Ex-Military from the US and Colombia Were in Charge of Training at the Teuchitlán Ranch: Survivor

The interviewee assured that the people abducted in the training camp were forced to kill people.

Tests ranging from coordinated jumps to target practice with gotcha guns were what the people at the Izaguirre ranch had to face in order to survive. The victims were subjected by former foreign military personnel to “very hard” training in order to become part of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) hitmen.

A survivor of the Teuchitlán ranch in Jalisco, where search mothers located possible human remains on Wednesday, March 5, said that the people held at the facility were allegedly trained by former military personnel from the United States and Colombia.

“It was a difficult training (…) I was trained by former US and Colombian military who distinguished by language and skin color as well”.

Victims arrived of their own free will

In an interview with Alejandro Domínguez for MILENIO Televisión, the survivor confirmed that the Izaguirre ranch functioned as a training camp for the CJNG, where they “disappeared” people who did not pass the physical tests to which the former foreign soldiers subjected them.

-Did they all arrive under the promise of employment? –

“Some went willingly,” the interviewee pointed out, confirming that some people were looking to work as CJNG hitmen.

For the duration of the training, the trainees received a payment of 3,000 pesos a week that they could use until they were released from the ranch.

Despite versions about the number of people who may have been killed at the ranch, the survivor said that most of them left the place alive; although they later worked for the cartel in different states of the Mexican Republic.

“For example, when I was there, there were 230 people; 30 stayed there and the rest finished their training, but I never saw 20 of the 200 people again (…) The rest are deployed to different points, that is, in plazas. They pass this training stage and go to the plazas to work, either in Guanajuato, Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco (…).

During the interview, he also said that the CNJG sends these people to Zacatecas; Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco; Ixtapa, Guerrero; Aguascalientes and San Luis Potosi.

“From the beginning of the training, they tell them who they work for,” said the man, who assured that the detainees cannot reveal their identities because they are threatened by armed CJNG hitmen. 

This is how the victims survived at the ranch

Forced to burn, dismember and kill people, the victims at the ranch had to try to sleep lying on the ground, next to each other. When the night was cold, things didn’t improve, as they only had a couple of blankets, rugs and tarps to cover themselves.  

The man confirmed that there were dogs in the place to which they were also throwing human flesh: “There was one like a wolf, an Alaskan wolf; and another like a Bulldog. They were fat, big; they were given meat”.

For his part, he said that the alleged assassins fed themselves with meat from pigs that they raised there.

Victims confirmed the existence of other training points.

“They told us that there were more (training points). There are many in Michoacan (which work the same way),” he answered. 

About the people who died at the ranch, the survivor explained that some of them cannot stand the pain, since they are trained with gotcha guns.

The man says he managed to escape once he passed the training and was placed in the Zacatecas plaza, where he had to work as a hitman:

“I escaped from Zacatecas, I managed to get away because they sent us ‘shopping’; to steal cars and cell phones. But I refused because I told them that they hadn’t mentioned that at the beginning, our job wasn’t to steal or do that, we were just supposed to be there as hired killers.

Considering that bullets and other loud noises could be heard from the ranch, the survivor thinks that the authorities are corrupt, these training places will never cease to exist. 

“It could be that they are alive because, as I told you a while ago, they cannot be training with tennis shoes (…) It could be that they are still alive somewhere in the country. Some of them are still alive in their areas of operations, they are just not allowed to leave because they are kept in safe houses, against their will”, he mentioned about the discovery of shoes in the vicinity of the ranch.

Sources: Milenio, Cartel Insider