Sheinbaum reaches for AMLO’s script with Jalisco horror
by David Agren.
As the horror of an extermination camp discovered in Jalisco state hit the national headlines, President Claudia Sheinbaum found a familiar victim: former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, her mentor and predecessor, who routinely floated conspiracies and spoke of campaigns against him amid rising crime and violence.
“Leave him alone,” an annoyed Sheinbaum said at a morning press conference, referring to AMLO and the “narcopresidente” accusation. “All that again against President López Obrador, no, when the state prosecutor’s office had the property guarded.”
Sheinbaum won office promising to construct “the second level” of AMLO’s populist political project, the “fourth transformation.” But she’s already abandoned his stated security policy of “hugs, not bullets,” as she fends off U.S. pressure on fentanyl and migrants.
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.