These are messages from organized crime in Mexico, offering jobs. Sometimes subtly, through deception, and other times directly, criminal groups like “the four letters,” the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), are increasingly using social media to recruit soldiers to join their ranks. The Teuchitlán case, the ranch discovered by relatives of people who disappeared in March in the center of the country, has shed light on this phenomenon, about which little was known until recently.
While investigators work to process the enormous amount of evidence found at the ranch, including clothing, bones, and remains of bonfires, the public is questioning how it works. Relatives of missing persons, who number in the tens of thousands across the country, have reported that there, on a ranch in an agricultural area, an hour and a quarter from Guadalajara, the country’s second largest city, an extermination center with its crematoriums operated. While waiting for forensic work to reveal the extent of the horror, questions arise about the other uses the criminals gave to the site.
As authorities have reported in recent weeks, the CJNG operated a training center on the ranch. The criminal group, one of the most powerful in the country, which ships huge quantities of fentanyl and methamphetamine to the United States, recruited young people through false job offers, with the aim of forcibly integrating them into its ranks. The alleged mastermind of this operation, arrested in March, whom authorities identify as Commander Lastra, trained “hundreds of individuals” recruited at the ranch. Those who refused or tried to escape were killed, according to the detainee, according to the government’s account.
In a report presented at the end of March, federal security czar Omar García Harfuch reported that Commander Lastra managed “a group of collaborators dedicated to the recruitment process through TikTok, where he offered fake job opportunities.” Harfuch presented several accounts dedicated to the matter on that social network and stated that 49 recruiters had already been arrested. The details of the operation shocked a country that has suffered the ravages of violence for almost two decades, adding new concerns about the virtual capabilities of crime, a relatively new field for authorities.
