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Relatives of the disappeared denounce state staging in extermination camp in Jalisco [1]
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Date: 2025-04
In the absence of any items of clothing belonging to their loved ones, women as strong as the searchers, who themselves regularly dig pits to look for remains, begin to break down. They are visibly devastated as they are circled by dozens of cameras, which focus on every tear, every scream, every curse. With the removal of the evidence, they feel their relatives have disappeared from them forever. The clothes they had seen before were like signals sent by their sons, daughters, husbands and parents. They know that if their loved ones were burned there, they may now never be found.
One of the hardest moments comes when a woman notices a hole under a cobblestone. The woman, a member of the Guerreros Buscadores collective, appeared in a previous live broadcast in which they found the 300 shoes, a missing young man’s farewell letter, bone fragments and other remains that revealed what society and the government had not wanted to see: that the local cartel was forcibly detaining young people to turn them into hitmen – subjecting them to brutal training in which those who did not kill, died.
The hole she now sees in the floor below confirms to her that the state prosecutor's office did not do a good job of searching the site. She throws herself to the ground and, as if in a trance, begins to dig with her nails, crying and shouting: “Touch it here, how does it sound, it's hollow! ... Look! ... Look how it sounds here!”. Another woman joins her, shouting demands for people to bring picks and shovels to help them.
Uniformed public servants stand around but nobody understands what they are doing. They don't explain anything or offer a guided tour, they just make sure that the security seals cordoning off certain areas are not broken. The three psychologists sent by the state prosecutor’s office are not enough to cover the whole of the site, which has traumatised people everywhere.
From 1.30pm, the furious comments of mothers leaving the ranch are broadcast live on TV. Surrounded by her colleagues, Patricia Sotelo from the Huellas de Amor collective, tells the camera: “Just setting foot on the site is a pain and you feel it. It's a mockery of our pain. We expected to be able to walk every inch of the place on our own feet. […] They won't let us go through what we've seen on the television, you're treated like a primary school child, you have to follow the instructions, stay in a line, they give us 15, 20 minutes.
“There's nothing left, they wouldn't let us go where the bedroom was supposed to be. We knew that Gertz Manero and the Guadalajara prosecutor were coming, but they never arrived. Gertz should take his place, he shouldn't just collect his pay cheque.”
At 2:36 pm, when it’s clear that the visit has been a disaster, Jalisco authorities wash their hands of the ranch – making clear that the investigation is the national government’s responsibility. The state prosecutor's office posts a photo of an official document on X, writing: “We have made all the information on the Izaguirre Ranch case available to the [federal Attorney General’s Office] so that they can exercise their power to lead the investigation.”
While the mothers who spend their days searching for their missing relatives with picks, shovels and rods are only allowed 20 minutes at the site, influencers such as Jorge Manuel Suárez Azcargota get more privileged access.
In his broadcast on X, he boasts of having been supported by the prosecutor's office to be the first to take a look at the site. He shows what he believes was a “family home” and what “was once a pond”. A rudimentary kitchen, a bathroom. The excavations. The drones flying overhead. The vibe, he says, is “not cool” – very heavy, ugly, with a “fucking charge”.
Other influencers from Mexico City arrive at the narco-ranch, eager to enter and verify if this place is really an ‘extermination camp’. They want to see the ‘cremation ovens’ the mothers showed on social media two weeks ago in a clip of a man half-submerged in a hole while women sift earth and deposit fragments of bones on a plastic tray.
Some of the influencers and journalists have come to decide for themselves if the photos shared online of abandoned clothes and pits with human remains are ‘set-ups’, The president and pro-government media have made such claims, saying they are part of a campaign orchestrated by the right that aims to encourage an invasion by the US. Two days ago, on 18 March, President Sheinbaum used a press conference to say the ranch was part of a “dirty war” manipulated by 87,000 opposition bots on social media to attack the government and former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The tour is self-guided. Along the path through the site are yellow, red and green flags, marking where possible evidence has been found. There is a yellow cordon in the main area but it is not respected or even noticed amid the hustle and bustle. Another site is cordoned off with a cloth. None of the dozens of uniformed personnel attending (soldiers, national guards, staff from government departments on human rights, victims support and civil protection, as well as the special prosecutor's office for disappeared people, the state Attorney General’s Office, the National Search Commission and a long etcetera), give an account of what happened in this ranch or offer any official findings or conclusions.
This lack of information leads to confusion in the live broadcasts of journalists, Facebookers, YouTubers, Twitters, TikTokers and Instagrammers at the ranch. Where some see a dining room, others see a flaying site. Only the families who entered the site and found the evidence in the first months of the year can offer explanations for what they saw.
Raúl Servín, who has been searching for his son Raúl for a decade, offers the tour the media hoped for. Servín is a member of Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco, the collective that made this site public. He talks about the dentures they found, the metal plate in the arm of a missing person his group was looking for, and the remains he removed from the site. He criticises the prosecution experts’ poor excavations, claiming their explorations did not go as deep underground as his own.
A journalist stops to film a building littered with jerrycans, where traffic signs had been used for shooting practice. She says on camera that the criminals had “a bar” there to dismember their victims. Servín, dressed in his bandana and the black long-sleeved T-shirt he wears on searches, doesn't want to enter, explaining that he didn’t go any further and only remembers empty jerrycans in a room.
Asked by a journalist if fuel was used here, Servín replies: “Yes. Proof shows that what was taken to Mexico City were not complete bodies.” They ask what the remains looked like and he points to a stone, saying: “Like this little stone over there, that's what the parts of the human bodies that were burned looked like.”
Camerapeople push him to say more, to go on. But prosecution staff object because the visit has already lasted longer than it should have: it is now 3:30pm. Somebody still manages to ask Servín the million-dollar question, though, the public debate issue: is it true that this site is an extermination centre, as the searching families have said, or is it just a training camp, as the prosecutor, Gertz, said in his conference?
“I don't know what [the government] calls it,” he says. “When I was a child, I saw in cartoons that they used those laser-type extermination guns. I think [the government] thought of it that way.
“So, when I came, I said: ‘If you're taking a person’s life and burning them, it's a punishment of extermination’. Of course. They're learning [to kill] with other people’s bodies, so maybe for [the government] it's not that way, but unfortunately, that's the reality for us.”
The aftermath
After the tour, where everyone did what they wanted, many journalists and influencers made a snap judgement. There are no crematoriums here, no ovens, nothing burnt, they said, as if they had X-ray vision and were forensic science experts. This was no extermination camp, they decided – even going on to report this as fact at the president's daily press conferences in the following days.
Photographer Ulises Ruíz, who visited the ranch with Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco on 5 March, returned for the media visit and disagrees with those who claim that nothing was ever there.
“I saw [the holes had been] covered up,” he says. He saw one of Guerreros Buscadores’ original excavations, which he says was about a metre deep. But the pit looked to have been filled in on the day of the official visit, although he had to assess from a distance as the passage leading to it had been shut off.
“If they claimed they didn't see ovens it’s because they were never told that the ovens here are not like bread or pizza ovens, that they could be underground,” Ruiz tells me. “I have been to two or three other places considered crematories, with Buscando Corazones and Guerreros searching groups, and they undoubtedly do not look like a bread oven or any other oven that one can imagine; they have different features.”
What was the goal of this official visit? There are still no answers. Some so-called experts have claimed the right wing, who are in opposition in Mexico, are lying about the site being an ‘extermination camp’ in order to give the US an excuse to invade Mexico in search of terrorists. If the state planned the visit to stop these ‘rumours’ by taking control of the narrative, then something went horribly wrong. It was after the visit that the Teuchitlán camp began making headlines internationally.
The day after the visit to the ranch, President Sheinbaum defended it as an act of freedom of expression intended to allow everyone to make up their own mind. She said nothing about the site’s alteration or destruction of evidence.
But if the tour served any real purpose, it was providing the media – which also feeds on the anonymous testimonies of those who claim to have escaped from that same ranch alive – with images of terror. There are so many of these anonymous reports that they become doubtful, but the humanitarian crisis in Mexico has lasted so long, and Jalisco authorities have so often ignored the reports of these events (the first was in 2011), that it’s still possible that they are true.
Many mothers originally described the visit as “a mockery”, “a circus”, “a staging”, “a museum of our pain” or a “stunt”. But as the days go by, some incredibly feel that it could have been a trap. Neither Ponce nor Ornelas, the searching mothers, had any idea of the campaign of insults and attacks that would be unleashed in the aftermath of the visit.
“It's good that the ranch made itself known. What isn't good is that they are attacking all of us, all the groups, all the mothers; it's very ugly, They are attacking us all as ‘sell-outs’ because ‘we didn't look after [our children]’ before, because they were ‘in a bad way’,” says Ornelas, her voice breaking. “And that is what hurts the most.”
Ornelas is speaking to me from her home in Guadalajara, where she is still coming to terms with what happened. “People are not empathetic, they don't know that we pay out of our own pocket to look for our children.
“To be honest, I don't even watch the news, but I went on YouTube to see what they had come up with, and I said to myself: ‘I hope it doesn't happen to them, that they don't suffer what one is suffering’. Whether our missing people were doing well or badly, what we want is to bring them home”.
At the end of March, the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco collective reported receiving threats and denounced the “unprecedented smear and defamation campaign” being waged against searching relatives.
Within 24 hours of the visit to the ranch, some media outlets were already beginning to criticise the “invention of the extermination camp” and the cremation ovens. But they were also spreading other news: groups of mothers continued to arrive at the ranch asking to enter, although they were not allowed in. The mothers, unstoppable, continue to dig up truths.
* This is a translated and edited version of the article originally published in A dónde van los desaparecidoss
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/mexico-extermination-camp-izaguirre-ranch-jalisco-teuchitlan-mothers-disappeared-staged-state/
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