Khthon documents mass graves, atrocity crimes, and forensic evidence from conflict zones worldwide. Our work is strictly humanitarian and apolitical.
This site may contain imagery and descriptions of deceased individuals, violent injuries, and human remains gathered in the course of active investigations. Content is presented for accountability and documentation purposes only.
Khthon documents mass graves, atrocity crimes, and forensic evidence from conflict zones worldwide. Our work is strictly humanitarian and apolitical.
This site may contain imagery and descriptions of deceased individuals, violent injuries, and human remains gathered in the course of active investigations.
Situation Overview
Since the mid-2000s, the government's militarised campaign against organised crime has fractured major cartels, producing violent competition among rival groups. In this environment, disappearances have reached crisis levels, with an estimated 100,000 people currently missing. Cartel practices of intimidation often involve leaving bodies in public view, but the greater humanitarian crisis lies in the thousands of victims hidden in clandestine graves — closely tied to drug trafficking, local territorial control, and the vulnerability of migrants passing through Mexican territory.
Clandestine graves in Mexico are typically shallow, hastily dug, and obscured beneath bushes, palm groves, or ravines — terrains where satellite imagery alone proves ineffective. Unlike the structured, repeated burial signatures documented in conventional conflict zones, Mexican cartel graves are deliberately chaotic and concealed: remains are often dismembered and distributed across bags, cremated, or dumped in inaccessible terrain specifically to frustrate detection and identification. Many discoveries occur by accident, or through painstaking searches led by families' collectives like the Madres Buscadoras de Sonora and Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco, who probe the earth with sticks or deploy drones to detect anomalies.
GEOINT Methodology
Research centres like CentroGeo have experimented with satellite-based nitrogen analysis, hyperspectral imagery, and drones to narrow search areas, but no organisation in Mexico runs active, tasked satellite monitoring of suspected sites. For now, Khthon's work in Mexico depends heavily on SOCMINT and HUMINT to guide investigations.
Cartel Concealment Workflow
01 · TRAINING / EXTERMINATION RANCHES
Recruitment Compounds
Rancho Izaguirre and Rancho La Vega reveal a CJNG model of forced recruitment through false job postings, followed by training, abuse, and execution at remote rural compounds. Satellite imagery distinguishes these sites by training infrastructure — obstacle courses, fenced enclosures, barbed wire — that persists across years and is visible from above even when ground access is denied.
02 · BAGGED REMAINS / URBAN PERIPHERY
Dismemberment and Disposal
Sites like Zapopan's Las Agujas and Nextipac show a distinct pattern: remains distributed across dozens or hundreds of plastic bags rather than intact bodies, frequently near urban peripheries, construction sites, and dirt road junctions. Volume of bags does not equal victim count, complicating both detection and identification.
03 · ABANDONED PROPERTY / RESIDENTIAL
Property-Adjacent Concealment
La Calera, Irapuato demonstrates a residential variant: bodies concealed beneath the yard of an ostensibly abandoned rural property, detected only after persistent odour complaints from neighbours. This pattern — small rural communities, simply constructed homes, properties assumed vacant — recurs across contested cartel territory nationwide.
Transparency & Monitoring Landscape
Mexico's 2017 General Law on Disappearance requires a national registry of common and clandestine graves. There is still no public, complete version of it. The work of counting graves, auditing official data, and pushing for disclosure has fallen to civil society, and access is getting harder each year.
01 · TRANSPARENCY AUDITING
Data Cívica
Data Cívica audits official grave data through transparency requests (Mexico's equivalent of FOIA) to every state prosecutor's office and the federal Fiscalía General de la República, and co-produces the Plataforma Ciudadana de Fosas with the Universidad Iberoamericana's Human Rights Programme and ARTICLE 19. Its July 2026 report, Enterrar la verdad, found transparency collapsing year on year: prosecutors answering fell from 93.8% in 2022 to 90.6%, 84.4%, and then 62.5% in 2025, the first year after the INAI was dissolved. Good-quality answers fell from 57.6% to 39.3%, and eight offices that answered in 2024 stopped answering in 2025.
Source: Enterrar la verdad (2026)
02 · GEOSPATIAL RESEARCH
CentroGeo
CentroGeo, a public geospatial research centre, is a partner in the Plataforma Ciudadana de Fosas and contributed to a search-area model built with Data Cívica, Elementa DDHH, and the Ibero. Trained on 52 grave locations in Baja California, the model combines point-pattern analysis, road-access and visibility analysis, and satellite nitrogen signatures; Data Cívica reports it cut potential search areas by 78%. CentroGeo researchers have also tested drones, multispectral and thermal imaging. How far CentroGeo's role in Data Cívica's current work extends is not publicly clear.
Sources: Data Cívica (2022) · Citizen Evidence Lab
03 · STRATEGIC LITIGATION
Elementa DDHH
Elementa DDHH is a feminist human rights organisation working in Mexico and Colombia that uses litigation to force disclosure. It runs Desaparecer en Baja California, a public record built from its own transparency requests, and in October 2025 won a district court ruling ordering the Baja California prosecutor's office to release disappearance data it had classified; the office appealed in December 2025. In 2026 the same office classified its grave records as well.
Sources: Desaparecer en BC · Radar BC (May 2026)
Case file · Amparo indirectoFiled 6 Aug 2026Status as of 26 Sep 2026
Elementa DDHH v. Secretaría de Gobernación & Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda
What is being challengedThe federal government's failure to issue the technical guidelines for, and to integrate, coordinate, and keep updated, the Registro Nacional de Fosas Comunes y Clandestinas.
BackgroundIn 2025 the Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda took its public grave map and registry offline. Even before removal, its data stopped at August 2023 and covered only 15 of 32 states. Since then, the only national count has come from civil society and search collectives.
CourtJuzgado Primero de Distrito, Baja California (Mexicali)
Filed byRenata Demichelis Ávila, legal representative, Elementa DDHH A.C.
RespondentsSecretaría de Gobernación (Segob), through the Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda, and other federal agencies
Latest: On filing, the judge gave Elementa five business days to set out the specific facts and omissions behind the claim before the suit could be formally admitted. As of 26 September 2026, we have found no public reporting on whether the suit has been admitted or on any ruling. Khthon is following the case.
Sources: El Financiero · Zeta Tijuana · Plataforma Ciudadana de Fosas
No one is watching from above
Data Cívica audits what prosecutors disclose. CentroGeo has built research models and tested sensors. Elementa litigates for access. None of them runs active, tasked satellite monitoring: repeated, scheduled collection over suspected sites to catch soil disturbance, burning, and new construction as it happens. As official data disappears, independent imagery is one of the few records the state cannot withhold, and it is the capability Mexico most lacks.
Armed Group Profile
Aliases
CJNG
Formed
2010
Origin
Jalisco & Colima, Mexico
Known Camps
Rancho Izaguirre
The CJNG derives from one of two internal factions of the Milenio Cartel. Prior to July 2010, that cartel worked with the Sinaloa Cartel to move drug shipments and oversee finances in Jalisco and Colima. After the death of the Sinaloa Cartel's leader and the capture of the Milenio Cartel's leader, the two internal factions fought for control of the Sinaloa network in those states — the conflict from which the CJNG emerged.
Los Cuinis, a closely related criminal group, manages the cartel's finances and money laundering; it remains unclear whether the Cuinis function as part of the CJNG or as a closely allied but separate organisation. The CJNG is known to maintain ties with government officials at local, state, and federal levels in Mexico — a pattern of corruption and negotiated impunity that recurs across the sites Khthon has documented, including Rancho Izaguirre.
Recruitment is both voluntary and forced, including of children and migrants — consistent with the false-job-offer recruitment pipeline documented at Rancho Izaguirre and Rancho La Vega. The organisation operates through a central leadership structure layered over several semi-autonomous regional operations, with affiliations to local cartels and criminal groups that have allowed it to infiltrate local political leadership across its territories.
Known Leadership
It remains unclear whether El Mencho's death in February 2026 will trigger internal fragmentation or factional disputes within the organisation — a question with direct bearing on whether sites like Rancho Izaguirre and Rancho La Vega continue under unified CJNG control or fall to splinter or rival groups, a dynamic Khthon is actively monitoring.
2006
Calderón launches the drug war
President Felipe Calderón deploys the military against drug cartels, fracturing major organisations like the Sinaloa Cartel and the Zetas. The resulting territorial wars produce a dramatic escalation in kidnappings, executions, and clandestine grave use across northern and western states.
2009
First mass grave discoveries — Tamaulipas
Mass graves attributed to the Zetas cartel are discovered in Tamaulipas, containing dozens of migrants and victims of territorial violence. The scale shocks investigators and establishes a pattern of industrialised disposal that would be documented nationwide in subsequent years.
2011
72 migrants massacred — San Fernando
The bodies of 72 Central and South American migrants are found at a ranch in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. The massacre — carried out by the Zetas — highlights the extreme vulnerability of migrants to cartel violence and forced disappearance along transit routes through Mexico.
2014
Ayotzinapa — 43 students disappeared
43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College are forcibly disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, after their buses are intercepted by municipal police working with the Guerreros Unidos cartel. The case becomes a global symbol of enforced disappearance, impunity, and state collusion with organised crime.
2016–2019
Jalisco New Generation Cartel expansion
The CJNG rapidly expands across Mexico, deploying extreme violence — including acid baths and cremation to dissolve or destroy bodies — to eliminate rivals and conceal victims. Rancho Izaguirre, active since at least 2011, shows its first satellite-documented smoke and burn signatures by February 2019, consistent with the clandestine crematorium activity later described by survivors and collectives.
2019
Madres Buscadoras de Sonora founded
Ceci Flores founds the Madres Buscadoras de Sonora, a collective of mothers searching for disappeared family members using sticks, shovels, and handheld drones. The group — alongside sister collectives like Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco — discovers dozens of clandestine graves and becomes a reference model for community-led forensic investigation in dangerous environments.
SEP 2024–JAN 2025
Rancho Izaguirre raided, Rancho La Vega liberated
Federal forces raid Rancho Izaguirre in September 2024, freeing two captives and arresting ten suspects; the site's full scope only emerges in March 2025 when Guerreros Buscadores Jalisco catalogue over 1,300 items of evidence. On 29 January 2025, a Joint Task Force storms Rancho La Vega — a related CJNG recruitment camp roughly 7.5km away — freeing 37 captives amid allegations of torture and abuse by the rescuing forces themselves. Commander José Gregorio "El Lastra" Hermida, linked to both ranches, is arrested in March 2025.
JUL–AUG 2025
La Calera mass grave discovered — Guanajuato
The Guanajuato Prosecutor's Office discovers a mass grave at an abandoned property in La Calera, Irapuato, following resident odour complaints. Approximately 32 dismembered bodies are recovered over four days of excavation using heavy machinery, in a state contested between CJNG and the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel since 2019.
2025
National grave registry taken offline
The Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda removes its public map and registry of clandestine graves. Its data ran only to August 2023 and covered 15 of Mexico's 32 states. The same year, the federal transparency institute INAI is dissolved and replaced by Transparencia para el Pueblo.
2025–2026
Zapopan graves found ahead of FIFA World Cup
Collectives and authorities uncover three mass grave sites in Zapopan — Las Agujas, Nextipac/Camino al Alemán, and Arroyo Hondo/Plan de la Noria — all within 20km of Akron Stadium, a 2026 FIFA World Cup venue. Over 300 bags of remains are recovered across the three sites as Jalisco state allocates roughly $23 billion MXN to World Cup infrastructure against $2.1 billion MXN for disappearance investigations, drawing sharp criticism from search collectives over state priorities. Khthon geolocated all three sites, whose exact locations had not been disclosed, and published its findings in June 2026.
JUL 2026
"Enterrar la verdad" documents collapsing transparency
Data Cívica, the Universidad Iberoamericana's Human Rights Programme, and ARTICLE 19 report that only 62.5% of state prosecutors' offices answered transparency requests on clandestine graves for 2025, down from 93.8% in 2022, and that the share of good-quality answers fell from 57.6% to 39.3% in a single year.
6 AUG 2026
Elementa DDHH sues over the missing registry
Elementa DDHH files an amparo in federal court in Mexicali against the Interior Ministry and the Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda for failing to integrate and maintain the Registro Nacional de Fosas Comunes y Clandestinas required by law.
Ongoing
Khthon monitoring — SOCMINT and emerging GEOINT methods
Khthon tracks Mexico through SOCMINT, cartel communications monitoring, and coordination with Buscadoras networks. Experimental collaboration with CentroGeo's nitrogen/chlorophyll spectral analysis is being evaluated for integration with our time-series satellite methodology to detect recently disturbed soil in high-priority states.
Browse Khthon's full catalogue of country and case reports across seven global regions, or get involved with our ongoing investigations.
