Members of the “Guerreros Buscadores” embrace as they pray at the Izaguirre Ranch in the community of La Estanzuela, where they located three human crematories while searching for relatives in Teuchitlán, Jalisco state, Mexico, on March 5. According to local authorities, the Izaguirre Ranch was used by organized crime to train new members. (Ulises Ruiz/AFP/Getty Images)
For months, the tips had been appearing on a Facebook page. There was a mass grave hidden in a rural village outside Guadalajara, in western Mexico, the messages said.
Mexico has grappled for years with a crisis of disappearances, with more than 110,000 people reported missing. Relatives of the disappeared have unearthed hundreds of graves filled with corpses. This seemed like another. But the people who ran the Facebook page — a group in Jalisco state who search for the missing — were puzzled. The grave was said to be in the village of La Estanzuela. But where, exactly?