MEXICO CITY (CN) - Emmanuel Balderas Guerrero was 22 years old when a friend offered him $500 during a night of partying.

He wasn't desperate for the money. He was doing well working as a chef manager in Mexico City's ritzy Beverly Hills equivalent, Polanco.

But that night he pocketed the cash without much thought, considering it a loan from an old friend to tide him over during the four days he had taken off from his grueling restaurant job.

Balderas Guerrero went back to work. That was when the phone calls began.

"He knew how many vacation days I had; he let me rest. At work, my phone blew up. He called me every minute," he said. Eventually he answered, and told his friend he'd return the money. But it was too late.

The friend insisted, "It wasn't a loan. Hurry up, I'll meet you in front of your house." When Balderas Guerrero went home, he saw his father casually chatting with his friend.

The friend told him to grab his things right away and get in the truck parked outside. Once again, Balderas Guerrero tried to pay him back. Once again, the friend refused.

They drove toward Toluca in the state of Mexico, which borders Mexico City, arriving at a ranch in a remote area.

He recalled, "We arrived around 2, 2:30 at night. There were dozens of people there working, cutting grass. They all had pistols on them. I thought, 'What the hell? Are they going to shoot at the grass or what, man?'"

The friend introduced him to a large middle-aged man with a Grim Reaper tattooed on his bald head.

"The bald man informed me that he was the boss and that he had a job for me," Balderas Guerrero said. "He told me that getting in is easy, but getting out is hard." He soon figured out he was on a cartel ranch operated by Los Zetas, one of Mexico's most expansive and violent cartels at the time. 

That night, they led him to a small metal-roofed house where a blindfolded man bound by his feet and hands was inside. Balderas Guerrero's job was to watch over the prisoner until morning to ensure he didn't escape. The man kept pleading with him to let him go.

"I had to wear headphones because I couldn't bear to hear the man beg anymore," Balderas Guerrero said. He knew his fate if he disobeyed his own captors.

Balderas Guerrero, now 37, was one of the lucky ones. He managed to leave the Zetas ranch and still works as a chef. He says he will never again accept money that he didn't earn.

Countless others didn't escape such sinister places and will never tell their stories.

The state of Jalisco has the highest number of disappeared people of any other state in the country, with 15,426 people currently missing. The ranch isn't the first headline connected to these disappearances to make worldwide news.

In 2018, two tractor-trailers were discovered in the Guadalajara metropolitan area filled with 322 total unidentified bodies. They served as a temporary morgue because Jalisco's Institute of Forensic Sciences' nine mortuaries ran out of space. Family members were only able to identify 48 of them.

In the same year, three University of Guadalajara film students were murdered and their bodies were burned in acid. State prosecutors said they had been mistakenly tagged as members of a rival gang.

National horror, major employer

Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco, or the Jalisco Warrior Searchers, is a group of women dedicated to finding their disappeared loved ones. On March 5, they were tipped off to Izaguirre Ranch in Teuchitlan, Jalisco, just 35 miles outside Mexico's second-largest city, Guadalajara. 

What searchers unearthed there eerily resembled a Holocaust memorial: backpacks, hundreds of pairs of shoes, men's and women's clothing, letters to family members, lockets, photos and identification cards. They also found cremation-style ovens and charred human bones. 

Mexico, despite its first female president's nearly universal popularity, has found itself grasping for answers for yet another national horror - this time, at a cartel training ranch.

Authorities confirmed that the Teuchitlan ranch operated as a Jalisco New Generation Cartel training camp until the National Guard located it and shut it down in September, when they arrested 10 armed men and rescued two kidnapped people. The property was forcibly sold to the cartel in 2012. 

Omar Garcia Harfuch, the secretary of security and citizen protection, said that for the time being, there is no clear indication the ranch was a death camp, as some have claimed.

Cartels are Mexico's fifth-largest employer. Balderas Guerrero was tricked into working for the cartels by a friendly face, but recruitment these days can be just as duplicitous.

David Mora, International Crisis Group's senior analyst for Mexico, says cartels mainly recruit men between the ages of 15 and 40 in three ways, all connected to social media. Some young people ask TikTok or Facebook accounts reportedly affiliated with organized crime for details on joining. Cartels will also put out an open call for recruits.

The third and most insidious way, thought to be the main driver for young men arriving at the Teuchitlan ranch, is false job advertisements. Cartels, acting like legitimate employers, advertise calls to hire security guards, sometimes even municipal police. They set a pick-up location to transport the unsuspecting kidnap victims to their supposed interviews.

In the case of Teuchitlan, many young men were sent to a nearby bus station for transportation to a job or job interview. By the time they realized what was happening, they were powerless to leave.

"In the case of the Jalisco ranch, they were just looking for jobs. They were young, unemployed and just trying to get by," Mora said. "They are viewed as an expendable population, no one is going to care what happens to them. The previous administration promised to get to the root of the problem, but that didn't happen."

Digital minefield

On March 24, the National Guard arrested Jose Gregorio Lastra in Mexico City. Lastra confessed to the murder of at least eight young people who tried to flee the ranch in Jalisco, which he helped to operate. He was also responsible for recruiting young people to join the cartel.

Shortly before his arrest, a group claiming to be the Jalisco New Generation Cartel posted a video on social media denying responsibility for the ranch disappearances and placing blame on the search group who found the grisly scene. "Why are they trying to harm the Jalisco New Generation Cartel with lies and fabricated, baseless stories?" the armed masked man in the video pleads. 

The cartel ran at least 39 TikTok accounts that the Department of Security and Civilian Protection deactivated. These accounts posted security guard jobs offering to pay up to $600 a week, especially lucrative rates for an unemployed young person.

Though social media has made recruitment for cartels much easier, Mora also notes the importance of narcobloggers and other less traditional forms of journalism, usually on X and Facebook. Some may tend to sensationalize cartel violence, but he says they also can serve a purpose in context of the larger mediascape.

"Digital news journalism is a minefield," he said." "But the spirit is the same and we should be thankful that someone is covering the news in places where the resources aren't there."

Source: Courthouse News Service