The Horror: Extermination Camps and Thousands of Clandestine Graves in Mexico

“The horror…the horror.” This is the famous remark made by Colonel Walter E. Kurtz near the end of the film Apocalypse Now about the inhumanity of what he saw and did in the Vietnam War.

This horror has been experienced in Mexico for at least 30 years with the savage violence that organized crime groups have carried out in the country.

On March 5, the group “Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco,” dedicated to tracking down the remains of missing persons in that Mexican state, found graves containing charred human remains, 400 shoes, 493 items of clothing, and various personal belongings at Rancho Izaguirre in the municipality of Teuchitlán.

That ranch had already been searched by military authorities and the state prosecutor's office on September 18 of last year. Still, the discovery of the human remains or the clothing was not reported at that time.

People who Mexican criminal groups have abducted have reported that kidnapped young people, whether from rural communities, small towns, or undocumented migrants, were taken to these ranches (such as the one found in Jalisco, believed to have been controlled by the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel) to be forced to become hitmen for the cartel.

As part of their "training," they forced some to torture and murder others. This explains the large amount of clothing and human remains found at the site, leading the national press to describe it as an "extermination camp."

The Attorney General's Office, which has already opened an investigation, is seeking to hold state authorities (from the Movimiento Ciudadano party, the opposition to the country's ruling Morena party) accountable for not detecting these incidents in time.

The reality is that these types of ranches and cartel properties have existed for a long time. For example, in 2009, on a property known as La Gallera in Tijuana, Baja California, a member of the Tijuana cartel, Santiago "El Pozolero" Meza López, disappeared with acid 300 people that were executed by that cartel, according to his testimony to authorities.

In 2010, the Los Zetas cartel murdered 72 undocumented migrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, who were found piled up in a warehouse.

In September 2014, the Guerreros Unidos cartel of Iguala, Guerrero, along with local police and those from Cocula and Huitzuco, kidnapped and disappeared the 43 Ayotzinapa students.

And the cases continue: San Pedro de las Colonias, Coahuila, in 2015; El Mante, Tamaulipas, in 2019; La Bartolina, also in Tamaulipas, in 2021, etc.

These days, the Tamaulipas collective "Love for the Disappeared" discovered another possible extermination camp in Reynosa, but Governor Américo Villarreal (of Morena) and President Sheinbaum herself quickly dismissed the information, stating that it was not a clandestine crematorium but rather belonged to a "funeral home."

These events are part of the tragedy of disappearances in Mexico, the vast majority of which are related to the activities of organized crime.

Since the early 1960s, the Mexican State has recognized 123,800 missing persons in the country. In contrast, in the United States, the National Missing and Unlocated Persons System recognizes 90,000 active cases; in 2020, 365,348 reports of missing children were registered; however, many of these people are later found.

But during Andrés Manuel López Obrador's administration alone (2018-2024), the number of missing persons reached 54,000, meaning 43.9% of all missing persons were recorded in a single period of 5 years and 10 months. That is, 25 people disappeared per day during the previous administration.

According to the National Registry of Missing Persons, 1,695 people have been recorded missing during Claudia Sheinbaum's administration so far, meaning the daily average has skyrocketed to 41 per day.

Neither President Sheinbaum nor her government's security cabinet seems to have the will or the strategy to address this tragedy that brutally strikes Mexican society.

For its part, the Universidad Iberoamericana, together with the non-governmental organizations Article 19, the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, Data Cívica, Human Rights-Data Analysis, and the Canada Fund, developed the "Citizen Grave Platform" (https://ibero.mx/prensa/pdh-ibero-y-organizaciones-lanzan-plataforma-ciudadana-de-fosas), which maps and records the number of clandestine graves found in the country.

According to this Platform:

The discovery of clandestine graves has been recurrent and widespread in most states of Mexico since 2007…

Based on the platform's data, we know that according to available official data, between 2006 and 2019, at least 2,357 clandestine graves were discovered in Mexico, along with the bodies of at least 2,603 ​​victims, as well as more than 1,000 bone fragments whose identities were not determined. The five states with the highest number of reported clandestine grave discoveries were Veracruz, Tamaulipas, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Zacatecas.

The Platform must have obtained the remaining data after 2019, based on its investigations, as authorities from the López Obrador administration and state governments have not provided an update:

Based on press records, we estimate that 1,491 clandestine graves have been observed in Mexico, of which 4,259 bodies and 47,355 remains or fragments have been exhumed in 30 states. The figure could rise to 1,759 graves, 5,133 bodies, and 95,806 remains. The states with the highest number of discoveries are Chihuahua, Guerrero, Jalisco, Michoacán, and Veracruz, which account for 58% of the total graves.

This information highlights that for decades, regardless of the political party in power at the national or state levels, there has been negligence, complicity, and a lack of will on the part of authorities to address a problem that deeply affects citizens: the disappearance of thousands of their loved ones, the overwhelming majority of whom are murdered, dismembered, burned, and buried in clandestine graves.

It has been up to family members, civil society organizations, and national and international non-governmental organizations to search for and locate most of these clandestine graves, human remains, and extermination camps.

As long as authorities at all three levels of government—federal, state, and municipal—maintain their stance of indifference (even contempt) toward the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans affected by disappearances and murders perpetrated by organized crime, and as long as there is no national strategy to resolve this tragedy, the number of victims will continue to mount, and the problem will become so large that no authority will be willing to assume responsibility for addressing it in the near future.