”Immediate Hiring.” The CJNG Recruits And Disappears With ‘Pig Slaughter’

Interpol follows this method of operation that combines fraud with forced recruitment. Since 2018, cases of young people from Jalisco who have disappeared for responding to false job offers have been reported.

Andrea and Federico went out to dinner one night in December 2021. They hadn’t seen each other for a week because this Uber driver had returned to the family home in Lagos de Moreno to take care of his mother who had fallen ill. After the burgers and before saying goodbye, he took a sheet of paper out of his jeans pocket that he tore off a post near the bus station in Zapopan, Jalisco.

The piece of paper had an unlikely job offer. For two weeks of work, the last two of the year, a marketing company was offering 20 thousand pesos. It didn’t require experience, nor a long selection process. “Immediate hiring,” it read. Andrea, cautious, asked him if that wasn’t a scam. Federico, on the other hand, played the role of a brave boyfriend and told her to trust that with that money they would start the year off right. He even joked that it would be the start of the wedding party fund.

The next day, December 9, Federico sent her a message. “My love, I’m on my way to my appointment, wish me luck.” She responded with a voice message that ended with a kiss. Andrea waited for one, two, four hours for the good news that never came. She called her boyfriend and found his voicemail. Five, six, ten hours. There was no trace of him. The 23-year-old boy had vanished. 

Weeks later, while searching for information about missing young people, Andrea found that hundreds in Mexico – and thousands around the world – never return home after attending fake work appointments. This is a criminal movement on a global scale.

This phenomenon has alarmed the International Police, Interpol, which has given a terrible name to the victims of this type of disappearance and human exploitation: young people like Federico are called “pigs” and those who have the last contact with them are nicknamed “butchers”. This criminal model is called ‘pig butchering’. The translation into Spanish would be “pig butchery”, although police forces prefer: “pig slaughter”.

It is so brutal that in March 2024 Interpol sent an urgent message to its 196 member countries, including Mexico, to warn of this crime that was originally devised as a mix of sentimental fraud and fraudulent investment. Today, this crime has evolved into call centers dedicated to fraud, false job offers, protection for people entering a prison or rehabilitation center for the first time, or even recruitment of girls, boys and adolescents by organized crime through video games.

The name was given during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was also an epidemic of loneliness due to isolation. Mafias in Asia saw an opportunity and recruited hundreds of young people to create fake profiles from their computers and phones and look for people in need of affection. The “slaughter” occurs with the first deposit or transfer that hurts someone else’s assets and the knife doesn’t leave those bank accounts until they have been completely drained. 

Like the coronavirus, this “digital carnage” began in China and spread to other countries. Benedikt Hofmann, deputy representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, quickly saw a worrying change: the first perpetrators were members of the mafias, but soon they would find in police operations people who had been kidnapped and forced to work in safe houses disguised as call centers. 

A new type of crime in the world

Soon the authorities in Asia were overwhelmed by piles of criminal records: it was not clear who the victim or the perpetrator was. Sometimes the “butcher” was a violent young man from the Triads; sometimes it was a young Filipino girl who made single men fall in love in exchange for regaining her freedom, as was discovered last March, when authorities in Manila raided a fake call center. There they discovered 658 kidnapped people who paid their own ransoms attached to phones and computers. 

According to Interpol, the “pig slaughter” began to spread around the world like a virus without a vaccine. It reached Muslim Asia and settled in the United Arab Emirates. Afghans, Yemenis and Omanis became the next victims of the mafias that nest in millionaire cities like Dubai or Abu Dhabi. 

The contagion continued and reached Africa. Criminal and terrorist groups Black Axe, Airlords, Supreme Eiye and Boko Haram adapted it to already known scams such as “The Nigerian Prince”, which consists of an email from a supposed member of African royalty who needs help to transfer a large sum of money abroad and who, in exchange, promises a generous reward that turns into embezzlement. Later, the crime spread throughout Europe, where it was operated by mafias such as the Albanian, Russian, the Irish Clan Kinahan and the Italian ‘Ndrangheta, among others.

The world’s leading experts on digital crimes, such as Ronnie Tokazowski, could only watch in frustration as the inevitable occurred: the expansion to the American continent, where the “pig slaughter” was learned by the Brazilian Commando Vermelho and the criminal gangs of Colombia.

Until, confirmed by Interpol, this new crime arrived in Mexico. It was brought by the most lethal cartel in the country, the one that is behind 80% of the homicides linked to crime, according to the University of Uppsala in Sweden: the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which would twist it to create its own version.

A criminal discovery in Zapopan involved false ‘call centers’

On May 31, 2023, agents of the Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office arrived at a 40-meter-deep ravine in the Mirador Escondido community, in Zapopan, and squeezed between boulders and rocks found 45 black bags with human remains.

The discovery marked the end of a mission that had begun three days earlier, when, thanks to street protests, the relatives of eight children who disappeared between May 20 and 22 managed to mobilize the authorities. The case began to rise to the category of scandal due to a fact that surprised Jalisco society. The missing people seemed to have no common ties, they worked in different companies but in the same field: ‘call centers’, the line of business that many young Mexicans turn to as their first job.

The expert examinations concluded that the human remains belonged to several people, including the eight telephone operators. And when they raided these companies they found drugs, weapons, machines to count money, USB drives with contact lists of foreign people and a mop with blood.

Mexican authorities linked the case to complaints from the United States Treasury Department, which in March 2023 warned of call centers operated by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel to scam with fake timeshares. The Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office profiled the victims and drew up the strongest hypothesis: the eight had been hired to sell vacation plans, but at some point they realized that, in reality, they had to operate a scam.

The “pigs” or victims were American retirees, the “food” was paradisiacal hotels with long stays in Puerto Vallarta and the “bleeding knife” was in their hands to bury it on bank accounts of unsuspecting people.

Authorities believe that Itzel Abigail, Carlos David, Arturo, Carlos Benjamín, Jorge Miguel, Mayra Karina, Jesús Alfredo and Juan Antonio openly refused to participate and, perhaps, threatened to report the “butchers.” The response of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel was murder preceded by torture. A strong message for those who want to get out of this network of exploitation.

This is how the Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s ‘call centers’ operate

To set up a fake call center, organized crime requires an office or home, furniture to create a credible facade, technological equipment, access to bank terminals, private security and more. Some bosses may believe that this is an expensive investment, so they prefer “pig slaughter” variants that are cheaper, but that lead to the same thing: forced disappearance or murder.

A different method of operation is in prisons, rehabilitation centers for people with addictions or schools, where the “butcher” offers as “food” the physical protection of the cartel against members of rival groups, stalkers or ex-partners. The “slaughter” includes large sums of money that must be transferred to bank accounts that are opened and closed to mislead the authorities.

Another variant is recruitment in video games, where “the fattening” is the offer to transform from an anonymous virtual shooter into a famous real-life hitman. And deceptive job offers are also a type of crime, with high salaries and immediate hiring in remote places. In these cases, there is a perpetrator who exaggerates the benefits and a victim who minimizes the risks.

“On Facebook, they often place ads that are sometimes explicit, but are disguised as job offers for security guards, office assistants, or cleaning assistants. Sometimes they have pretended to be formal companies that conduct job interviews and even medical assessments. In other cases, they are summoned to places they must reach by bus and disappear,” says Jorge Ramírez, a professor of Sociology at the University of Guadalajara and a scholar of forced disappearances.

His university has been hit hard by this new crime: the University Committee for the Disappeared has recorded, since 2018, 20 missing students and eight murdered for responding to job offers allegedly belonging to this scheme that in Mexico combines labor fraud with forced recruitment.

“They don’t return from job appointments or meetings at the exit points of the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area […]. They are recruited knowing that they will enter the Jalisco Cartel, but they are never told under what conditions. They are usually very young, some of them minors, and it seems that they are not clear about what will happen to them. Most of the testimonies that are known indicate that they regretted it,” says the academic.

For the families of the victims, the anguish is focused on their return home. For the local authorities, on the increase in the number of disappearances and homicides. And for international organizations, the concern is that, behind the “pig slaughter”, there is a more perverse motivation: to prolong the existence of organized crime, eternal life.

Interpol Secretary General Jürgen Stock believes that organized crime operates this new model also to have a “reserve” of militants that allows them to renew their ranks in case of police or military operations that end in large arrests or deaths of their members. “The fact that it is a cartel that operates with a large number of young people recruited by force shows the drama that is experienced in Jalisco: continuing to incorporate new recruits. It is a profitable business,” Ramírez laments. 

Andrea has the same belief about the fate of her boyfriend Federico. Someone tricked him into replacing another one that the bosses in the area see as “disposable.” Then someone will probably take his place. And so on ad infinitum. A plan for the cartels to have eternal life. An unlimited number of substitutes. 

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Attractive salaries and “immediate hiring” continue to hook dozens of victims in the atrocious method adopted by the CJNG to forcibly recruit “workers” 

In the days following Federico’s disappearance, Andrea became a detective. Every morning she went to the Zapopan bus station and looked for little pieces of paper with job offers that looked like that clipping that fades from her mind every day. “Immediate hiring,” she remembered and tried to identify a type of letter that seemed familiar to her to take to the police.

In the search, she remembers, she found dozens of suspicious offers. Salaries of up to 30 thousand pesos for hostesses, night watchmen, dancers, bricklayers, nurses and housewives willing to give four hours of their day at home to pack items that they had to pick up personally in remote areas in Tonalá or Tlajomulco, where the local cartel usually has its safe houses and warehouses.

Some of them she tore off in honor of Federico; others she left on posts and walls so that no one would notice that she was looking for the scam that would lead her to her boyfriend. With the help of a pill in the morning and another at night, she immersed herself in a narcoleptic state to give her mind small breaks from obsessive thoughts.

Since then, a strange peace floats over Andrea, who can now tell me her story without breaking into tears and only shedding a few tears. That closure interpreted by her allows her to continue breathing: her boyfriend fulfilled, once again, his promise to let her know when he returns home after a day of work. Federico is in heaven, she assures.

There is only one thing that continues to hurt her like a splinter stuck in her: that some “butcher” believed that he could replace her boyfriend with another boy. It’s not like that. Federico, she clarifies, was irreplaceable.

Source: Milenio