The shoes and backpacks, arranged in neat rows, make it look almost like a school cloakroom. But the ranch where they were found is an alleged training camp and killing site for Mexico’s Jalisco cartel.
The discovery by activists of underground ovens and 200 pairs of shoes in what they call an “extermination camp” has horrified Mexico, sparking protests across the country.
It is the highest-profile such case in years – and has forced the spotlight back on to Mexico’s crisis of forced disappearances related to organised crime. Across the country, more than 120,000 people are registered as missing.
Related: Mexico: 200 pairs of shoes found at clandestine crematorium
“These places exist all over the country,” said María Guadalupe Aguilar, founder of Familias Unidas por Nuestros Desaparecidos, who has been searching for her son José Luis Arana since 17 January 2011. “Mexico is full of mass graves.”
Authorities have offered few answers about the camp, which was found near the town of Teuchitlán, 60km (37 miles) from Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city.
They say it may have been operated by the Jalisco cartel, one of Mexico’s most powerful organised crime groups, but have yet to say how many people died there, and none of the remains have been identified.
On Wednesday, federal attorney general Alejandro Gertz said the initial investigation had been riddled with omissions, pointing the blame at local authorities.
Although the ranch was secured by state authorities in September last year, the ovens and more than 1,000 items of clothing were only reported earlier this month when Warrior Searchers of Jalisco, a collective of relatives of missing people, went there after receiving an anonymous tip. Within a few hours, they found human remains.
Gertz said his office is exploring whether failures in the initial investigation were due to incompetence or collusion with organised crime.
As shock waves from the case passed through Mexico, several people claiming to be survivors came forward with testimonies, describing how they were lured to the ranch with fake offers of work.
Their accounts coincide with previous reports of forced recruitment in Jalisco, in which young people responded to job adverts online before being kidnapped and held in dire conditions as they were both victimised and forced to victimise others to survive.
“The training, the abuse, it’s designed to dehumanise them, to strip them of themselves,” said Alejandra Guillén, a journalist and academic at Iteso, a university in Guadalajara, who investigates forced disappearances.
“They promised them work and a salary and none of it was true: they began to train them to be sicarios [killers],” said Aguilar, who went to the ranch last week to help classify the clothes.
Photos of every item of clothing have since been put online. Relatives of the disappeared across Mexico have pored over the images. Some have travelled to Jalisco.
“Your skin crawls seeing everything thrown on the ground, seeing the suitcases, the dreams of these young people,” Indira Navarro, one of the activists who discovered the site, told Radio Fórmula. “To see how they ended up there because they thought they could have a better life.”
Training camps and clandestine ovens, often found by search collectives, have been documented across Jalisco for years – including several just a short distance from the ranch.
“Just this year they even found one in the same municipality where they freed 36 people,” said Anna Karolina Chimiak, from the Centre of Justice for Peace and Development, a civil society group in Jalisco.
But it was the image of the shoes, with its echoes of the 20th century’s darkest chapters, that meant this discovery broke through.
It remains unclear what became of their owners. But incinerating bodies is a “known practice” in Jalisco, said Chimiak.
It is the latest, cruellest evolution of forced disappearances, said Aguilar: “With ashes, the hope of identifying them is lost.”
In response to the scandal, Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, announced measures to strengthen laws around missing people. She promised the discovery would be investigated fully, unlike high-profile cases under previous governments, such as the 43 student teachers from Ayotzinapa who were disappeared in 2014.
“There will not be impunity,” said Sheinbaum. “We will never hide anything.”
However, Sheinbaum has also claimed that certain media and opposition figures were weaponising the case to attack her government, and pointed to an alleged bot campaign on social media.
Meanwhile authorities have cast doubt on the idea that there were clandestine ovens on the ranch, despite acknowledging the presence of burnt remains.
“It is not a setup, it is not an invention,” responded Warrior Searchers of Jalisco, the collective that found the underground ovens. “It is the harsh reality that we have found in Teuchitlán.”
“It feels more and more like there is a deliberate intent to generate a narrative that nothing happened there,” said Chimiak.
The crisis of forced disappearances in Mexico casts an enduring shadow on Sheinbaum’s pledge to reduce violence in Mexico, which was one of the failings of her predecessor and ally, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Although official data shows a reduction in the number of homicides in recent years, the number of disappearances has risen inexorably.
Jalisco alone has almost 15,000 missing people. It is also the stronghold of the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which was recently declared a foreign terrorist organisation by the Trump administration.
The great number of disappearances in Jalisco might reflect a mix of powerful economic interests, proximity to drug trafficking infrastructure like the port of Manzanillo, and a history of such violence dating back to the Guadalajara cartel and beyond, said Guillén.
Aguilar offered a more straightforward explanation: “Maybe it’s because we are in the hands of the most powerful cartel in the world.”
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