Fans flocking to a soccer match at a stadium a few miles away, south of Guadalajara, shout “Mexico! Mexico!” walked by dozens of pollice officers, bomb-sniffing dogs, metal detectors under the unblinking stare of surveillance cameras as authorities work to fine-tune their measures ahead of next year’s World Cup matches.

On the same day, south of the city, there was a different sort of deployment as National Guard troops stood guard as volunteers dug up the small patio of an abandoned house – with metal rods, shovels and their hands -- looking for some of Mexico’s 134,000 disappeared.

It’s a jarring contrast of modern Mexico especially present in the western state of Jalisco where soccer stadiums coexist with some of the world’s most powerful criminal organizations.

Here hundreds of police and soldiers will deploy to keep soccer fans safe during the World Cup next summer, but meanwhile, local families are the ones searching for their missing relatives.

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which the Trump administration designated a foreign terrorist organization earlier this year, has established itself as Mexico’s most powerful criminal organization.

It earned its reputation through bold attacks on authorities, such as downing a Mexican military helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade and attempting a spectacular ambush of a Mexico City police chief in 2020.

Experts say there has not been a criminal organization so powerful in Jalisco since the late 1980s, the last time Guadalajara hosted international matches during the 1986 World Cup.

Neither fans attending the recent match, nor the officials in charge of securing the site with police on foot, horseback and bicycle expressed concern about hosting international matches on the home turf of the Jalisco cartel.

Authorities are racing to bolster security and infrastructure before the tournament, planning to add 3,000 surveillance cameras — taking the total beyond 10,000 — while deploying hundreds of police and soldiers.

Local officials say the World Cup will generate $1 billion for the state and create up to 7,000 jobs, many of them in the tourism and construction sectors.

South of Guadalajara, Indira Navarro and a handful of other volunteers dug up the concrete slab behind an abandoned house in Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillo where they had a tip there might be human remains.

They’re members of the Jalisco Search Warriors, one of many volunteer groups across Mexico who spend their free time looking for bodies of the missing.

They didn’t find anything that morning, but earlier this year when they searched a ranch closer to Guadalajara that authorities had raided the previous year, they found hundreds of garments and some burned bone fragments that had authorities scrambling to explain why the initial investigation of the purported cartel recruitment and training site had been so shoddy.

Navarro is looking for her brother who disappeared in the neighboring state of Sonora in 2015. She says state officials in Jalisco don’t want to address the disappearances.

“It’s a real mockery for us, the victims, and more so because we do the work.”

Local officials downplay cartel influence, and some residents welcome the World Cup as a chance for normalcy.

But for those like Navarro, who have dedicated their lives to looking for loved ones with little help from authorities, all of the World Cup hype feels like whitewashing Jalisco’s violence.

AP video shot by: Martín Silva Rey