Misinformation clouds discovery of alleged extermination camp in Jalisco

Police guard access to Izaguirre Ranch in Teuchitlan, Jalisco state, Mexico, Tuesday, March 11, 2025. Image credit: AP Photo/Alfredo Moya/Alamy

by Madeleine Wattenbarger.

The news has shaken Mexico. Earlier this month, an anonymous report directed families of disappearance victims to a ranch in the town of Teuchitlán, Jalisco, that the state prosecutor’s office had searched in September.

“When we entered, the door was open,” recounts Norma Ángel, member of the search collective Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco, which received the report. The group began live-streaming what they found: piles of clothing, hundreds of pairs of shoes, pits of ash with burnt bones. “They’re completely incinerated bones, most of them very small. If you touched them, they fell apart.”

The videos went viral. A media firestorm ensued, fueled by anonymous testimonies that describe the Izaguirre Ranch as a training camp where young people were lured by false job offers and hundreds tortured, killed, and incinerated. The image of the hundreds of shoes moved the country. On Saturday, search collectives across Mexico hosted dozens of simultaneous vigils for the presumed victims of Teuchitlán as part of a National Day of Mourning.

President Claudia Sheinbaum responded to the discovery with a series of reforms intended to address disappearance at the national level. But the reforms were met with criticism by more than 120 victims’ groups who, in an open letter to the President, said they reflected “a lack of knowledge of the mechanisms which already exist” to investigate disappearances.

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office took on the case and this week continues to search the ranch. In a March 19 press conference, Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero highlighted what he described as the omissions of the local authorities, particularly the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office.

Anonymous testimonies about the ranch have fueled a national outcry. But little information about the events at the Izaguirre Ranch has been verified. The clothing’s provenance is unknown. It is unclear how many human remains are present at the site, and the fragments are yet to be identified.

Meanwhile, a cloud of misinformation hangs over the case. José Luis Castillo searches for his daughter Esmeralda, who disappeared in Ciudad Juarez in 2009. A few days after the Teuchitlán finding, news began circulating on social media that Esmeralda was found, based on the clothing at the ranch: a backpack found in the Izaguirre Ranch matched the description of one the young woman wore when she disappeared.

“We want to thank everyone that’s paying attention to our daughter’s case, but fortunately or unfortunately, the backpack doesn’t have anything to do with our daughter,” Castillo said in a phone interview. Both backpacks were black with stars, but Esmeralda’s was made of cloth, the one at the ranch of leather or plastic.

Some families fear the authorities may use the high-profile discovery against them. Another anonymous audio recording linked the Izaguirre Ranch to one of the most visible recent disappearance cases in Jalisco: that of five young men who went missing from the town of Lagos de Moreno on August 11, 2023. A woman, who claimed without evidence to have escaped from the camp, said that the perpetrators in the Lagos de Moreno case came from the ranch. But her account has not be verified, and it contradicts the ongoing investigation.

“I don’t think they were there, because of the evidence that the prosecutor’s office showed us. It seems like they want to divert the investigation,” said Jaime Galván Dávila, father of Uriel Galván Gonzalez, one of the five missing. “There’s a lot of confusion.”

That diversion comes at a key moment for the Lagos de Moreno families. Two weeks before the Teuchitlán discovery, they requested a search at a brickyard where key suspects alleged that the boys were cremated. This week, the Jalisco search commission told them the search of the brickyard would be postponed. Instead, the commission invited the families to visit the ranch. They refused.

“We don’t want disinformation, because this whole flood of news is good for the prosecutor’s office,” says Mary Carmen Trejo, the legal representative of the Lagos de Moreno families. “It’s better for them, because they can start to bias the case.”