The discovery of the Teuchitlán ranch brings an urgent crisis to the political forefront. Half of the disappearances have been registered since 2019 and Jalisco is the state most stricken.
There is a Mexico full of wanted posters, of faces that look out from the pasted posters. They are on the lampposts, on the walls of any store, on the entrances to the subway. There is a Mexico full of searching eyes. They are scattered in the main cities, in the tourist destinations, in the towns of the sierras, in the poor neighborhoods, on the borders. Only a small part of the country is spared from the crisis. In Mexico there are 125,287 missing persons, according to the registry of the Ministry of the Interior, which collects data from the last century. 90% disappeared since 2006 and more than 60,000 people were lost track of as of 2019. Years and governments go by, and the scourge, instead of being solved, worsens. Behind the figures, the unanimous, unbroken cry of the families: where are they?
On March 5, the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco collective entered a field with two painted horses at the entrance. They didn’t know it then, but they were going to unlock the horror. The Izaguirre ranch, in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, with its graves, its skeletal remains and its hundreds of pants, shoes and T-shirts piled up, became the symbol of the state’s failure. The place had been used by the cartel as a center of reclusion, training and extermination. The Jalisco Attorney General’s Office had searched it six months earlier, but had given it no importance. Its discovery now, a few kilometers from Guadalajara – one of the richest cities in the country and one of the black holes of disappearance – has forced politicians to look at what has so often been ignored: a machinery of disappearance is at work in Mexico.
Most of the victims are young men: there are 40,000 disappeared between the ages of 20 and 34. Most of the women are taken away at an even younger age, between 15 and 19. There are municipalities of 30,000 inhabitants with almost 1,000 missing women and metropolitan areas, such as Guadalajara, which have amassed 9,500 people unaccounted for. As resistance to the tragedy, there are the hands of the searchers. Faced with a government that does not pursue them, the collectives formed by the families are the ones who dig the land and face the threats of criminal groups without assistance. Since 2011, 22 searchers have been killed and two others are still missing.
The horror that Teuchitlán has awakened has compelled Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration to act. The president has proposed measures that were already in the law -such as unifying forensic databases and generating an immediate search alert without waiting 72 hours-, standardizing the crime of disappearance with that of kidnapping, and strengthening three institutions -the National Center for Human Identification, the National Search Commission and the Executive Commission for Attention to Victims- which in practice were downgraded by her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The measures do not include anything new and have been received with skepticism by the searching families, but they represent the irruption, at last, of this urgent crisis into the political agenda.
Sociologist Carolina Robledo calls what is happening in Mexico a “disappearance project, which implies an investment of resources to make possible the concealment of bodies, the erasure of the traces of crime. The anthropologist Rossana Reguillo speaks of a necromachine: “A death machine that does not mind gobbling up bodies, territories, and then vomiting them up in the form of graves, and of corpses”. And the poet Sara Uribe writes: “What is the body when someone strips it of its name, its history, its surname? That it was a probability. When there is no visage, no trace, no footprints, no signs, that they were going to bring them here. That they were going to bring them here. What is the body when it is lost?
Jalisco, epicenter of disappearances
The Teuchitlán discovery surprised the country but not Jalisco. For years, collectives, investigators and journalists have been warning about what is happening in the state. It is the state with the highest number of missing persons, more than 15,300, and of those, almost 7,000 are men between 15 and 34 years old. In the Guadalajara metropolitan area alone, 28 extermination sites were found in one year, some in the city center, located after several captives managed to escape, still naked, still handcuffed, as revealed by Zona Docs. The existence of these places where the cartel tortures, kidnaps and murders is no secret. In 2019, EL PAÍS published a report with the testimonies of several survivors of these forced recruitment camps of the Jalisco Cartel – New Generation. They were located in Tala, a few minutes from the Izaguirre ranch.
One such place was where 16-year-old Christofer Antony went missing in August 2024. His family was going through an economic problem and the boy decided to help.The story is the same as hundreds of others: he found the job online and the employers paid for his transportation to Guadalajara. As soon as he arrived at the Zapopan bus station from Nayarit, his mother, Laura, lost communication with him.“It took him three months to call me with a borrowed cell phone,” she tells EL PAÍS, ”he was broke, sad. At one point he turned the camera and we could see young people lying on the floor, with blankets, like little tamales. There were many of them.”
Contact with her son skipped from one month to the next. On November 20 she spoke to him for the last time: they were going to take him to Mezquitic (Zacatecas) and the boy had tried to escape. “They are following me,” he told his mother. He was in San Juan de los Lagos, near the bus station. On the call, she heard three shots and that was it. Laura called the local police to come to her son’s aid: “They told me there was nothing, that everything was normal. She had no more news until March 5, when on the live video of the searchers at the ranch in Teuchitlán, she recognized a red shirt and a backpack: “I am 100% sure they are his.” “I’m burning out, I just want to know if they killed him, where they left him,” says this tired woman on the other end of the phone, ”they are taking our children, our teenagers, they mistreat them, and they are disappearing them. There is no one to help us.”
75% of the country reports missing persons
Disappearances are a stain: Mexico has almost 2,500 municipalities and 75% of them have reported disappearances. The distribution is uneven, but it shows the tentacles of the crisis. The 10 cities with the highest number accumulate together more than 21,500 people unaccounted for, that is, almost 20% of all those registered in the country. In addition to Guadalajara – in first place – and Zapopan, in Jalisco, the crisis erupts on the border of Tamaulipas with the United States. In Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros, almost 8,000 people are missing. Cradle of the reign of terror of Los Zetas – today with their leaders handed over to the United States – in 2021 they found there a predecessor to Teuchitlán, La Bartolina, a place that functioned as an extermination center and from which they have extracted more than a ton of bones, explains Rosa García to EL PAÍS. She is a woman is still searching for her brother, niece and daughter, all kidnapped between 2010 and 2012.
Among the top horror sites is Tijuana, with 2,382 missing persons, and where one of the first extermination centers in the country was found: La Gallera, the property where Santiago Meza, alias El Pozolero, disposed of hundreds of bodies in acid before his arrest in 2009. Next come Monterrey and Culiacan – the current scene of the drug war. Two much more ignored places stand out: Atlautla, in the State of Mexico, and Centro, in Tabasco. The former has a population of 32,000 people and 1,860 missing persons.
Source: RNPDNO EL PAÍS
The young people they took
Anthropologist Rossana Reguillo says that criminal groups “are using youth bodies as oil, as gasoline to keep their businesses running. The struggle for control of territory requires cannon fodder, the “acquisition of greater human resources through mechanisms such as disappearances,” according to Insight Crime. The criminal paranoia of identifying any young man as a potential enemy: in the years of the Zetas’ terror, anyone who passed through municipalities like San Fernando could disappear, because the cartel feared that anyone who sought the north would join the ranks of their rivals. Thus, it is young people who have been swelling the statistics of horror for decades. Half of the country’s missing persons, 60,000, are men between the ages of 15 and 39, of whom 35,000 are under 30.
Behind those numbers are the 43 students from Ayotzinapa; the five boys from Tierra Blanca kidnapped by Veracruz state police at the behest of a still incipient Jalisco New Generation Cartel in 2016; there are Salomón, Marco and Daniel, the three film students who disappeared in 2018 while filming in Guadalajara; there are the five from Lagos de Moreno. Of the latter, a woman, who survived the Teuchitlán ranch, has told the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco collective that they went through this extermination center. Roberto, Diego, Uriel, Jaime and Dante were childhood friends, on their way home, when on the night of Friday, August 11, 2023 they were intercepted by organized crime. The last images of them show them on their knees, beaten and gagged. Their families are still searching for them.
Seven missing women a day
Fewer women go missing in Mexico than men; they are fewer, but there are more than 28,800. In some states, such as the State of Mexico, there are as many as 5,500. There, two points stand out, Atlautla, which counts almost 900 women without a trace, and Toluca, with 385. The hot spots are also on the northern border of the country, in cities such as Reynosa, Matamoros and Nuevo Laredo (Tamaulipas), but also in Tijuana (Baja California) and Monterrey (Nuevo León). In the latter, the capital of the richest state in the country, the latest crisis of missing women is still echoing. The institutional mobilization to find Debanhi Escolar -who was found murdered in the cistern of a motel- or the absolute indifference towards Yolanda Martinez -whose father searched for her without help for a month and who was found dead in a place next to a highway-. Both without justice.
Behind the disappearances of women is sometimes sex trafficking. A recent report by several organizations found the links between the two crimes and also the failures of the authorities to link them and therefore to not find them. No one helped Norma Laguna when her daughter, Idaly Juache Laguna, was seen for two years enslaved in the bars and hotels of downtown Ciudad Juarez. Neither did María del Refugio Montoya, who has had to go into debt to keep insisting to the authorities that her daughter Elda Adriana Váldez was taken away when she wanted to stop working in a table dance in Guadalajara. “It has been four years, seven months and three days without my daughter,” Montoya told EL PAÍS, ”I don’t know if she is alive or not. The Prosecutor’s Office has never done anything to locate her. I still have no answer. Like her, tens of thousands of families.
Original text published by Patricia San Juan Flores and Beatriz Guillén in El País on March 23rd, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.