Teuchitlán discovery reignites calls for justice in Jalisco’s botched missing film students case
by Madeleine Wattenbarger.
The discovery of an alleged extermination camp at the Izaguirre Ranch in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, brought national attention to the crisis of disappearance in the state. Amidst the media storm, families have come forward to denounce the mismanagement of one of the most memorable recent disappearance cases in Jalisco: the three film students who went missing in March 2018.
Salomón Aceves Gastélum, Marco García Avalos and Daniel Díaz García disappeared after filming a school project in Tonalá, part of the Guadalajara metropolitan area. A month later, the Jalisco prosecutor’s office told the media that the young men were kidnapped by a cartel, tortured and their bodies dissolved in acid. The terrifying account sent a shock through Mexico, but seven years later, there is no evidence to support it. Seven years after the boys’ disappearance, the families are demanding that the authorities continue the investigation and look for their sons alive.
“There is no scientific data that indicates that our sons have died,” said Vicky García, Daniel’s mother. Rather, the official narrative - the “historic truth” - justified the authorities’ unwillingness to look for the boys alive.
Misinformation clouds discovery of alleged extermination camp in Jalisco
by Madeleine Wattenbarger.
The news has shaken Mexico. Earlier this month, an anonymous report directed families of disappearance victims to a ranch in the town of Teuchitlán, Jalisco, that the state prosecutor’s office had searched in September.
“When we entered, the door was open,” recounts Norma Ángel, member of the search collective Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco, which received the report. The group began live-streaming what they found: piles of clothing, hundreds of pairs of shoes, pits of ash with burnt bones. “They’re completely incinerated bones, most of them very small. If you touched them, they fell apart.”
The videos went viral. A media firestorm ensued, fueled by anonymous testimonies that describe the Izaguirre Ranch as a training camp where young people were lured by false job offers and hundreds tortured, killed, and incinerated. The image of the hundreds of shoes moved the country. On Saturday, search collectives across Mexico hosted dozens of simultaneous vigils for the presumed victims of Teuchitlán as part of a National Day of Mourning.