By Communist Party of Mexico
March 24, 2025
About Teuchitlán: Teuchitlán is proof that the country is a mass grave. Only in the hands of the people is there an end to the barbarism.
A few days ago, the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco Collective announced the discovery at Rancho Izaguirre, in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, of charred human remains and clothing belonging to a large number of people, as well as serious indications that the place was a base for one of the drug cartels operating in Mexico, used for forced recruitment, mass kidnapping, torture, murder and disappearance. The testimonies of several survivors give an account of the horror that occurs in such places.
Forced disappearance is an issue of the utmost national gravity, not unlike other tragedies that grieve our people, such as the disappearance of the 43 student teachers from Ayotzinapa. No one can remain oblivious to this horror, which unfortunately is not an exception or an anomaly, but the constant, the regularity in our country, at least since the so-called “War on Drugs” began in 2006.
In the last two decades search groups have emerged, made up of relatives, mainly mothers and fathers, of tens of thousands of disappeared people, who, facing difficulties, slander and threats – from the State and from the cartels – cling to the hope of finding their loved ones and take on the work that, according to the law, should fall to the State: They circulate wanted notices, they investigate following the trail of their loved ones, they gather evidence, almost always at the cost of their own safety. Time and again, the evidence leads them to deserts, forests and wastelands throughout the country, where they dig tirelessly, finding human remains in illegal burials, clandestine graves; over time, these forms of popular organization that are the collectives have acquired more experience in the field than the Mexican State itself, which does not search, or pretends to search only when some form of mobilization is exercised. Teuchitlán is an example: the site had recently been occupied by the National Guard, and through incapacity, omission or cover-up, they overlooked the horror that we see today. The fact that the barbarism of Teuchitlán has been exposed by one of these collectives speaks irrefutably of the great omission, incapacity and connivance of the State.
The number of victims of disappearance in Mexico exceeds 111,000 and this is in addition to the discovery of more than 5,600 clandestine graves, of which 2,863 were found during the six-year term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador alone. We clearly point out the responsibility of the Mexican capitalist state, regardless of who administers it every six years, as the results are the same with the PAN, MC, PRD, PRI and MORENA. It is not acceptable for the municipal, state and federal governments to pass the buck from one prosecutor’s office to another without taking responsibility and trying to present themselves as victims of a conspiracy, avoiding this great crime against the people which, in the time of the governments of Calderón, Peña Nieto and Obrador, has resulted in more than half a million deaths.
President Sheinbaum is not the victim; the victim is the working class and their children, who in search of a job or better working conditions fall into the nets of recruiters, the fronts of the cartels for recruiting labor and feeding their armed groups. The victims are migrants who are kidnapped at bus stations or even kidnapped directly on-board buses and vehicles on the roads, as happened in the case of San Fernando.
The victims are working-class women, adolescents and girls, against whom the most horrifying violence and disappearance has increased, with the aim of covering up rape, feminicide, trafficking and sexual exploitation, and the indirect victims are the mothers, the wives, the daughters, who with the terrible suffering of absence and uncertainty, are left to take charge of their families while at the same time facing the search with their own means. The victim is not Claudia Sheinbaum, who, despite assuming the head of the State whose agents at the municipal, state and federal level are directly involved in a high percentage of disappearances – as recognized by the 2021 special report of the CNDH [National Commission of Human Rights] – did not dedicate a single word of her inauguration speech to the situation of the disappeared and their families, who were camped out in the Zócalo [central square of Mexico City], a few meters away from her, waiting to be heard.
Teuchitlán is also an example of the failure of social programs, which do not meet the needs of working families and have not been able to counteract the effects of three decades of privatizations and shock policies of capitalism that hit the working class, no matter how many promises of welfare the government makes. Consequently, of the 15.6 million young people who work, more than 7.6 million of them, equivalent to 55% of young workers, have precarious jobs, with educational backwardness, low wages, job instability, working hours of more than 48 hours a week, without access to health services and social security. In contrast to the crumbs of welfarism, the process of capitalist accumulation intensifies, and a new layer joins the ranks of the bourgeoisie: the mega-millionaires such as Carlos Slim of Grupo Carso or David Martínez of ICA, owners of contracting companies favored by the “obradorismo” with the exclusivity of public works since he assumed the leadership of the government of Mexico City in 2000.
The issue of drug trafficking cannot be analyzed without considering its links with the state, the army, businessmen, the banking and financial system and politics at the top. Today it has an influence on national life through the various bourgeois parties, deputies, senators, governors and mayors. When the Mexican capitalist state talks about fighting the narcos, what it is saying is that it is hitting the cartels that are outside its control to favor those that are under its control. Their business dealings with mining companies, real estate agents, construction companies, agribusinesses and various investments — which have not stopped growing over the last two decades — together with constant attempts to legalize, do not cancel out the primary business: the production and trafficking of drugs, the control of drug markets, the development of black markets such as prostitution and human trafficking as the first laundering of their dirty money. This dynamic generates a constant demand for labor, an insatiable appetite that devours the sons and daughters of the proletariat, making tragedies like the one in Teuchitlán a constant in the country’s belts of misery.
Thus, the role of drug cartels as paramilitary forces and private armies at the service of monopolies cannot be ignored, to make way for the development of mining, extractive, real estate and tourism megaprojects, most often in collusion with state agents at all levels. This link is so evident that it is even mentioned in the special report of the UN Committee on the Disappearance of Persons in Mexico in 2022, regarding the disappearance of environmental and land defenders, the majority of whom are from indigenous communities. They resort to the use of paramilitary methods, to the use of terror, to make struggling organizations disappear, demobilize and decapitate them. The link between drug trafficking and illegal mining, both protected by the Army, has even been pointed to as a factor in the disappearance of the 43 from Ayotzinapa, as the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College has served as a rallying point for the defense of the indigenous communities of Guerrero – one of the states with the highest poverty rate – who are dispossessed and displaced by the mining companies that extract more than 250,000 ounces of gold annually from the state.
We therefore point to organized crime as a link in the chain of capitalist accumulation; if it is the material author of the disappearance, monopolies such as Ternium, Grupo Ferrominero, Acueducto Independencia, Minera Peña Colorada, and all those capital projects that not only exploit the workers and plunder the territory, but in their insatiable thirst for profit also prescribe disappearance, torture and murder, must also be in the dock. But in their insatiable thirst for profit they also prescribe disappearance, torture and murder. However, what we see is that capital prospers under the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now under that of Claudia Sheinbaum, with Plan Mexico, with public investment projects in infrastructure, with trade agreements, with capitalist expansion at the cost of the suffering of the people.
More than 111,000 disappeared cannot be swept under the carpet; it is disgusting, reminiscent of the media manipulation of the Díaz Ordaz regime, the behavior of government propagandists, who try to make the issue disappear from national attention by blaming the search groups and criminalizing the disappeared. It is infamous that their arguments are the same as those used by drug trafficking groups to intimidate the mothers searching for their loved ones. Similarly, the section of the bourgeoisie that is in conflict with the government from the right is seeking to obtain political dividends. However, both are jointly responsible for the crisis of violence and social breakdown that the country is experiencing.
The government of Claudia Sheinbaum, like that of López Obrador before it, argues that the problem of violence and disappearances grew rapidly during the “war on drugs” which began during the six-year term of Felipe Calderón, but the reality is that the policy of deploying the armed forces in public security tasks, which was initiated by Felipe Calderón, has been exponentially increased under the Morena government to the point of total militarization of the country, with the National Guard and the Army in the streets, participating in the economy and taking on functions in civil institutions, with the extension of their legal powers to detain and repress, under the same premise of “the fight against insecurity”. The evolution of the phenomenon of disappearance, mainly as a form of political repression at the hands of the white guards and the army, to disappearance at the hands of the cartels and the army, is a natural necessity and consequence of the advance of capital. The result of all these policies is now in plain sight, with terror reigning in every corner of the country, from Sinaloa to Chiapas, with our territory turned into a huge mass grave.
The Communist Party of Mexico expresses its solidarity with the mothers and fathers, with the relatives of the disappeared and the dead. We consider it a priority to concentrate our efforts to achieve justice. As with Ayotzinapa, only popular indignation and the mobilization of the various organizations of the working class will be able to dismantle the narrative of criminalization, and to confront criminal and state violence in an organized manner.
We believe that the origin of the current barbarism is capitalism, a system that creates drug trafficking and benefits from its existence. Putting an end to this criminal system is a task for the workers and the people and that is where our efforts are directed.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Mexico
https://www.comunistas-mexicanos.org/index.php/pcm/sobre-teuchitlan?s=08
