Mexico City, Mexico — On March 20, collectives of people searching for missing persons in Mexico denounced the country’s government, saying they are trying to cover up details about an alleged mass extermination camp linked to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) found earlier this month in Teuchitlan, Jalisco.
The alleged government cover-up comes days after Prosecutor General Alejandro Gertz Manero claimed that there was insufficient evidence to say that he CJNG killed and burned hundreds of victims inside a ranch in Teuchitlan, known as Rancho Izaguirre, and accused local authorities in Jalisco of committing serious errors in the investigation.
This Thursday, March 20, family members searching for loved ones were allowed entrance into the ranch for the first time since March 5, when the searching group Guerreros Buscadores Jalisco initially discovered remains of bodies, hundreds of personal belongings, and what appeared to be crematoriums.
To their horror, the searchers found that the ranch had been tampered with by the authorities.
“I found a pain but a pain to our pain because it is a mockery. They are making a mockery of our pain,” a mother searching for her missing daughter told reporters on March 20.
“This is a fabrication so that we don’t see what really happened, gentlemen. What my comrades saw the first time were graves, now the graves are flattened… I only want to go in to see if my daughter is there,” she added.
Karina Nova Cacho, a searching mother looking for her son, told reporters that the state of the ranch was a “mockery.”
“We did badly, far from finding anything, everything was clean, it is all swept and mopped, but there are flags with signs,” she said.
Before taking charge of the investigation, Mexico’s Prosecutor General Alejandro Gertz Manero claimed that there was not sufficient evidence to say that the ranch served as an extermination camp or that there were incinerators used to burn bodies on the property.
“[Jalisco’s prosecution] also does not have the physical and chemical analyses that directly link various trenches with the possibility of crematory activities that must have been subjected to temperatures between 800 and 1,200 degrees Celsius, which must necessarily leave expert traces,” he said.
While contradicting what was reported by the searchers on March 5, Manero also accused the state’s prosecution of leaving the crime scene in neglect for six months, since the ranch was first raided by the National Guard in September 2024.
While the searchers entered the ranch on March 20, 2025, for the past months authorities were aware of the landmark and that it was used by the Jalisco Cartel as a safehouse.
Featured image credit: via Guerreros Buscadores Jalisco
