Mexico 'ranch of horror' was cartel training site, not 'extermination camp'

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's security minister said on Tuesday there was no evidence that a so-called "ranch of horror" strewn with human remains was an "extermination camp" but rather it was a cartel training site where those who resisted recruitment were killed.

The discovery earlier this month of the site, littered with bone fragments, ashes, alleged makeshift crematoriums, along with hundreds of shoes and backpacks shocked Mexico, a country numbed by nearly two decades of bloody cartel violence.

"It's a completely different thing for killings or torture to be carried out on a property than for it to have been an extermination camp," Security Minister Omar Garcia Harfuch said on Tuesday morning, speaking at the president's daily morning press conference.

"An extermination camp is a place where hundreds and thousands of people are systematically murdered, I think we all understand that," he added.

"At the moment, I repeat, we have no evidence ... that it had been an extermination camp, but rather a training site."

Earlier this month, an activist search group for missing people found the ranch in Teuchitlan, a rural area about 40 miles (64 km) outside Jalisco's capital, Guadalajara.

At the time they said it appeared to have been used as an "extermination camp."

While the discovery of mass graves is not uncommon, the possibility the site was used for systematic killing has caused a deep sense of horror in the country, where more than 124,000 people have disappeared and few are ever found.

Mexico's top prosecutor has said state authorities bungled the initial investigation after discovering the ranch last September. It was then left abandoned and unsupervised until the activist search group found it earlier this month.

Federal investigators have now taken over the case.

Mexican authorities said they have arrested a suspect, who goes by the alias of "Commandante Lastra," whom officials accuse of leading recruitment at the ranch for the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Many would-be recruits were lured to the ranch under false pretenses, authorities have said, via social media ads for false job opportunities. But once at the ranch, those who refused to be trained and recruited into the ranks of the cartel, or those who tried to escape the site, were tortured or killed, Garcia said on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Laura Gottesdiener; Editing by Sandra Maler)