The Mexican city of Guadalajara is set to host four World Cup matches next year, and workers are working around the clock to upgrade infrastructure in time for the tournament.
Due to the intense construction work, the city’s roads are currently in a veritable mess, causing a constant headache for those who have to travel on them.
But Guadalajara has much bigger problems than transportation. The metropolis is the capital of the western state of Jalisco, which has the highest number of disappeared people in all of Mexico.
The official tally of missing people in Jalisco is nearly 16,000, out of a national total of more than 130,000. However, the actual toll is undoubtedly much higher, as families are often reluctant to report missing persons for fear of retaliation.
With the World Cup approaching, Mexican authorities are also working overtime to tarnish Guadalajara’s image. For months, local authorities have threatened to remove portraits and signs from the towering “Disappeared Roundabout” in the city center, effectively re-disappearing it.
I recently spent 5 days in Guadalajara and visited a roundabout that was a few kilometers walk from where I was staying. As we got closer to the scene, more and more posters with the faces and identifying information of the missing people appeared on telephone poles and planters on the sidewalk. Some of these posters also appeared to be affixed in larger format to the monument itself.
For example, 32-year-old Elda Adriana Valdez Montoya was last seen in Guadalajara on August 10, 2020. Jordi Alejandro Cárdenas Flores, 19, was last seen on May 19, 2022 in the nearby city of Tlaquepaque. Christopher Aaron Leobardo Ramírez Camarena, 16, was last seen on April 21, 2024 in Trajomulco de Zuniga, Jalisco. and 67-year-old Martha Leticia Diaz López, who was last seen in Guadalajara on June 27, 2025.
In Cárdenas Flores’ case, the poster said the young man was “taken away” by state prosecutors on May 19 and never returned.
Although there is a tendency to blame Mexico’s astronomical disappearance rate on violent drug cartels, including the notorious Jalisco New Generation cartel, the government is also fully involved in this phenomenon, whether through direct action, collaboration with criminal organizations, or simply preserving the panorama of near-total impunity that allows such crimes to flourish.
It also highlights that most of the disappearances occurred after the so-called “war on drugs” began in Mexico in 2006, which not only failed to solve the drug problem but also led to more than 460,000 murders in the country. Who else supported the war effort? – The United States rarely misses an opportunity for bloody hemispheric intervention.
But heaven forbid World Cup spectators should be exposed to such a sick reality – although it is becoming much harder to cover up the discovery of a mass secret grave and hundreds of bags containing bodies near the Guadalajara football stadium.
While in Guadalajara, I spoke with Maribel Cedeno, a representative of the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco (Jalisco Warrior Search Party). The group is one of a number of groups dedicated to searching for missing people in the face of deliberate government inaction. Her brother, Jose Gil Cedeno Rosales, went missing on September 21, 2021 in Tlahomulco de Zuniga.
As Cedeno commented to me, “absolutely nothing has changed” under Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office last year promising a more sympathetic approach to Mexico’s disappearances. Once in power, Sheinbaum apparently forgot about his commitments and effectively condemned countless Mexicans who had lost loved ones to a state of continued mental anguish.
Pointing to the extensive measures the government is taking to ensure the safety of the World Cup, Cedeno demanded: “But where is our safety? Where is our safety, our families, or those of us who are risking our lives searching for missing people?”
That’s a good question. But they’re not keeping authorities up at night.
In March, Guerreros Bascadores de Jalisco discovered a secret crematorium on a ranch outside the town of Teuchitlán, an hour from Guadalajara. It was reportedly used by the Jalisco New Generation cartel as a recruitment and training center as well as an extermination site.
Curiously, Mexican authorities had seized the ranch months earlier, but failed to notice the human bone fragments and hundreds of pairs of shoes strewn about.
On my last day in Guadalajara, I took an Uber to the ranch. It was listed in the Uber app as “Campo de adiestramiento y exterminio,” or training and extermination camp.
After much consideration, I decided on Teuchitlán town center as my destination, and along the way I suggested to the driver that I pay cash for a walk by the ranch. He made the sign of the cross but agreed.
The driver, an outgoing middle-aged man from eastern Jalisco, had spent 11 years as an undocumented worker in California and Oregon. His son was studying engineering at a university in Michigan. He personally knows several people who disappeared from their homeland, including two sisters, and lamented that Mexican authorities were only motivated to seek justice for the murders when the victims themselves were members of the security forces.
And while the driver is an avid soccer fan, he said he could not justify the state’s decision to spend millions on a World Cup extravaganza that provides little benefit to average Mexicans.
In Teuchitlan, we took a short stroll through the city’s colorful central square, bought a few beers, programmed our destination to “Adiestramiento and the City of Extinction,” and headed down dusty, isolated roads patrolled by eerie black cars. We returned to battle the traffic in Guadalajara when we found the camp cordoned off by the Mexican National Guard (a force with which I had also had several unpleasant encounters).
Indeed, it is in the Mexican government’s clear interest to retroactively cover up as much as possible about the Teuchitlán incident, which has already caused sufficient damage due to the unusually wide coverage it received in the international media.
But in the end, Mexico itself is a great mass grave. And while efforts to bury that grave for the World Cup may be a first-half goal for organized crime and complicit politicians alike, the score may be settled in the second half by those who refuse to definitively make their missing loved ones disappear.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
