When Virginia Ponce returns to the Izaguirre ranch in Teuchitlán (Jalisco, western Mexico), it’s no longer a secret and is instead officially authorized. Her heart sinks as she observes that this place does not resemble what she remembered: it looks “clean,” almost stripped bare. It doesn’t smell musty, nor is it dusty or abandoned; hundreds of people currently walk through, step on, and touch it—invited by the Federal and Jalisco prosecutors—though she, who tracks extermination sites, knows it’s the scene of many crimes and likely held forensic evidence.
She cannot reconcile this “makeover” of the site with the one that filled her nightmares after one of the secret visits made with other searching mothers in January and February 2025, when the cane fields were still high. Those days they inspected it in fear and secrecy; moments before leaving, they heard a scream: “Mommmy!”
“I thought I was the only one who heard it, I thought it was my own fear speaking, but no, my companions heard that cry for help. And when I listen to the video, I hear that ‘momma.’ To which of our moms was it speaking? It was very sad and painful,” she says, tears welling up in this woman who has been searching for her son, Víctor Hugo Meza, for four years and nine months and leads the Mothers Searching of Jalisco collective.
“We found clothes scattered all over that area; it was an unbearable smell, a pile of shoes everywhere. Everything was thrown around,” she says, gesturing to the surroundings, where nothing remains. She complains that this visit, to which the authorities invited her, feels like a mockery. “They brought us like to a museum, but at least in a museum you can see and ask questions, and here no one told you why you were coming or what work had been carried out. It’s a mockery.”
General outcry is common. “Nothing remains of what used to be; they already cleaned it. The clothes were covered with a tarp, and it smelled terrible. In fact, there was a gown hanging with blood, many blankets inside and outside. Now everything here is very stomped down,” asserts Adriana Ornelas, also part of the collective—she is searching for her twenty-something son, Paul Gabriel Sánchez—and feels that since January, they have taken away things from this ranch.
The chickens and cats are gone, along with the canned food (instant soups, sardine cans, pancake flour), the huge pile of plates (over 100), the rubber shoes, and the boots that were in new boxes, the two bed frames, the mattresses, a huge statue of Santa Muerte, and many more items that were not visible in the broadcasts made by the Jalisco Searcher Warriors collective, which entered the site on March 5, accompanied by photographer Ulises Ruiz from the French agency AFP. His photos of the hundreds of abandoned shoes and clothes and more than 1,000 ownerless items looked like remnants of a catastrophe that few survive.
Since March 8, when La Jornada newspaper featured news about the clandestine crematorium on its front page, the information began to be taken seriously and published in the national press.
These orphaned shoes and the news that, since September 2024, the ranch had been under the protection of the state prosecutor’s office, despite finding three people reported missing (one dead wrapped in plastic) and detaining 10 alleged cartel members, led to abandoning evidence, causing the entire country to turn its eyes to Jalisco, holding commemorations for the victims in 40 cities, and President Claudia Sheinbaum announcing that addressing the disappearance of people is a national priority.
Amidst the back-and-forth over whose responsibility it was, whether the state government, because it took charge of this drug ranch since September, or the federal government, since it was discovered by the National Guard and the land belonged to organized crime, on Wednesday, March 19, a smiling Alejandro Gertz Manero, head of the Attorney General’s Office (FGR), reported at a press conference all the irregularities committed by the State Attorney General’s Office (FGE) while processing the crime scene and invited the media to see this ranch in La Estanzuela, Teuchitlán with their own eyes.
After throwing the package to the state prosecutor’s office to organize the tour within 24 hours, they extended the invitation to families’ searcher collectives from the states of Jalisco, Colima, Guanajuato, Nayarit, and Zacatecas, as well as to all who had identified, among the photographs of items found shared online, any clothing belonging to the missing persons they were looking for.
Thus, the visit to this training camp, dubbed by the press as “The Terror School,” became a “tour of horror” that victims like Virginia, Adriana, and many other searching relatives experienced.
Nothing is left
The first reports of the scam begin at 13:59. While journalists are waiting to be allowed into the ranch, two women run out, traumatized. One of them—wearing a long-sleeved checkered shirt and her face covered with a ski mask because they were all warned it could be dangerous to give interviews with their faces uncovered—whose trembling hands struggle to hide her tears, shouts that they were deceived because there is nothing left; the bundle she thought belonged to her husband Juan José Ramos—disappeared from home “six years and 20 days ago”—is not there, and she cries with the helplessness of someone who feels they have hidden him again.
“There’s nothing. No clothing, no shoes, no backpack, nothing. They disappeared. It’s not fair. Colleagues from another collective came when it opened, and there are photos of everything that was there, now there’s nothing. They say it’s in Semefo [referring to Mexico’s forensic medical service], but they never published it, yet there are many places where there are mounds of earth. Let us in, let us dig, and they will see we would uncover many clues about our missing loved ones. This isn’t fair. We feel mocked. There’s no one to tell us what has happened to all this. Supposedly someone from Mexico [from the FGR] was to come and didn’t show up. As always, we are society’s mockery, this filthy government’s mockery. Everything is manipulated; all that is inside is manipulated. They only do this to put on a show. There were many shoes, lots of clothes, many backpacks. There was everything. And now there’s nothing.”
At the 11,000 square meter property, it is challenging to keep track of everything happening simultaneously: a father pulls a blue suitcase and some socks out of the ground near the storeroom where they supposedly trained assailants, a site that had already been processed by forensic experts from the prosecutor’s office. As the tour progresses, toothbrushes, combs, and belongings of someone will emerge. A woman from Colima places an altar against the wall with a photo of her missing son and some candles to say goodbye to him (“if he was here”). A Civil Protection employee tries to shout people out because the wall of the main gallery is about to collapse under the weight of the crowd.
Due to the absence of clothing, strong women like the searchers who dig graves began to collapse from the start of the tour. In various corners—surrounded by dozens of cameras that focus on every cry, every scream, every curse—they look desolate because they feel that by taking away the evidence, their relatives have disappeared forever. Those items they had seen were like signs their children, husbands, and parents were sending them. They sense that if they were burned there, they will never find them again.
One of the hardest moments is led by a member of the Guerreros Buscadores collective, who appeared in some of the live broadcasts where they find 300 shoes, a farewell letter from a young person who disappeared, bone fragments, and other images that revealed what society and the government didn’t want to see: that the local cartel took young people by force to convert them into hitmen and subjected them to brutal training where those who don’t kill end up dead. When she notices that the cobblestone under her foot feels hollow, and knowing the state prosecutor’s office didn’t do a good job at the crime scene, she throws herself to the ground and, in a trance-like state, begins to dig with her nails while shouting crying:
—Touch it here, how it sounds, it’s hollow!… Look at how it sounds here!…
—Get a pick and shovel! —another woman, who wears a sun hat and a thick long-sleeve shirt like those used by explorers, asks, and although she tries to calm her down, she then shouts exasperated—: If they [the forensic experts] aren’t going to work, then don’t give us a tour as if it were a museum, as if it were a horror movie, it’s a joke for us, the victims…
Confusion instead of information
Nothing foreshadowed that things would go so wrong. There was only noticeable federal and state disorganization, given the contradictory instructions to the press. The FGR summoned the press on Thursday, the 20th, at 12:00 noon, outside the state prosecutor’s office, while the FGE indicated they would leave at 11:00 from the general prosecutor’s delegation. As if each one wanted to shift the responsibility to the other.
“[The day before] around the afternoon, four or five PM, a rumor began circulating that they were leaving from two points because they could not agree on the route. This lasted until ten at night, when they finally decided to launch two summoning letters. But, evidently, it was clear there was no logistics, and there didn’t seem to be a fundamental reason for attending: whether they were to present evidence or if there would be an explanation,” explained Jalisco journalist and columnist Jonathan Lomelí López.
Through the Glorieta de los Niños Héroes, renamed the Glorieta de las y los Desaparecidos because it is plastered with images of the missing persons searched by their families (in Jalisco, at least 15,000 are registered), buses—some reports mention 10, others 12—fitted for 40 guests each, passed through.
An hour later, the maquiladora-type buses hired by the state were the first to park in the designated lot, a kilometer from the black gate with the drawing of two rearing horses, where it reads: Izaguirre Ranch.
A logistics plan was proposed to the newcomers: wait for a few vans that would take groups of 10 people, and make 20-minute tours to allow access for subsequent visitors.
By 13:15 the war cry of families could already be heard, who, desperate to stay under the sun and among the dirt, eager to enter the ranch where the items of the missing were, leaped over the officials preventing their passage and began a caravan shouting:
“We want in, we want in, we want in, we want in, we want in, we want in, we want in, we want in, we want in, we want in, we want in, we want in.”
The war cry could not hide the fury of their first complaints:
“As I tell you, ma’am, we are human beings; we are mothers looking for our children. Do you think this is fair? Huh? Besides, when we are with the shovel and pick digging, who comes close? No one! No one comes close. And now it’s all politics, it’s government; give us the respect we deserve. They should think about it: we have our children missing. And to treat us like this when they invite us and [say] they will treat us with dignity? It’s not fair. It’s not fair, ma’am. We are human beings, not animals.”
A searching father could be heard on his cell phone taking a call from a newscaster: “I can’t say it was 100, it was 200 [bodies]. I don’t have the exact number. I can’t give you a number because the bodies we pulled out weren’t complete; nothing was left.”
The furious procession reached the black gate; the entrance resembled an anthill. People argued to get inside.
Inside the estate, state officials awaited, each with their logos on their uniforms, but no one understood what they were doing: they didn’t explain anything or provide a tour like in museums, they only ensured that security seals weren’t crossed. The three sad psychologists dispatched by the state prosecutor’s office were also absent when their presence was most urgently needed.
From 13:30 hours, the furious criticisms of mothers emerging from the ranch were already being broadcast, such as Patricia Sotelo from the Huellas de Amor collective, who—surrounded by her demanding female companions—said on camera: “Just stepping into the place is a pain, and you can feel it. It’s a mockery of our pain. We expected to walk through every corner on our own. […] What we’ve seen on TV, they won’t let us through, you line up like primary school kids, you have to follow orders, stay in a line, they give us 15, 20 minutes. […] There’s nothing left, they didn’t let us into what was supposedly the dormitory. We knew Gertz Manero and the prosecutor from Guadalajara were supposed to come, and they never arrived. Gertz should take his position; he shouldn’t just collect a paycheck.”
At 14:36, when the visit was already a disaster, the Jalisco prosecutor tweeted an image of an official note with a message: “We have made available to the @FGRMexico all information regarding the Izaguirre ranch case so that they can exercise their authority to lead and direct the investigation.”
A spectacle for ‘influencers’
While the mothers who spend all day searching with picks, shovels, and rods for their disappeared relatives were given only 20 minutes of access, others had privileges, like Jorge Manuel Suárez Azcargota (@SUAREZDEJALISCO), the VIP influencer whom the state government ushered in before the tour. In his broadcast, he boasted about being guarded by the prosecutor’s office to be the first to glance at the storage room. He showed what he thought was the “house of a family.” He pointed out what “once was a pond.” The rudimentary kitchen. A bathroom. The excavations. The drones hovering over the space. He felt, he said, a “not cool vibe,” very heavy, ugly, with a “really bad charge.”
In his live video, he added his touch to the attorney general’s visit: “Gertz Manero’s visit was expected; obviously, he is not here. Perhaps this could be seen as a lack of care because the collectives, the media, are here; at ground zero, the information should be shared,” he stated in the message he posted later.
He wouldn’t be the only influencer at “ground zero.” Others from Mexico City were on their way to the drug ranch, eager to verify if this place was indeed a “death camp” and to search for the “cremation ovens” that the mothers had shared in their broadcasts two weeks earlier, showing images of a man half-buried in a hole and them sifting dirt, placing bone fragments in a plastic tray.
During the Mañanera (the daily presidential press conference) on March 18, it was announced that the Teuchitlán case was part of a “dirty war,” being manipulated by 87,000 bots from the opposition to attack President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government and the former president López Obrador.
Some influencers and journalists went to confirm live whether those photos of abandoned clothing and holes with human remains, which turned Izaguirre ranch into “Mexico’s Auschwitz,” were the setup the president and various friendly outlets accused of being a campaign orchestrated by the right or with interventionist aims to facilitate a U.S. invasion.
The tour was self-directed. Along the path through the property, there were yellow, red, and green flags marking where possible evidence was found. In the main storeroom, a yellow cordon was placed, but amidst the tumult, it was neither respected nor even noticeable. Another area was blocked with fabric.
During the visit, only flattened earth was visible. Raúl Servín, a member of Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco, the collective that made the discovery public, repeated that the prosecutor’s office had filled in the holes from which they extracted bone fragments. “I saw it when they covered it up. Everything has been altered.”
Of the dozens of uniformed personnel present (soldiers, national guards, human rights staff, victim services, civil protection, the disappearance prosecutor’s office, FGE, search commission, and a long etcetera), none gave reasons for what happened on that ranch, about the findings, or about the conclusions. In live broadcasts by journalists, Facebook users, YouTubers, Twitter users, TikTokers, and Instagram users that arrived at the ranch, one could perceive a Tower of Babel, where everyone spoke a different language. Where some saw a cafeteria, others saw a dismemberment site.
International journalists stepping onto the drug cartel’s training field for the first time detailed in English, before cameras, the execution methods used on the property, and even the exact locations where each thing happened, even when the case is still under investigation. They seasoned their reports with rumors, news, deductions, and interviews with anonymous survivors sharing their testimonies on the newscasts.
There were also those morbidly curious who—against the families turned into bundles of nerves while trying to find recognized items—seemed to compete for who could ask the cruelest, most terrible, or bloodiest questions to gain more views.
“Do you believe your son is buried here? If that’s the case, if he could hear you, what message would you give him?”
Only the families who entered the perimeter in the first quarter of this year and found evidence were able to provide explanations of what they saw. Mr. Raúl Servín, who has been searching for his son Raúl for a decade, provides the tour the media need. He talks of the dentures they found (“molar pieces”), of a metal plate from one person his collective is searching for, of the remains he extracted. He criticizes how poorly the prosecutor’s forensic team excavated, claiming their investigations don’t compare to the depth he can reach underground.
A journalist stops to record a structure where road signs used for target practice were found, and many containers, stating on camera that the criminals had an area there to dismember their victims.
Raúl Servín, wearing his bandana (a traditional patterned scarf used in Mexico as protection and decoration) and his long-sleeved black shirt suitable for searches, doesn’t want to continue; he explains that he did not investigate further. He only recalls that there were empty containers in one room.
—Did they use fuel here?
—Yes. The evidence is that those taken were not whole bodies. That’s because they took the evidence to Mexico; they were not complete bodies.
—What did the remains look like?
—Like that little stone over there; that’s how the parts of the human bodies were reduced after being burned.
Cameramen urge him to share more, to keep going. And he does. Prosecutor’s office staff restrict their access because the visit has lasted too long: it’s 15:30.
Then they throw the million-dollar question at him, over which public debate and accusations against the searching families for exaggeration arise:
—Is this an extermination center or just a training ground, as the prosecutor [Gertz] stated in his conference?
—I don’t know what they call it. When I was a child, I saw cartoons where they used those laser-type guns that exterminated people. I think they [the government] thought of it that way. So, when I came, I said: “No, logical, as you are taking someone’s life and burning them, it’s a punishment of extermination.” Of course. They are learning [to kill] with other bodies, so maybe for them [the government] it’s not that way, but unfortunately, that’s the reality for us.
Intervention at the crime scene
Halfway through the tour, Adriana Ornelas’ daughter—sister of Paulo Gabriel, who was taken last year along with his bosses from the stereo installation business where he worked—noticed the distorted message that a supposed journalist was already broadcasting. And distrust flooded her.
“My daughter saw an influencer saying there was nothing there. That everything was staged, that we were paid, that we are from a political party… It makes me furious. They sent me the link to the live broadcast; they’re saying that,” points out her mother, who didn’t notice; that day, she provided support to companions overwhelmed by their raw emotions.
From that Montessori-style tour where everyone did as they wished, journalists and influencers emerged who immediately claimed to have X-ray vision and were experts in Forensic Sciences: there are no crematories here, there are no ovens, nothing burned, there is no extermination center. They even reported this in the president’s Mañanera in the following days.
Photographer Ulises Ruíz, who accompanied the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco on March 5 when they found the shoes, clothing, and bone fragments, returned to the ranch for the media visit and contradicts those who claim that nothing ever existed: “[On the tour] I saw the holes filled in.” He mentions that one of the excavations the collective he accompanied made was about a meter deep. But on the tour day, he caught a glimpse from afar—because the path was restricted—that the hole appeared to be filled in.
“[If in the ‘Mañanera’] they stated that they didn’t see ovens, it’s because no one told them that the ovens here are not like those for bread or pizza; they could be underground. I have been to two or three of the sites called crematories, with the Buscando Corazones mothers and with Guerreros [Buscadores], and undoubtedly they don’t resemble features of a bread oven or any other conditions one knows of a barbecue; they have different specifications,” he said in an interview.
To explain the variations that went misunderstood on the tour, he shared three aerial photographs he took for the AFP agency at the Izaguirre ranch using a drone, showing the evolution of the excavated sites—where he saw the searchers extract bone fragments—to compare them with the day of the visit. A fourth photo displays the depth of the excavations.
The ‘spin doctors’ failed
Why was the visit organized? There are still no answers. If the intent was to control the narrative to lessen the moment’s intensity—and not give the U.S. an excuse to invade Mexico in search of terrorists, as proposed by some analysis tables—and to disconnect the training camps of hitmen from the extermination sites—many of which have been designated in Mexico as clandestine grave sites—something went terribly wrong.
After the visit, the Teuchitlán topic made headlines in international news outlets.
The Guardian: “Secret ovens and human remains: a macabre extermination site in Mexico sheds light on forced disappearances.”
El País: “The horror of Teuchitlán opens its doors: ‘The only truth is they don’t care about the missing’.”
New York Times: “In a ‘death camp,’ traces of the beloved missing.”
CNN: “The secrets of Rancho Izaguirre: between horror and seeking the missing.”
In comments from U.S. media, many wrote that Mexico needed “help” to combat its own terrorists.
If anything came from the tour, it was to provide media with terrifying images that also fed on the anonymous testimonies springing up like mushrooms from individuals claiming they had been in that same ranch and made it out alive. There are so many that they can be doubtful, but the humanitarian crisis has lasted so long, and the reports of these events have been disregarded in Jalisco (the first was in 2011), so they can’t just be dismissed.
To keep digging
For some mothers, the visit was “a mockery,” “a circus,” “a theater,” “a museum of our pain,” or a “staging,” as days go by, they feel it could have been a trap. Neither Adriana, Virginia, nor the searching mothers anticipated the campaign of insults that would erupt against them.
“It’s good that the ranch was exposed. What’s not good is that they are attacking all the collectives, all the moms; it’s terrible. We are being accused of being sellouts, of not caring for our children before, of being on the wrong paths. And that hurts the most—her voice breaks—, that people aren’t empathetic, they don’t realize we pay from our own pockets to look for our children. Honestly, I don’t even watch the news, but I went to YouTube to see what they aired, and I said: ‘I hope it doesn’t happen to them, that they suffer what we are suffering.’ Whether they’re living well or poorly [our missing], what we want is to bring them home,” says Adriana from her home in Guadalajara, where she is still processing what happened.
Although her collective kept the visits secret—because the members of the National Guard escorting them during the two occasions they entered only allowed them to take images and did not let them excavate nor make it public in the media, and although Virginia says they informed a prosecutor from the Public Ministry named Berenice, whose last name they do not recall, who ignored them and prohibited their return—Adriana feels grateful to Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco for breaking the silence, publicizing the discovery, and drawing attention to all of them.
Though they are now being attacked. “[They told Ale] that this drama should’ve happened so they wouldn’t have taken him,” she says, hurt by the insults against the mother who attended the visit to Teuchitlán searching for the cap, the backpack, and a metal plate that belonged to her son, and who, in an attack of hysteria, crying and anguish, when she didn’t find the evidence she had seen, threw herself on the ground to dig with her nails.
This week, the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco collective announced they are “facing an unprecedented defamation and discrediting campaign.” They have also received threats.
On Friday, March 21, during the Mañanera, President Sheinbaum defended the visit to the ranch as an act of freedom of expression (she didn’t mention altering or destroying evidence) so everyone could form their opinion.
That same day, some media began criticizing the “invention of the extermination center” and the cremation ovens. Yet they also reported another story: groups of mothers continued arriving at the ranch asking to enter, but they were not authorized. On television, a mother and her daughter, both from the Buscando Corazones group in Jalisco, were seen carrying picks, shovels, and everyday rods, dressed in their long shirts and sun hats, inspecting the parcels adjoining the Izaguirre property; afterwards, new findings were announced: a sweatshirt, a cap, a huarache (a type of Mexican sandal) and—most suspiciously—a burned sock. Also a faded blueprint of the terror ranch, where the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Sciences marked the areas of interest that weren’t inspected later.
The mothers, relentless, continued digging for truths.
*Marcela Turati, an acclaimed Mexican journalist, is a co-founder of Quinto Elemento Lab and the project ‘Where do the disappeared go?’ Author of the book ‘San Fernando: last stop’ (2023) about the disappearances in Tamaulipas and the search for their families.
This story is published with permission from its author and www.adondevanlosdesaparecidos.org, a research and memory site on the logic of disappearances in Mexico.
