaguirre case, in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, the Attorney General of the Republic, Alejandro Gertz Manero, held the state government responsible for serious omissions.

The newspaper Reform He listed them this way:

Omissions that Gertz pointed out in the work of the Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office, which since six months ago learned about the Teuchitlán “drug ranch”:

• They found skeletal remains and did not carry out expert reports.
• They didn’t trace fingerprints.
• They did not search any footwear or clothing found.
• They did not process found cars and three of those cars had already disappeared.
• They did not notify the Attorney General’s Office of the Republic due to high-caliber weapons and organized crime.
• The Mayor of Teuchitlán or the Police Commissioner were not called to testify.
• The owner of the ranch was not investigated.
• The ranch, which was presumably already secured, was left unattended.
• No cover-up link between authorities and cartels was established.
• It was not reported that a victim stated that the clothes found at the ranch were left by people recruited by the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel.
• It was not documented that the credentials found at the ranch belonged to hitmen detained in other states.

Finally, on March 24, 2025, the Attorney General of the Republic announced that the agency under his charge would assume the investigations related to Rancho Izaguirre, in Teuchitlán, Jalisco.

Gertz Manero said that the Attorney General’s Office of the Republic took possession of the Izaguirre Ranch, because a federal investigation folder had already been integrated, after the arrest of José Gregorio Lastra Hermida, “El Lastra”, a recruiter for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) in charge of training new elements of the criminal group on that property.

“That site is occupied by the federal authorities and experts are entering to determine the reality of what is there,” said Gertz Manero in the morning conference of President Claudia Sheinbaum from the National Palace, on March 24, 2025.

On May 4, 2025, the Spanish newspaper The Country reported the arrest of the Mayor of Teuchitlán, José Ascensión Murguía Santiago, of Movimiento Ciudadano, for his links with the Rancho Izaguirre, used by the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, at least, as an operations and recruitment center. To date, this is the only relevant arrest of an official related to the case.

The authority has not summoned former governor Enrique Alfaro Ramírez or the current president Pablo Lemus Navarro to appear on the matter, who at different times and circumstances, but with the same emphasis, boasted of their friendship with the Mayor of Teuchitlán. There is also no news that the former Jalisco state prosecutor Luis Joaquín Méndez or Blanca Trujillo, who was the Prosecutor for Missing Persons and currently serves as head of the Deputy Prosecutor’s Office for Missing Persons, have been invited to appear.

If anyone imagines that the Rancho Izaguirre matter will be professionally investigated and the operators, accomplices and concealers punished, lose all hope, because remember that in the hands of the current Attorney General of the Republic, Alejandro Gertz Manero, nothing progresses and everything is diluted, like ice cubes in a glass of water. They have already poured dirt on the case of Rancho Izaguirre, Jalisco style, because in this region marked by pain, anguish and hopelessness, no one is guilty, because everything disappears in clandestine graves.