Translated for LAB by Mike Gatehouse
The Mexican Bishops have touched on a sore point for the country. They issued a press release denouncing the ongoing scandal of disappearances, which have increased by 40 per cent in the last year. This revelation came a few days after the discovery of a training camp for kidnapped conscripts and what has been called organized crime’s extermination camp, operated by the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, at Rancho Izaguirre, in Teuchitlán, Jalisco (see below).
Referring at its morning press conference to progress made on security matters in the country, the government of president Claudia Sheinbaum made frequent mentions of a decrease in the number of homicides.
In their most recent report, the government claims that thanks to its National Security Strategy, there has been a drop of 15 per cent in the number of victims of homicide per day: in September 2024 there were 87 such murders daily and by February 2025 this had dropped to 74.
Yet the Bishops claim that with this data the government are trying to hide the fact that disappearances increased by 40 per cent. President Sheinbaum’s retorted that the Bishops’ information is incorrect: ‘There’s this idea that there are more disappearances than murders, but that’s not true’, she said.
Murders vs disappearances
According to the news project ‘Where Have All the Disappeared Gone’, which covers this matter from the perspective of memory and human rights, in the first hundred days of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government, an average of 40 disappearances daily was reported.
The same Project records that from 1 October 2024, when Sheinbaum became President of Mexico, to January 2025, 4,010 persons disappeared, according the National Register of Missing and Disappeared Persons. ‘The statistics show that last year there was a marked jump in this type of crime’. In the preceding six years the number of forced disappearances rose from 8,000 to 13,617.
The most recent report of the government’s National Commission for Missing People (CNB), shows that by March 2025 there were 123,808 missing and disappeared persons. The states with the largest number of disappearances are Jalisco (15,013), Mexico State (13,643) and Tamaulipas (13,306).
The security crisis in Mexico is made worse not just by the persistence of organized crime, but by the lack of trustworthy data to enable the design and evaluation of effective policies.
The NGO Common Cause (Causa Común), which is concerned with promoting citizenship, the state of law, and requiring accountability from the authorities, warns about political manipulation of this data:
‘The security crisis in Mexico is made worse not just by the persistence of organized crime, but by the lack of trustworthy data to enable the design and evaluation of effective policies,’ writes Fernando Escobar in the Causa Común blog published in the online newspaper Animal Político.
Official statements focusing on changes in murder rates are being used by the government to support its line that the pacification of the country is proceeding in parallel with the apparent decrease in the number of murders.
‘This tactic can lead to mistaken conclusions and to defining ridiculous objectives, such as that peace is the absence of crime, or that the only measure of public security is the number of murders.’ Yet both peace and security are far more complex matters for society.
As the journalists at Where Have All the Disappeared Gone point out, with the federal government focusing on the protection of Mexicans in the United States, since the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, and on the war on fentanyl, the crisis of disappearances is not mentioned in the government’s six-year agenda.
The problem is being blanked out completely. If you look through the main measures we are so far aware of in the Six Year Plan of President Claudia Sheinbaum, the subject of disappearances is not mentioned, according to Humberto Guerrero, coordinator at the NGO Fundar of the programme for human rights and the fight against impunity.
Jeremy Renaux, regional coordinator of the programme on disappeared people in Mexico and Central America for the International Committee of the Red Cross (CICR) , stated that the statistics on disappearances in Mexico are alarming and that this is one of the main challenges for the federal government.
Rancho Izaguirre, Teuchitlán — if only…
If only it turns out not to be true. If only the Rancho Izaguirre in Teuchitlán was not after all an extermination camp for a drug cartel. If only the heap of shoes found by mothers searching for disappeared people did not in fact belong to some of the thousands of victims of forced disappearance in Mexico. If only…
The last few weeks have been exhausting. Since 5 March when the group Guerreros Buscadores (guerilla searchers) de Jalisco published its findings at Rancho Izaguirre in the journal The Search for Disappeared People, there has been a wave of outrage, a media battle between the government and the opposition, an avalanche of speculation, shifting of responsibility, accusations and counter-accusations, and a tour of this organized crime site organized by the government’s General Prosecution Service. There has even been a video in which armed men claiming to be members of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación tried to defend themselves and blamed the searcher mothers for causing panic.
A bit of context
After a series of anonymous calls, the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco, engaged in the search for disappeared people in this western state of Mexico, went to Rancho Izaguirre, a property of some 10,000 sq m in area.
According to press reports the ranch was seized forcibly from its owner in 2013, after threats from the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación. What was going on there remains a mystery, is under judicial investigation and has provoked widespread outrage and political posturing.
In September 2024 there was a confrontation at this ranch between the National Guard and organized crime, in which 10 people were arrested, two kidnap victims freed and a dead body discovered.
Six months after this confrontation, the Guerreros Buscadores, after another series of anonymous calls, entered the ranch and found trenches containing calcified human remains and in one room some 200 pairs of shoes plus some personal belongings.
When the photograph of this pile of shoes was published, it was immediately assumed that Rancho Izaguirre must be an extermination camp and a centre for forced recruitment for organized crime.
The Buscadores collective uploaded to social media images of the clothing they had found, and gradually messages came in from mothers, sisters, friends and fathers who had recognized a pair of shoes, a backpack or a t-shirt or some other thing belonging to a family member for whom they had been searching for some time.
Exactly what happened to the owners of these shoes is the big question, to which no answer has yet been given. Officially they are said to belong to people recruited by the drug cartel. But does that make them victims or criminals? Are they still alive, and what has happened to them? No-one knows.
Concerning the trenches full of human remains, every day more is coming to light, but there is still no confirmation of the identity or number of the victims.
In an attempt to calm concerns, the Prosecutor General, Alejandro Gertz Manero, who has been in this post at least since January 2019, told a press conference that the authorities in Jalisco were to blame for a series of lapses since the September 2024 confrontation between the National Guard and members of the criminal cartel.
What Gertz Manero failed to mention is that the National Guard is a public security force under the command of the national Ministry of Defence and that although the National Guard had submitted a report about what happened at Rancho Izaguirre to the state authorities, it should also have reported to the federal government.
Gertz Manero stated that the Federal Prosecution Service had not been informed about this, so that the federal government, which only took over investigation of this case on 20 March, attributes all responsibility to the local authorities.
On 1 December 2024 there was a change of government in Jalisco. The Governor, from the Movimiento Ciudadano party, Enrique Alfaro Ramírez is at present in Spain and it is up to the Federal Prosecution Service to decide whether to summon him to provide an explanation. This will also be the case with the ex-Prosecutor for Jalisco, Luis Joaquín Méndez Ruiz, to explain his apparent failure to investigate disappearances and forced recruitment by the cartels.
Meanwhile, at the National Palace, President Claudia Sheinbaum says that this is not a political matter and that the government will not distort the truth of what happened there. She accused the opposition of spending millions of pesos to discredit the government, promoting on social media the hashtags ‘narco presidenta’ and ‘narco expresidente’. She also blamed the press for describing Rancho Izaguirre as an extermination camp. On the basis of a single photo, the one of piles of shoes, a whole story had been constructed, she said, aimed at panicking the public.
Certainly the discoveries in Teuchitlán have made the tragedy of the thousands of disappeared persons in Mexico a priority item on the agenda for the six-year plan. Among other actions, laws will be revised, and the National Commission for Missing Persons will be strengthened.
The photograph of the shoes at Teuchitlán, Jalisco is much more than just a photo. It is part of the history of forced recruitment in Mexico, of the hit-men, the 123,000 disappeared people, the searcher mothers, the 5,600 clandestine graves, and the collusion between the security services and organized crime. It is the history of Mexico today, of the Mexico we grieve for.
