Five people killed and burned to death in Jalisco torture house

"MX" for Borderland Beat

The house in Zapopan, Jalisco, where the five bodies were found; second floor was set on fire

Five people were found dead inside a home in the state of Jalisco over the weekend. Investigators said the victims were tied up and brutally tortured with a tourniquet before the house was set on fire. The incident occurred in La Estancia neighborhood in Zapopan, a suburb of the Guadalajara metropolitan area.

The first responders to arrive at the scene were the Jalisco State Police and municipal firefighters. They arrived at the scene after an anonymous citizen made an emergency call of a house fire at around 7:30 p.m. Neighborhood residents told the police that they thought the house was abandoned since they never noticed any activity from the house in two years.

Authorities have not discarded the possibility that this property may have been used by an organized crime group as a "torture house".

Background
Investigators believe that houses like the one in Zapopan are used by organized crime members as "torture houses". In the past, they have found houses in the area where the victims were brutally tortured. The torture methods include electrocution, forcing victims into a hole and feeding them to animals, or starving them to death. In this case, some of the victims showed torture wounds on their necks after their captors used a tourniquet.

Example of a tourniquet, which was used to torture the victim's on their necks 

This was not the first mass murder incident reported in La Estancia, Zapopan. On 3 July 2019, authorities discovered one corpse and three severed heads inside a house. Close to this neighborhood in Ciudad Granja, on 12 August 2019, the police discovered ten people inside a home. More than half of them were killed by their captors. 

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and its splintered cells operate in Guadalajara and its surrounding municipalities, including Zapopan. Jalisco is a strategic state for organized crime groups because of its economic output and geographical attributes for drug trafficking operations. The Guadalajara metropolitan area also offers a huge opportunity for money laundering.

Bloody weekend in Jalisco

Between Saturday evening (when the arson was reported) and up until Sunday at noon, at least 10 homicides were reported throughout the entire Guadalajara metropolitan area, with has approximately 4.8 million people. This urban area is the largest in the state of Jalisco and the second largest in the country after Greater Mexico City.

In neighborhood Lomas de Polanco in Guadalajara, a 35-year-old woman was shot in the face and killed at around 11:30 p.m. Nearly at the same time, in Colón Industrial neighorhood, a man was gunned down by unknown assailants.

At around 1:40 a.m., a man was killed in a drive-by shooting as he walked with his girlfriend in Santa Elena de la Cruz neighborhood. Before dawn, the police found a bullet-ridden man inside a vehicle in Las Bóvedas neighborhood. In the municipality of Tlaquepaque, the police discovered an encobijado, a dead person found wrapped in blankets, stuffed in a stroller.