Mexican mayor arrested about alleged ties with cartel training camp

Public prosecutors in Mexico have arrested the mayor of Teuchitlán in the state of West -Jalisco as part of their research into a nearby cartel training site.

The mayor, Santiaa Santiago, is suspected of acquaintances with the CJNG.

The research was started after activists had discovered bone fragments and hundreds of discarded shoes, backpacks and items of clothing on the Izaguirre Ranch outside the city in March.

Rights groups said they feared that the ranch had been used as a “extermination camp”, where people were forced and trained, and those who refused were tortured and killed.

The discovery by people who were looking for their missing relatives of what seemed to be the evidence of massive murders on the site shocked the country, where cartel violence is widespread.

The attorney general of Mexico Alejandro Gertz gave a press conference last week to update journalists on the federal investigation into the ranch.

He confirmed that the site was used as a training center for recruits from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of the most feared and powerful transnational gangs for drug trafficking, who has its power base in Jalisco.

However, he said that there was no evidence that it was used as an extermination and cremation location.

According to the Attorney General, bone fragments discovered that there were no recent and forensic tests, suggested that the fires that were lit on the ranch would not have been hot enough to remove from human remains.

Gertz’s statements caused anger among “seekers”, given to family members who were looking for the more than 120,000 people who have been missing in Mexico in Mexico for the past two decades.

They said that his press conference raised more questions than it answered and failed to answer the many abandoned shoes on the ranch and what had become of those people.

Gertz insisted that the authorities would continue to investigate whether there had been any collusion between the CJNG and the local officials.

The arrest of mayor Murguía Santiago is part of that current investigation.

Prior to his arrest, the mayor had said he had nothing to hide. “If they want to investigate me, she leaves, I am clean and willing to say what I know,” he told the local media.

But public prosecutors claim that he was aware of the existence of the training center and did not act on that knowledge.