From Rancho Izaguirre, reflections to come

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Miguel Ramírez

Master student in Carlos III University of Madrid

University of Guadalajara

 

The place where I was born and the house where I grew up and lived the most memorable moments of my life is located just 60 kilometers away from Teuchitlán, a municipality in the State of Jalisco, México. Teuchitlán has been on the spotlight among activist and the national and international press in the last few weeks. 

         In Teuchitlán is located Rancho Izaguirre, a property that, in recent days, was secured by Mexican State authorities. This was because it is undeniably the physical space where, without any doubt, actions occurred that have irreversibly destroyed thousands of lives. All the evidence indicates that this place has served as a center of operations where a criminal group trains and disappears people according to their convenience.

The crescendo of the ‘Rancho Izaguirre narrative’ was undeniably triggered by the March 5th dissemination of a harrowing video attributed to the Colectivo de guerreros buscadores de Jalisco/Jalisco Searching Warriors Collective (Franco, Darwin, 2024). documenting their on-site inspection. For an international readership perhaps unfamiliar with this phenomenon, it is crucial to contextualize these collectives as a poignant manifestation of Mexico’s civil society response to the endemic crisis of desaparecidos, disappeared persons crisis. Their emergence underscores the perceived inadequacy and precariousness of the Mexican State’s official response to this profound human rights crisis (Franco, Darwin, 2025a).

These collectives of searchers, essentially grassroots search parties, represent an organized societal endeavor to locate fragmented and concealed human remains across diverse terrains. Confronting sophisticated and disturbing modus operandi of bodily disposal and evidentiary obfuscation, their reason is to provide solace and closure to families grappling with the agonizing ambiguity of disappearance. Operating under duress, these brave individuals often face criminalization from state actors and threats, intimidation, and violence from the very criminal elements seeking to perpetuate their impunity and conceal their barbarity. Undeterred, they venture into the abyss, meticulously documenting the unfathomable horror and savagery that unfolds with impunity across the nation daily.

It is pertinent to underscore here that a significant number of these courageous searchers have themselves fallen victim to assassination at the hands of organized criminal groups, as meticulously documented by the NGO ¿A dónde van los desaparecidos? /Where do the disappeared go? (Nuño, Analy y Ayala Martínez, Aranzazú, 2025).

This grim reality illuminates yet another dark and tragic dimension of this ongoing crisis, an inhumane entrenchment of impunity and the perpetuation of individual, familial, and collective suffering engendered by these disappearances, a chilling attitude that should rightfully terrify and concern us all.

The aforementioned video, capturing the Collective’s entry into the property, offers stark and brutal testimony. The documented scenes are nothing short of an indictment, reflecting the squalor and terror of a nation seemingly adrift in a crisis that elicits insufficient societal introspection, compounded by a tepid and inadequate institutional response. The visual inventory – hundreds of discarded garments and footwear strewn across the Rancho, personal items of individuals who once possessed their liberty and their lives – paints a visceral portrait of loss. The contentious issue of alleged clandestine crematories, purportedly utilized by organized crime to obliterate bodies and conceal homicides, has ignited a national debate, giving rise to the terrifying speculation of extermination camps run by criminal organizations (Ginés, Isabel,2025).

However, the Rancho Izaguirre saga is but another episode within a broader societal and institutional crisis of overwhelming magnitude. In the analytical framework proposed by Mexican researcher Rosana Reguillo, this constitutes yet another grim ‘postcard of horror,’ a stark tableau illuminating the brutal reality of a State seemingly subjugated by the violence and dynamics of the necromáquina, a lethal apparatus of human annihilation operating with near-total impunity across the national landscape (Reguillo, Rossana, 2025), relentlessly extinguishing the lives and liberties of individuals and families.

The disappeared persons crisis– brutally exposed at Rancho Izaguirre – undoubtedly represents the most harrowing manifestation of this necromáquina. The staggering statistics of disappeared persons in Mexico underscore the inescapable responsibility of the Mexican State. According to official government data, as of April 18, 2025, the number of individuals not located stands at a staggering 127,280 (The National Search Commission for Persons/Comisión Nacional de Busqueda, 2025). Pervasive impunity severely hinders the ability to definitively attribute culpability for these disappearances. An overwhelming majority of cases never reach judicialization. In its latest report on disappearances in Mexico, the United Nations Committee Against Forced Disappearance concluded that a mere 2% to 6% of cases have been brought before the courts, with only 36 convictions nationwide (United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances,2022). In 2023, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights noted the paltry figure of just 40 convictions for this crime, urging Mexico to rectify this trajectory of profound impunity (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2023) While these figures are subject to updates and minor numerical variations, the near-absolute impunity surrounding this crime remains as an undisputed reality.

This context compels the conclusion that a robust and reliable information source for definitively establishing legal culpability for disappearances remains elusive. Nevertheless, it is a widely acknowledged fact that a significant proportion of disappearances have been perpetrated by crime organizations, often with the complicity or omission of state agents, as detailed within the aforementioned UN report.

Recently, on April, 2025, the Committee on Enforced Disappearances concluded that disappearances in Mexico occur in a systematic and widespread manner, a reality that led the Committee to activate for the first time the Article 34 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons against Enforced Disappearance (Nucamendi, Marcos, 2025). Thus, the repercussions and possibilities surrounding this mechanism warrant a discussion for another time.

The necessary reflection, therefore, transcends the purely legal realm, yet crucially requires its foundation. In Mexico, the impunity surrounding the disappeared crisis is not merely a statistic; it represents a profound absence, a vital and social void. A disappeared human is absent from their life, from a specific place and environment where they are awaited, and thus perpetually missing. However, this absence extends to the collective consciousness. Impunity signifies the absence of an history, a narrative that must be reclaimed by our public institutions if we are to function as a community committed to justice and truth, and if our institutions are to respond to this fundamental yearning. Addressing this crisis requires dismantling impunity and contemplating how to transcend this devastating reality by learning from it, and mostly, honoring the memory of the hundreds of thousands of victims. Rancho Izaguirre stands as another harrowing tableau, which, while instilling fear and revulsion, must serve as a catalyst for a profound and urgently needed collective reflection on the excessive violence that plagues Mexico.

To contemplate the victims and to endeavor to reclaim their memory, articulating through our institutions a truth, even if merely juridical—as first step—, regarding these systematic and widespread outrages, is an imperative. The alternative consigns us to the Arendtian banality of evil (Arendt, Hannah, 2016), where an absence of reflection stands as fertile ground for mass violations of individual dignity. The crisis of violence in Mexico —the necromáquina—compounded by a pervasive impunity sustained by an overwhelming and inexplicable institutional and social normalization, a sort of lack of a proper construction of the collective memory in the way Hartog presents it (Hartog, François, 2007). This underscores the urgent need for a reflection that has yet to fully materialize but must come: a collective consensus that positions human dignity as the very nucleus of communal and individual action within Mexico.

As I was making the finals corrections to this text, the devastating news reaches me: María del Carmen Morales, who was searching for her disappeared son, Julian, since the beginning of 2024, committed member of the Colectivo guerreros buscadores de Jalisco —the collective that found and documented the atrocities of the Izaguirre ranch —and her son, Jaime Ramírez Morales, have been brutally murdered in Tlajomulco, Jalisco (Franco, Darwin, 2025b). This is undeniably another grim snapshot of the pervasive violence that destroys families and communities with total impunity across México. 

References. 

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