The mayor of a small Mexican town has been accused of colluding with one of the country’s most violent drug cartels to operate a recruitment and training center that was uncovered in March.
The mayor, José Asunción Murguía Santiago was charged with organized crime offenses and forced disappearance, prosecutors said at a hearing on Friday.
The site of the center, in the western state of Jalisco, gained notoriety after volunteer searchers announced the discovery of hundreds of shoes piled together, heaps of clothing and what seemed to be human bone fragments found in an abandoned ranch surrounded by sugar cane fields in Teuchitlán, a town outside Guadalajara, sending shock waves across the nation. The searchers claimed the ranch was the site of human cremations, but authorities have since said there is no proof of that.
The allegations against Mr. Murguía Santiago served as a stinging reminder of Mexican officials’ long history of collusion with organized crime, at a time when President Trump has proposed using American troops to crack down on cartels. Mexico’s president refused.
Attorney General Alejandro Gertz said last week that until recently the ranch in Teuchitlán had been used by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel for training and recruiting. Mexican officials have said that the cartel lured new recruits with fake job offers to the ranch.
But in a departure from previous comments, Mr. Gertz insisted that there was no proof of cremations carried out there, and said claims that the site had been an “extermination camp” were unfounded. Volunteer groups have disputed the federal findings, insisting that 17 batches of charred human remains, including teeth and bone fragments, have been recovered from the ranch.
Mr. Gertz said his office did not know how many people could have disappeared at the ranch and that investigators would “go after those who were covering up or participating in” the cartel’s operations.
The case has brought renewed attention to the more than 127,000 people who have disappeared in Mexico since the 1960s. It has also become a thorn in the side of the administration of President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, who is under pressure to solve the country’s disappearance crisis once and for all. Since she took office in October, nearly 8,700 people have vanished, according to government data.
While Ms. Sheinbaum has vowed to use her forces to counter the cartels — and has stepped up those efforts since Mr. Trump came to power — the nexus between Mexican authorities and drug groups remains a problem.
So far, more than a dozen suspects have been arrested in connection with the Teuchitlán case. They include four former police officers and a police chief, as well as a cartel leader identified as José Gregorio Lastra, who the authorities say oversaw the training center.
According to Mr. Lastra’s testimony, revealed in part by Mexican officials, his group would kill, beat and torture people who resisted training or tried to escape from the ranch.
Mr. Murguía Santiago, now in his third term in office, is the first government official to have been detained. His arrest on May 3, experts say, signals the close-knit relationship that organized crime has established with local authorities in some parts of Mexico, either through collaboration or coercion.
“Either you try to stop the territorial advance of organized crime, and you pay dearly for that,” said David Mora, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, an organization that monitors and tries to mitigate armed conflicts, “or you bend and cooperate.”
Details of the case against the mayor came out on Friday during a hearing.
According to prosecutors, he allegedly visited the ranch several times in 2024. Prosecutors also accuse Mr. Murguía Santiago of being on the cartel’s payroll. In exchange, they say, the mayor allowed them to operate the training center and offered surveillance through the municipal police to make sure recruits wouldn’t escape.
Mr. Murguía Santiago has so far refused to testify. During the hearing, his defense team brought a witness, his secretary, who said that the mayor could not have visited the ranch in the months he is accused of having been there because she was with him “most of the time” — though she would sometimes lose track of him in the afternoons, she said.
In March, Mr. Murguía Santiago told reporters that he had no knowledge of what was happening at the ranch.
“I am not worried,” he said in a televised interview. “We are not involved in anything. What I have always tried to do as mayor is to help people.”
Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has accused the Mexican government of being controlled by the cartels, suggesting that U.S. forces are needed to counter their vast drug making and smuggling empire. That has led to bouts of tension with the Mexican government, which insists that a unilateral attack by the Pentagon against the cartels would be a violation of Mexico’s sovereignty and set back bilateral relations by decades.
Carolina Solís contributed reporting from El Salto, Jalisco.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega is a reporter and researcher for The Times based in Mexico City, covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
Maria Abi-Habib is an investigative correspondent reporting on Latin America and is based in Mexico City.
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