‘A circus of horror’: The cruel visit to ‘staged’ extermination camp in Mexico

In January and February of this year, groups of people searching for missing loved ones secretly entered the Izaguirre Ranch in the western Mexican state of Jalisco. There, they found pits containing the remains of burned bones and thousands of personal belongings.

The site in the municipality of Teuchitlán was allegedly used as a recruitment and extermination centre by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). The relatives found it with the help of alleged survivors who said they had been held there.

More than 125,000 people have disappeared in Mexico in the past 25 years, half of them since 2019, according to official figures. Some 15,000 are missing from Jalisco alone – more than any other state.

Evidence suggests organised crime gangs like the CJNG lure in young people with false promises of employment, before enslaving them and forcing them to train to be hitmen – training that can include fighting other victims to the death. Bodies are dismembered, burned and left in the thousands of mass graves across the country.

An organisation formed by some of the victims’ relatives, Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco (Warrior Searchers of Jalisco), visited the Teuchitlán site again on 5 March to film and photograph their findings. The group later published these images and videos on social media. Two weeks later, federal and Jalisco prosecutor’s offices invited journalists, social media influencers and mothers of missing people on an official visit to the ranch.

That visit prompted complaints from many of the mothers, who felt the site had been altered since they first found it and that they were being deceived by authorities. The day was poorly planned and marred by chaos, which neither federal nor state authorities took responsibility for. Amid a lack of explanations about what had happened at the ranch, each visitor invented their own narrative.

The following article is an account of the visit, which openDemocracy has translated into English and edited. It was originally written by Marcela Turati and published in A dónde van los desaparecidos (a Mexican media site whose name means ‘Where the disappeared go’).

When Virginia Ponce returns to the Izaguirre Ranch, this time with official authorisation, her heart sinks. The site isn’t as she remembered it: it’s no longer dusty and abandoned, nor reeking of damp. Instead, it’s ‘clean’ and hundreds of people are walking through it, treading on it and disturbing it at the invitation of the federal and state prosecutors.

Ponce, who tracks down cartel extermination sites like this one, knows that it is the scene of many crimes and likely contains forensic evidence that should be preserved.

She cannot reconcile this made-up site with the one she has seen in her nightmares since her furtive visits with other searching mothers in January and February, when the reeds in the surrounding fields still stood tall. On those days, they searched the site secretly and fearfully.

“We found clothes lying all over there; it was an unbearable smell, a mess of shoes everywhere. Everything was thrown away,” she says, pointing at an area that is now empty.

Ponce has been searching for her son, Víctor Hugo Meza, for four years and nine months. She leads Madres Buscadoras de Jalisco, a collective of women whose children are missing. On one of their visits to the ranch, the women heard a cry moments before leaving: “Mamááá!”

She still does not know whether the scream was from somebody still alive or from beyond the grave. “I thought I was the only one who had heard it, I thought it was my own fear, but my colleagues heard that cry for help too. And when I listen to the video I can hear that ‘mamá’,” Ponce says with tears in her eyes. “Which of us mothers was he talking to? It was so sad and painful.”

Ponce complains that this visit to the ranch, which the authorities coordinated and invited relatives on, is a mockery. “They showed us around like we were in a museum but even in a museum you can see [things] or ask questions. Here, nobody tells us what we have come for or what work has been done. It's a joke.”

She is far from the only one complaining. “Nothing is left [of what was there], they've already cleaned it,” says Adriana Ornelas, another member of the collective. “There was a bloodstained dressing gown, lots of blankets here and outside.”

Ornelas is looking for her son Paul Gabriel Sánchez, who is in his twenties. She says that they have been taking things from this ranch since January, although she does not say who they are.

The chickens and cats are no longer there, nor are the tinned food (instant soups, tins of sardines, pancake flour), the huge pile of more than 100 dishes, the trainers and boots that were in new boxes, the two bed bases, the mattresses, the huge statue of Santa Muerte and more.

Ornelas thinks some of these objects were removed even before the relatives’ official visit was announced, as she says she also did not see them in the broadcasts by the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco collective, who entered on 5 March accompanied by Ulises Ruiz, an AFP photographer. Ruiz’s images of the hundreds of abandoned shoes and items of clothing and more than a thousand unclaimed objects looked like the vestiges of a catastrophe from which few survive. The catastrophe of forced recruitment and the disappearance of people plagues Mexico.

‘They’re staging this’

The state prosecutor’s office has been in charge of the Izaguirre Ranch since September 2024, when the National Guard raided the site and found three people who had been reported missing (two were being held hostage, while the third was dead, wrapped in plastic) and arrested 10 alleged members of the cartel.

But the mothers claimed the state prosecutor’s office had ignored evidence of many more killings at the site. On 5 March they shared photos, such as of the hundreds of shoes they had found, and succeeded in turning the whole country’s attention to the ranch.

Mourning ceremonies for the victims were held in 40 cities, and president Claudia Sheinbaum announced that dealing with disappeared people is a national priority. The Jalisco Attorney General’s Office later said that raiding officers had failed to find evidence of the additional remains and cremation ovens because they’d been hidden in underground rooms.

Amid the bickering over whether the blame for failing to properly investigate should lie with the state government (which was monitoring the site) or the federal government (the site was used for organised crime – a federal offence), a smiling Alejandro Gertz Manero, the head of the federal Attorney General's Office, held a press conference on 19 March.

In what could be described as throwing Jalisco’s Attorney General’s Office under the bus, Gertz detailed a number of irregularities in the state’s handling of the crime scene and invited the media to see the ranch for themselves. A visit, he announced, would take place less than 24 hours later and would be organised by the state government.

The state office responded by extending invitations to groups of searching families from Mexican states including Jalisco, Colima, Guanajuato, Nayarit and Zacatecas, as well as to all those who had identified belongings of the people they were looking for in the photos and videos of the site that had been shared online.

But the visit to the ranch – known as ‘the little school of terror’ in the press – quickly became a horror tour, in which searching relatives were victims. Within 45 minutes of the ranch’s gates being opened to relatives, reports were circling that the visit was a scam.

As journalists waited to be let in, two women came running out, their trauma obvious despite the balaclavas covering their faces (all the women were warned it could be dangerous to give interviews with their faces visible due to potential repercussions from the cartel).

One of them shouted that they had been deceived. Nothing is there anymore, she said in tears. Among the missing items is a scarf she had seen at the site, which she thought belonged to her husband, Juan José Ramos, who she says disappeared from their home “six years and 20 days ago”.

“There is nothing,” she shouted. “No clothes, no shoes, no backpack, nothing. They are missing. It's not acceptable. [...] Let us in, let us search, and you'll see we’re going to find a lot of clues about our missing people.

“There is no one to tell you what has happened to all this. One person [from the federal Attorney General’s Office] was supposed to come from Mexico City but didn't arrive. As always, we are the laughing stock of this society, of this fucking government. Everything inside is manipulated. They're just staging this”.

A failed visit

There had been no indication that the tour of the ranch might go so wrong, though perhaps the lack of coordination between the federal and state authorities should have been a hint.

The first problem was the contradictory instructions issued to the press. The federal Attorney General’s Office told journalists to meet outside the state prosecutor's office at midday to be taken to the site, while his state-level counterpart had said they would leave at 11am. It was as if each side wanted to blame the other.

“[A day earlier] around 4 or 5 in the afternoon, the rumour began to circulate that they were going to leave from two different points because they couldn't agree on the route. That lasted until 10pm, when they finally decided to send out two calls,” said Jalisco journalist and columnist Jonathan Lomelí López.

“But obviously, it was noticeable that there were no logistics, and it seems to me that there was no underlying reason to attend either,” he added, explaining that it was not clear whether the invitees were going to be presented with evidence of their loved ones’ deaths or any other explanation.

The next day, relatives are eager to enter the site and search for more information about their loved ones’ whereabouts. First to arrive at the site are 10 state-hired buses, each with room for 40 guests. They stop in an area designated a car park, a kilometre from the large black gates that bear the words ‘Izaguirre Ranch’ and a drawing of two rearing horses.

The relatives are told to wait for vans to ferry them in groups of 10 to the ranch, where they will be allowed 20 minutes each inside. A father can be heard answering a phone call from a news show while he waits. “I can't say that there are 100, 200 [bodies], I don't have the exact number,” he says. “I can't give you a number because the bodies we took out were not complete, there was nothing left.”

By 1.15pm, the relatives have been waiting for an hour or two. They grow tired of being made to stand around in the sun and the dust. Impatient to enter the ranch, they jump over the officials blocking their way and form a walking caravan, chanting: “We want to go in, we want to go in, we want to go in.”

The angry procession comes up against the black gate – an entrance that now looks like an anthill. They argue with officials. As the gates are finally opened and people pour in, it is difficult to follow everything that is happening on the 11,000-square-metre estate.

One father digs a blue briefcase and some socks out of the ground at the warehouse where the cartel supposedly trained hitmen. It’s a place that had already been inspected by the experts from the public prosecutor's office; yet during the tour, toothbrushes, combs, things that belonged to someone keep turning up.

A woman from Colima state makes an altar, placing a photo of her missing son on a wall along with some candles to bid him farewell – “if he was here”, she says. An employee from Civil Protection, the national organisation in charge of ensuring health and safety and assessing any potential risks, tries to shout people away, warning that the wall of the main hall could collapse under the weight of the crowd.

The cartel detained young people to force them into brutal hitmen training. Those who did not kill, died

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