Mexico 'ranch of horror' was cartel training site, not 'extermination camp'

26/3/2025 6:47

Mexico's security minister said on Tuesday there was no evidence that a so-called "ranch of horror" strewn with human remains was an "extermination camp" but rather it was a cartel training site where those who resisted recruitment were killed.



The discovery earlier this month of the site, littered with bone fragments, ashes, alleged makeshift crematoriums, along with hundreds of shoes and backpacks shocked Mexico, a country numbed by nearly two decades of bloody cartel violence.



"It's a completely different thing for killings or torture to be carried out on a property than for it to have been anextermination camp," Security Minister Omar Garcia Harfuch said on Tuesday morning, speaking at the president's daily morning press conference.



"An extermination camp is a place where hundreds and thousands of people are systematically murdered, I think we all understand that," he added.



"At the moment, I repeat, we have no evidence ... that it had been an extermination camp, but rather a training site."



Earlier this month, an activist search group for missing people found the ranch in Teuchitlan, a rural area about 40 miles (64 km) outside Jalisco's capital, Guadalajara.