Fwd: LOS ANGELES TIMES: Nearly 1,900 vanished in and around Guadalajara. Now the World Cup arrives
Molly Molloy
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-05-17/nearly-1-900-vanished-in-around-guadalajara-now-world-cup-arrives
The highway from the Guadalajara city airport to downtown is newly paved and the city’s famous roundabout has gotten a $4-million facelift.
Read in Los Angeles Times: https://apple.news/Aido4Il7FS6afTdjSJqG_hA
Cartel members responded to El Mencho’s death by setting fire to cars and buses and blocking major exits from Guadalajara. The city was briefly paralyzed. Gunmen burned 80 convenience stores and a host of pharmacies, flexing their power in the city.
In the days after the violence, FIFA officials met with the Mexican government to review security for the Guadalajara matches. Sheinbaum laid out a plan to send 100,000 security personnel, including Army soldiers and police officers, to stadiums in Guadalajara and the country’s two other host cities, Mexico City and Monterrey. FIFA determined it would not change the World Cup venues.
U.S. law enforcement has been advising Mexico on counter-terrorism methods, including training in repelling drone bombs, a weapon increasingly used by cartels to terrorize communities, attack adversaries and target military convoys. U.S. special forces have been training Mexican military teams to repel attacks at stadiums.
The Mexican government had already witnessed the Jalisco cartel’s proclivity for brazen killing. In December, some four miles from Akron Stadium, gunmen fired more than 3,000 bullets in broad daylight into the car of a director of a produce distribution center. The gun battle between his security guards and the cartel took place just a few blocks from a police station. It took officers nearly a half hour to arrive at the scene.
In recent years, Jalisco state has become a cartel killing ground, security experts say. Some graves discovered in the Guadalajara area contained a single body, some more than 40. A few had 95 or more.
In 2023, the remains of nine teenagers, chopped up and stuffed in trash bags, were found in a canyon in Zapopan. They had worked for a Jalisco cartel call center where telemarketers scammed Americans of millions of dollars in a time-share scheme. The teenagers are believed to have upset their employer.
Traffickers recruit young people, including minors, to serve as foot soldiers in their bloody quest to control drug-trafficking routes across Mexico. Some of those teenagers were lured by ads promising good-paying jobs, only to discover they were being funneled to a Jalisco cartel training camp an hour outside Guadalajara. There, as a test, Mexican security officials said, recruits were forced to kill fellow recruits.
The cartel has recruited more than 45,000 minors across Mexico in recent years, said one Jalisco state representative.
While some of Guadalajara’s upscale neighborhoods have escaped the violence, families across the metropolitan area have seen hundreds of children disappear, some to reappear, dead, on cartel battlefields across Jalisco and in the states of Sinaloa and Michoacán, searchers said.
The Jalisco state government lists more than 16,000 reports of missing people — the most of any Mexican state. Nationwide more than 130,000 people are reported missing.
Despite the preparations and the buzz among the nation’s vast population of soccer fans, World Cup fever has not caught on among families of the disappeared and the search teams that each week fan out across Guadalajara, looking for new graves.
Natalia Leticia García’s son disappeared in 2017. She began her own search and launched a group to help find other victims. Eight years later, García’s group has located 26 graves. Some finds have been bags full of severed heads, others holding just arms. It is a cartel tactic, she said, to make it harder to piece together remains.
“It is cruel,” García said. Her son, César Ulises Quintero García, remains missing.
Fisher is a special correspondent. This article was co-published with Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual nonprofit newsroom that covers stories from Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border.