For the past five years, Marcela Turati, Thelma Gómez Durán and Eliezer Budasoff have been investigating forced labour camps run by drug cartels in the Sierra Tarahumara mountains in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. In a landmark report, they tracked down and interviewed victims of this criminal operation – men who were kidnapped, held in captivity in the mountains, and made to cultivate drugs under extreme conditions, without pay, often for years on end. The existence of these camps is an open secret in Chihuahua, tolerated by the authorities. This is the most detailed portrait to date of life inside Mexico’s expanding narco-slavery system.

The names of all living characters have been changed to protect their identities. This translation has been edited and abridged: the full story, in Spanish, can be read at Quinto Elemento Lab.

In the early hours of 11 July 2019, a convoy of pickup trucks set out westwards from Ciudad Cuauhtémoc in Chihuahua, a state on the US-Mexico border. It travelled for a few hours towards the Sierra Tarahumara mountains, first on highways and then on dirt roads, before stopping at a lone cabin just beyond the village of Yoquivo, where the route became too rough.

More than 50 state officials – mostly police investigators, plus some prosecutors – got out. Around 10 were left on guard; the rest advanced on foot through the temperate forest. At some point they split up: one group took the path to the top of the mountain, and the others descended towards the bottom of the canyon. The latter walked for another four hours, through pine, madrone and oak groves, from time to time coming upon clearings where the trees had been felled and burned to make way for poppy and marijuana crops. At last, they reached a spot where a band of raggedly dressed men were clearing a slope with their hands. When the men caught sight of the officials, they looked terrified, as if expecting to be arrested.

The second group made its way up stone cliffs so high and sheer that they formed a natural wall. At the peak, there was a kind of grotto, formed by the space between giant rock formations, with a narrow entrance. An assortment of items were strewn around inside: clothes, blankets and a radio; a blackened broom and plastic jugs; a ladle, a grill and pots; bags of fertiliser and packets of cornflour.

These were the remains of a forced labour camp, one of many that drug cartels have been operating since at least 2017 across the Sierra Tarahumara – a magnificent landscape of mountains and canyons that stretches nearly 1,000 kilometres from just south of the US border through the states of Chihuahua, Sonora, Durango and Sinaloa. The camps parasitically feed on the surrounding region. Cartel agents from out of state approach vulnerable local men with the promise of credible jobs – putting up fences, clearing land, tending livestock – at an unspecified location. Recruits are, instead, kidnapped and taken to isolated corners of the mountains, where they are made to perform hard agricultural labour under the constant watch of armed guards for no pay, for months or even years on end, until they almost drop dead. This captive workforce is largely drawn from poor neighbourhoods in the foothills, at settlements of displaced indigenous Rarámuri people, along the railway tracks where day labourers gather for work, outside welfare offices.

Twenty-one men – the youngest was 18, the oldest 52 – were rescued from the camp near Yoquivo that day. The “subhuman conditions” of their captivity had left them “physically shattered”, an agent from the public prosecutor’s office told us. During the long walk out of the forest, they seemed not so much happy as disoriented and afraid: two camp overseers had been freed by agents as well. Back at the convoy, when the officials offered to share their provisions, the captives could not contain themselves. “We were carrying tins of tuna,” an agent told us. “They would ask for some and then say: ‘May I eat all of it?’”

On the return journey, during a stop at a checkpoint on the Las Estrellas highway, a staff member from the Chihuahua State Attorney General’s Office took a photograph of the survivors. While a few of them look at the camera, the rest stare hard at the ground, as if ashamed, or gaze vacantly into space. Their features are mostly obscured by the shadows cast by baseball caps. Still, you can make out sunken cheeks and beards several weeks old. The thick black grime that has accumulated on their clothes makes them resemble coal miners. They look so haggard that it is difficult to guess their age. Only two carry backpacks; the rest are wearing all their possessions.

At the public prosecutor’s office in Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, the freed men gave their sworn testimonies one by one. A local activist named Gabino Gómez came to meet them; he had been advocating on behalf of the relatives of disappeared victims for close to a decade. (The first case in the city that came to his attention involved eight members of the same family.) When Gabino saw the survivors, he rushed to shake their hands and hug them. They could not understand why a complete stranger was so distressed and emotional. In that bewilderment lay their tragedy. They had been so thoroughly severed from society that they could not see themselves as Gabino saw them.

Most of the survivors did not consider themselves to be “victims” of human trafficking, let alone slavery. All they knew was that they had been duped. Only four of the 21 had been reported as disappeared by their families. The other 17 had been officially forgotten.

The July 2019 raid was a long time coming. For at least two years, the Chihuahua police had been hearing from escapees of forced labour camps in the Sierra Tarahumara – but they singularly failed to investigate their allegations. In 2018, when a Rarámuri teenager fled from a camp and contacted the public prosecutor’s office, they did not even bother to interview him at length.

Later that year, three captives made a daring escape from another camp. An older prisoner hatched the plan out of pity for two recently kidnapped teenagers, who cried every night. If I’m going to die here, he thought, I might as well die trying to get those kids out. After months of waiting for the right moment, he urged them to take their chance while they were hauling water from a nearby stream one afternoon. They walked through the forest for three days, without food, hiding in caves during the day and setting out after dark, pursued all along by their captors, whose flashlights they could see in the distance. At the main road, they hitched a ride on a pickup truck.

Under the initials B.A.R., the man recorded an in-depth sworn testimony with the public prosecutor. The situation he described was reminiscent of haciendas in the nineteenth century, but with the colonial slaver replaced by the armed drug trafficker. For three years he had been held with dozens of other captives in the mountains. From dawn till dusk they farmed poppies and cannabis; at night they slept on the floors of stone caves. They were forced to smoke marijuana and snort cocaine to weaken their resistance. Order was violently enforced: beatings with oak clubs, food deprivation, waterboarding. “I was punished too,” B.A.R. said. “They’d grab me by my feet and hold me upside down, dunking me in the river until I nearly drowned.”

Sometimes, B.A.R. testified, the guards ordered the captives to rape one another. One of the teenagers who escaped with him was himself punished this way. “I didn’t do anything, because I was afraid,” he told the authorities. “It hurt a lot. It happened many times.” The runaways described fatal violence. “I saw them kill some of my compañeros,” B.A.R. said. One was drowned; another was beaten to death; a third was pushed off a cliff. One of the teenagers recounted how the camp cook was murdered: “A man shot her in the forehead.”

B.A.R. told prosecutors that he had been taken to at least six different forced-labour camps in the mountains. Prompted by his testimony, they carried out a raid at the very site of the future rescue, where they found food, cooking equipment, tools and even parts of a cabin. Perhaps because the camp was deserted on that day, they assumed it had been abandoned. There were no followup investigations.

The next July, three more runaways appeared. A police officer saw them get out of the back of a pickup truck at the Las Estrellas checkpoint. They were dirty and malnourished; their clothes were in tatters. Commander Julio César Andrade did not believe them when they claimed to have been working in a nearby apple orchard. He took them to eat at a roadside restaurant, where the truth came out. At the prosecutor’s office, they provided sworn statements that were virtually carbon copies of those gathered from around Chihuahua in the preceding two years: the same recruitment method, the same cavernous area in the Sierra Tarahumara, the same physical and psychological torture. One of the escapees served as a guide during the big rescue operation that followed.

The Mexican press reported on the rescue as if it had uncovered a case of business fraud, rather than human rights violations. The captives were described as men conned into living in caves and working without pay. Most articles failed to mention that four of them had been reported missing. (Their discovery was an unusual outcome in a country where the official figure of disappeared people stands above 130,000, with 95% of those from the last two decades.) Questions were not asked about state culpability, or even the existence of other camps. Thus a grave political crime was turned into a macabre oddity.

In order to understand how modern slavery came to be institutionalised in the Sierra Tarahumara, it is necessary to understand how drug cartels have evolved in recent decades – and how their relationship with the state has changed, too. Since the 1970s, when Mexico became a large-scale producer of poppies and marijuana, there have been reports of civilian agricultural labourers at clandestine narco-camps. Initially these was paid jobs. In The Century of Drugs (2005), the sociologist Luis Astorga described how, in the early 1980s, cartels actively recruited working-class youth to travel to the so-called Golden Triangle in the mountains of Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango to plant poppies, for a salary far higher than local farms offered. The money was so good that some villages were emptied of able-bodied men during the harvest season.

This bucolic picture darkened as cartels transformed from local operations to transnational criminal enterprises. In 1984, near the village of El Búfalo, a 544-hectare marijuana production facility run by the Sinaloa cartel was discovered. More than 12,000 migrant workers were toiling there in captivity, in extreme conditions, often without pay. Around 400 soldiers raided the complex and freed the labourers, though the overseers fled.

After the scandal at El Búfalo, there were no further reports of clandestine camps until the 2010s. The timing was not coincidental. In 2012, Colorado and Washington legalised cannabis, a move that was eventually adopted by other US states. Meanwhile, fentanyl use skyrocketed among Americans; it proved cheaper, more potent and easier to produce than heroin. These twin developments led to a fall in demand for Mexican cannabis and poppies, as the Sinaloan journalist Marco Vizcarra, who has extensively investigated drug markets, explained to us. In the past decade or so, the price of a kilo of opium gum has halved.

Domestic production was also reorganised in this period. Where there was once a sort of free market, with any number of intermediaries buying and selling the gum, by 2017 the Sinaloa cartel had developed a monopsony through force. They unilaterally brought the price down, squeezing individual growers.

All this led to a resurgence of kidnapping and slavery, as cartels tried to adapt to new market circumstances and bring down their “labour costs”. Such crimes occurred in Guerrero and Jalisco, but mainly in Chihuahua, which has become a hotbed of narco violence, in particular battles between local factions of the Juárez cartel. Disappearances have been rising almost continuously for over a decade. More than 2,841 people – 2,494 men and 347 women – have been officially reported missing since 2014, though the true figure is certainly much higher. In 2016, there were more disappearances in Ciudad Cuauhtémoc than any other Mexican city.

Around that time, shady operators began arriving in numbers in Chihuahua’s mountainous western region, renting agricultural plots for drug production, and eventually displacing the landowners, many of whom were Rarámuri. Villagers observed them forcing migrants off northbound trains and coercing them to work in the fields. The Casa del Migrante shelter in Chihuahua City began to gather testimonies about this practice from Central Americans heading to the US. At least two of their complaints were shelved by the state attorney general.

And so slavery in the Sierra Tarahumara became a kind of open secret. State officials were well aware that forced-labour camps were operating in the mountains, but they did next to nothing to find out more. Almost no first-hand accounts from survivors were available to the public. Until now.

We have been investigating and writing about forced disappearances in Mexico for over 15 years. This work has taken us to morgues, cemeteries, unmarked burial plots and clandestine mass graves. News of the Sierra Tarahumara rescue grimly piqued our interest. Here, for the first time, was a story indicating that some of the disappeared may still be alive.

It took us a while to track down the survivors. The Chihuahua public prosecutor’s office allowed us to look at the 21 sworn testimonies, but forbade us from making copies, or even taking notes. So we recorded ourselves reading the documents aloud. Those accounts – and our interviews with state officials – lead us to various impoverished suburbs of Chihuahua City and Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, where locals soon came forward to help us identify our subjects. Over five years, we conducted long and often fraught interviews with many of them – in low-income housing complexes and indigenous settlements, roadside cafes and cheap motels, abandoned houses and even garbage dumps.

These were sobering interactions. Freedom had not been kind to the captives. Few had been able to regain even the wretched standard of living that had pushed them into the arms of the cartels in the first place. Many were scarred by paranoia, trapped in addiction or suffering mental illnesses. Some had been abandoned by their partners or families. More than one, we learned, died after being rescued, some by their own hand. We came to feel that these men had been triply betrayed: first by the narcos who had lured them into the mountains, then by the government that failed to look for them, and finally by a society that refused to welcome them back into its fold.

We are telling their stories not because we hope to secure justice, but simply to establish the truth. This was a modest ambition shared by one of our interlocutors, Andrés. He told us that many of the survivors’ accounts had been doubted. He’d even read criticisms on social media: That’s what they deserve for being shiftless and lazy. “Those people should try thinking before they speak, because they don’t know when they might suddenly find themselves in a similar situation,” Andrés said. “They might be lucky enough to be rescued, or unlucky enough to die out there. I decided to give this interview because this situation’s not going to change. In Mexico, there’s sexual slavery, human trafficking, forced labour. This didn’t start yesterday; it’s been going on for many years.” 

On his 987th day of captivity, after spending a whole week praying to Saint Jude to help him escape from the mountains, Javier did not know how to react when he saw all those uniformed men emerge from the bushes. At that moment he was on his knees, clearing weeds by hand. His first thought was that they had come to kill them. The camp guards had often warned that members of los contras, a rival cartel, could attack anytime.

He only managed to run a few metres before stopping, paralysed, in front of a sheer cliff. When the police caught up and explained that it was a rescue, his second thought was that they were going to arrest him. They mentioned a hotel, which he feared was “going to be a prison”, he told us when we interviewed him at the public prosecutor’s office. The conversation occurred in the presence of a state official who often interrupted us and closed down certain enquiries: for instance, about whether the state had provided Javier with psychological treatment.

At 39, Javier was one of the oldest of the 21 survivors. He had spent the longest time in the camp. According to his calculations, his captors owed him 248,055 pesos of stolen wages, after deducting for provisions like cigarettes and biscuits that the guards gave him “on credit”. Two hundred and forty-eight thousand and fifty-five Mexican pesos, for close to a thousand days of his life. He knew now that no one was going to pay him.

Javier’s story begins, like so many others, with a desperate lack of money. And a fight with his wife – a scene that would play over and over in his mind during his long captivity. One evening in September 2016, she returned home from work to discover that he had not managed to put any food on the table. They argued. If you’re not bringing home milk or diapers, you might as well not bother coming back.

He stormed off to the train tracks on the outskirts of Chihuahua City, where day labourers gather to wait for jobs. A heavy-duty grey pickup – “the one-tonne truck”, he calls it – was parked there, with seven men already sitting in the back. The driver stepped out and made him an offer. Work with us on a cattle ranch in the mountains for a month. We will give you 300 pesos a day, three meals a day, and a place to live. The catch was that they had to leave straight away. There was no time for Javier to tell his wife or say goodbye to their three children. Still, it was not a hard decision, especially in his angry state. He would call her later, he thought – and he would return with good money.

For a few hours, everything seemed normal. The recruiters bought them beers and paid for dinner at a roadside canteen. It is hard to say exactly when the men began to realise that they had been tricked, when it dawned on them that something was wrong, when they knew that it was already too late. An agent told us that recruits sometimes tried to jump out of the truck before it reached its destination. When that happened, a foreman would get out, draw his gun and point it at them.

The truck stopped at a village in the mountains around nightfall. The recruiters put hoods over their captives’ heads, then forced them to walk for hours to a makeshift camp, where they slept on the ground. At dawn they were woken and marched 15 minutes down the mountain slope to a poppy field, where their task was to score the plants to extract opium gum. Such was the work during the autumn. Thereafter their labour varied according to the growing cycle: preparing the land, sowing and harvesting. Agriculture was interspersed with an endless series of taxing errands: clearing scrub, chopping firewood, carrying supplies, washing, cutting steps into the mountainside, digging wells, fetching water and chaperoning captives to other fields. The aim was to wear them down “until they were no longer of any use”, as another survivor told us.

In his sworn testimony, Javier recalled that there were about 80 workers and six armed guards in the first camp he was taken to. Those numbers varied from one site to the next, and across the season, halving after the harvest. What never changed was their hunger. Twice a day, in the morning and the evening, they received a bowl of soup or beans. When at risk of fainting, they were sent to the loquero – literally, the crazy-maker – who plied them with “loco”, a mixture of cornflour, water and sugar, which kept them wired until nightfall.

Beatings were the primary means of discipline. Whether the task was to fell trees with a chainsaw, burn scrub or plough the land with a pickaxe, the enforcer’s club always set the pace. “I’d collapse and they’d come over and whack me,” Javier told us. The guards promised to “give some water” to anyone who disobeyed orders. That is, to dunk him in a pool or well until he turned purple. “They would pull him out, hit him in the stomach with the butt of a rifle to get the water out, and then do it all over again.”

Hunger eventually overcame resistance. Many captives agreed to literally beat their fellows with a club for a reward as small as a soft drink or some biscuits. Their captors gave these twisted directives to keep things moving, or simply for their own entertainment. Javier maintains that he never beat anyone, no matter how hungry he was.

The daily indignities and humiliations were innumerable. They were not allowed to go to the toilet without being watched. They were forced to urinate into a 20-litre bucket in the cave that was their quarters. They were only allowed to bathe once a month, down at the freezing stream, sharing a bar of soap among 15 people, with no way to dry off afterwards. They lived in the very garments they’d arrived in, which soon turned to rags. They had to steal from each other or pick up discards to get a change of clothes. Javier once grew so desperate that he traded a pack of cigarettes for a pair of tattered trousers.

As time went on, some captives began to disappear. In his testimony, Javier recounts his own escape attempt. Around five months in, he and a friend walked for two hours, until they came upon another camp, where they were intercepted by a rifle-wielding man in a balaclava and a soldier’s cap, who promptly put them to work in nearby poppy fields. Javier never mustered the courage to flee again. He was afraid of wild animals, of falling off a cliff at night, of getting lost, of running into the rival cartel – and above all, of being caught by the overseers.

Javier tells the story of another man who made it as far as Yoquivo, the nearest village, about a three-hour walk away, where the bosses got most of their supplies. It had around 135 inhabitants at the time. At the village shop, the escapee tried to trade his mobile phone for food. The shopkeeper asked him to wait, disappeared inside, and phoned the camp bosses. As punishment, the runaway was dunked several times in the stream, and then tied to a tree, naked, for an entire day.

The captives worked on eight different plots of land that all belonged to the same family. Within this vast criminal setup, there were social hierarchies. Multiple survivors told us about men and women who were paid to undertake unforced labour for short spells during the harvest season. They mostly hailed from Sinaloa, and may have been relatives or friends of the camp operators. Every time such a group arrived, Javier would beg the overseers to send him back with them. “They’d say to me: ‘No, we’ll take you back, you’ll be getting out soon. You’ve already earned a good amount, we’re going to pay you. Or you can take some land.’”

These interactions always left Javier especially depressed. He’d have dreams about being back home, but without his wife. A few times he convinced the guards to lend him a phone to call her, in exchange for cigarettes or performing errands. When he tried to explain his situation, she never believed him. She suspected that he had found another woman. She threatened to find someone else as well.

To cope with the pain, Javier would tally the wages he was owed. “I dreamed of how all this money could buy us a little house, clothes for the children, and food.” These thoughts even spurred him on to work harder. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t know what to feel when the police rescued him. He was going to see his wife and children, but he was no longer a creditor. The fantasy that had given meaning to his life for three years had melted away.

Javier returned home empty-handed, his pride even more broken than it had been on that fateful day he went to the railway tracks. His family no longer pay much attention to him. In fact, they are angry that he abandoned them. He doesn’t know how to convince them that he was held by force, against his will. Each time his wife gets drunk, she takes it out on him all over again, blaming him for everything that happened. He responds helplessly: It’s over, it’s in the past, don’t do this.

“It would be better for me not to remember anything,” Javier told us near the interview’s end, when we asked about his future plans.

A few days after the rescue, Andrés’ father finally arrived in Ciudad Cuauhtémoc to pick him up. Unlike other victims’ relatives, who wept with joy to see their long-missing sons and fathers, he seemed angry. After a formal greeting, he said: “Tell me the truth, loco. Are there going to be any problems? Could something happen to us?”

“I have no idea,” Andrés replied.

“Tell me straight up if we’re in danger, so we can get out of here quickly… ”

The two of them caught the bus back to their village, feeling nervous and uneasy. His father repeatedly asked him if they might be killed. Andrés could only tell him to be quiet.

Two years on, he was still looking over his shoulder. His life had become peripatetic: every so often he relocated to a new house, or a new town. He only visited his children, who lived with their mother, at night – “like a criminal” – and always left by dawn. Indeed, he lived in fear of arrest. If an old report were to surface and expose his connection to the mountain camps, he thought, no one would believe the truth. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t been rescued. “I would have preferred to escape,” he told us when we interviewed him one afternoon in June 2021, after his shift as a butcher at a supermarket in Mexico’s far north. “Right now I’d be a normal person, just like anyone else.” He agreed to speak on the condition that we conceal his identity.

Andrés’ ordeal in the Sierra Tarahumara had left him very unstable, as we learned during the period of our correspondence. He would call us from the side of a highway somewhere, and then vanish for days, before reappearing in Acapulco or Mexico City. But he could also be exceptionally lucid. During seven months of captivity, he had closely observed his surroundings, absorbing as much information as possible. This was because of a story he had read many years earlier in Reader’s Digest, about two black slaves chained together and forced to work on a railway line. “The slaves began to plan their escape, watching the guards’ movements – when they changed shifts, when they were allowed to rest, and at what point they might let them slip away,” he recalled. Andrés close study of the camp enabled him to describe the forced labour operations in the Sierra Tarahumara in unequalled detail.

Andres’ story, as told in his official statement, begins like many others. He was drinking a soda outside a convenience store in Chihuahua City, waiting to catch a bus back to his village, when a truck pulled up. The man in the passenger seat – “dressed in ranch-style clothing, with a sturdy build and a moustache” – asked if he knew how to set up fence posts. If so, there was a job for him near Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, and a free ride there to boot. I’ll save myself the 100 pesos for the bus, thought Andrés. He took a seat in the back among a few other men.

The truck hadn’t even left Chihuahua when the police stopped them. Officers made all the men get out and asked them if they’d been drinking, what they were carrying, what their names were – until the moustached foreman intervened. After some money exchanged hands, a senior policeman appeared and told the other cops to “get the hell out of there”.

It is a damning detail to include in a prosecutorial report: a complaint hidden within another complaint. The real story is even more shameful. Andrés told us that the police themselves had delivered him to the recruiters: they had accosted him at the bus stop, on the pretext of running a background check, given him a beating and then handed him over. When a senior prosecutor read as much in the text that his assistants had prepared, he ordered them to amend the account. In the version that made it into the case file, the police merely accept a bribe.

The truck drove on for a long while, almost without slowing down, before turning onto a dirt road. When the vehicle could go no further, the captives were told to get out. Andrés glanced around: “All I could see were hills and trees.” From there they walked for several hours into the heart of the mountains. They smelled burning wood long before arriving at the base camp, which was laid out around a large cave, inside which “there were a few iron sheets for cooking, a stone countertop, and a storeroom for food”.

When some of the captives went behind the counter, the armed men kicked them out. “They haven’t even done a lick of work and they already want to eat. The food is for those who’ve already got shit done,” one said. A short while later, Andrés recalled, hundreds of people came down the path that the captives had just descended. At the cave, they were each given a plate, a spoon, a few beans and some tortillas.

The next day, Andrés’ group was made to walk for three hours to fetch blankets that had been stashed in covered pits. Each of them lugged a pile of 10 or so blankets back to base camp. That evening the guards explained their duties: “Don’t panic, guys. We’re not going to kill you. You are here to work your asses off. If you work hard, there won’t be any beatings, you will have a lovely time.”

Their daily routine was numbing and miserable. They came out of their caves at 4:30 AM, did a roll call, were allowed to use the toilet, and were then led into the mountains. “As soon as we arrived at the fields, they would shout: ‘Bend over, get to work.’” Breakfast was served at about 10 AM, back at the cave; it lasted five or 10 minutes. While the stragglers finished their meals, the others filled jugs with water or loco. Then they returned to work the fields until sundown.

As a mercy, their shifts began later when they had to carry large loads – around 5:30 or 6 AM – but often only ended at 2 AM or 3 AM the following morning. They walked for between six and eight hours through the mountains, back and forth. During these endless, pack-mule journeys, Andrés often considered suicide. “I would think: ‘I might as well throw myself off the cliff – to hell with it, it’s easier to die here, right now, while I’m not so fucked up.’ You didn’t see it as suicide, but as a release, as setting yourself free.”

He even witnessed murder: “We often carried very heavy water jugs – as much as 60 litres – uphill, on narrow paths that barely had space for a single person: there was a sheer drop on one side and the rock face on the other. One man refused to go up the slope with his load. So a supervisor came over, punched him in the face, gave him a massive kick, and threw him into a nearby stream. He floated down to a spot where several currents met, forming a sort of whirlpool. From higher up, we watched him drown. They brought us back down for the water jugs, but his body was abandoned.”

In all, Andrés lived in three different camps and worked in five. Like the chained slave from Reader’s Digest, he stored food, and did favours for the guards, including watching over other captives and slaughtering cows. If he kept his wits about him, it was by escaping into his own mind. “They saw me as a tame chicken, but I had something they couldn’t access: what I was thinking.”

Andrés recalls that, five days before the rescue, the camp supervisors appeared more alert and better armed, with rifles and grenades. They spoke of a “massacre” at another camp. When the police arrived, Andrés heard a gunshot, which made him think the moment had come: “They’re going to execute us.” After everything had settled down, the authorities asked him to find captives in other parts of the forest. Apparently he knew his way around better than they did.

“Go and get them,” they said.

“No, let’s go together,” he replied.

“No, you go, we’ll wait here for you. Are you scared or what?”

“Well, if you lot with guns are in a panic, do you think I won’t be as well?”

Andrés didn’t conduct a search, and neither did the police.

La Noria, also known as Vistas Cerro Grande, is a suburb tucked away on the southern outskirts of Chihuahua City, at the foot of the Cerro Grande mountain. It is an area infamous for disturbing news stories, blighted by poverty and plagued by drugs, short on formal employment and neglected by the state. All of this makes it an ideal recruiting ground for cartels. A foreman can prey on any number of debt-ridden addicts, cash-strapped young fathers and seasonal labourers struggling after the harvest.

Five of the 21 survivors were initially poached from Vistas Cerro Grande. In April 2019, Hipólito was roaming the neighbourhood in search of work when a truck stopped in front of him. “I was looking to scrape together enough for some nappies and a pint of milk. They gave me 1,000 pesos to put up a fence. That was all that I earned in seven months of captivity. In return I lost my family. I lost everything. Now I live in the dark.”

He never won back his wife’s trust after his rescue. She never fully believed that a cartel had kidnapped him. She thought he’d left her for another woman. She didn’t even come to pick him up from the prosecutor’s office; he went home on a bus with a trafficker and a foreman who the authorities had granted victim status. “We arrived, looked around, and found nothing,” Hipólito said. “Empty houses, no families. You could say we left the small hell only to enter the big one.”

His wife couldn’t – or didn’t want to – deal with someone who had developed an addiction to crystal meth while in captivity. She left, taking their two girls with her. He did not recover from her departure. A relative told us that he tried to kill himself several times: by hanging, with pills. One night in 2021, two years before his death, we found him on the backstreets of La Noria; he was about to climb down into the bed of a dry stream filled with rubbish. During our subsequent interview, he referred to himself as a beast of burden, a horse, a rag, a branch, a pig.

“They’d give you an ass-kicking that left you knocked out for days,” he said. “I had no say in anything, I had to do whatever they told me.... We were simply animals. In that place life had no value.”

At one point, he leaned towards the mobile phone we were using to record the interview: “If she hears this on the TV or wherever it’s going to be shown, I want to send a greeting to my sweet wife. Forgive me, my love. This is what really happened, Lorena. I love you and I care for you so much, my Lore. Believe that I’m so proud of you for everything. I’m leaving those two bright little stars in your care. I love them. Thank you.”

In the early hours of 15 July 2023, almost exactly four years after his rescue, Hipólito was found beaten to death on the streets of the Granjas del Cerro Grande neighbourhood. There was a news article about it in a local newspaper; it consisted of five lines. His life, from his capture onwards, amounted to a single sentence.

The day he was taken away, Hipólito had climbed into the truck with four neighbours, three of them barely out of their teens: Bryan, David and Brandon. Bryan’s mother, who knew he was craving money to buy a truck, tried desperately to stop him going, right up to the very last moment. “Instead of taking shortcuts, come and work with me in a maquiladora,” she pleaded. After this fell on deaf ears, she confronted the foreman, Licho, who said it was too late: her son had already spent his advance of 1,000 pesos, on drugs and essentials for the trip.

There was nothing more she could do. Bryan had recently turned 18; he didn’t need her permission to leave home. Licho comforted her. “The boys are clearing a plot of land in the mountains so a school can be built. Don’t worry, they’ll be back soon.” He promised weekly updates, via Brandon’s mother, Elvira, who had packed lunches for the journey.

“It was all lies,” Bryan’s mother told us in August 2024. “They never answered Elvira’s calls. They said there was no mobile service. Every night I’d go to Elvira and ask her: ‘Have you heard anything?’”

Three months after Brandon left, another teenager who had gone with him turned up unannounced on Elvira’s doorstep. He had escaped from their camp in the mountains, where the boys were sleeping in caves and extracting opium gum in exchange for drugs. Dismayed by the news, the two mothers visited Licho’s house, which was up on the hill. The foreman assured them that the boys were fine; they would be coming back soon. But his drunk, wheelchair-bound father interrupted the conversation to say, tearfully, that he too had lost a son in those fields – the boy had been drowned as punishment.

Before the families could report Licho to the police, Bryan escaped on foot with a friend. “He turned up looking worse than a beggar,” his sister recalled. “His sleeves were torn, his trainers were full of holes, and he had no socks. There was a fungal infection on his hands, which were black, all burned. Because he rolled up his trousers, his legs were burned. Because they didn’t bathe out there, he was covered in scabies.”

Bryan never spoke about what he went through. When someone asked him about it, he just shrugged his shoulders. “He shut himself off from the world,” his mother told us. Two childhood photographs of him hung on the wall of the living room where we conducted the interview: one from nursery and another from primary school. He looks happy in both. His hair is combed, his uniform spotless. What had happened to to the mischievous kid who used to pretend to be Spider-Man? To the teenage heartthrob who practised parkour? Now he was a zombie.

These days Bryan’s family devote themselves to protecting him from himself. He has tried to commit suicide multiple times; he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. His mother was aware that her son’s case was not an isolated one. “It’s awful that they’re out there taking people away, and on top of that poisoning them, stuffing them with drugs. I don’t even know what to think.”

Brandon only came home much later, after the July 2019 rescue. Not yet 18, he returned in a state of madness. “They brought him here themselves,” Hipólito told us, referring to the traffickers. “Because his family reported him as disappeared, there were police investigations and all that fuss. Things were getting dicey with the government, so they had to let him go.”

Hipólito said that, at first, Brandon had been “easygoing, a hard worker, a good conversationalist – he could hold his own in a debate”. But as time went on, the boy was subjected to a lot of abuse. When we asked if that abuse was sexual, Hipólito refused to answer: “I’m not going to talk; I’ll hold my tongue. I’ll die without saying a word.”

Later that day, we found Brandon himself sitting on the sidewalk in front of a corner store next to his house. At our prompting, he began recounting what happened: the trip to the mountains; the “drug traffickers with weapons” who forced them to work from 5 AM until 8 PM; how two people were shot for trying to escape. But as he went on, his account became filled with fantasy and delirium: spaceships, kings and queens, zodiac signs and planets, Jesus Christ and the Virgin of Guadalupe.

When we met him again three years later, his house had been set on fire – perhaps because of a dispute about drug debts, or in an act of revenge; it was not entirely clear. Plastic sheets and pieces of wood covered the windows. Outside, there were sacks of rubbish and heaps of soil, tyres and a car seat, a ruined sofa. Through the open door we could see clothes piled on the floor.

Brandon’s skin was damaged. “I cut myself. I need to do so to feel a bit of pain, so I can breathe,” he said. His brother approached, evidently high. He wept over Brandon’s fate, and that of Elvira, who had been left mostly non-responsive after unsuccessful brain surgery. Some young people passing by stopped to listen to our conversation, too. They mentioned other locals who had been through the caves. It seemed that everyone knew someone who had been abducted. That guy over there… Ask that one… The other guy…

One youth said he had been going to the caves of his own volition since the age of 17. They used to pay him up to 8,000 pesos for six weeks during the harvest season. But then bad things started happening. “I’d heard that sometimes they didn’t pay their workers, or that they held them there for a long time.” That’s why he stopped going.

The investigation was mishandled from the outset. Sources with access to the investigation file told us that it was poorly compiled, and that statements from key witnesses and earlier victims had been omitted. Only five arrest warrants were ever issued. In 2023, after the first public prosecutor assigned to the case requested a leave of absence, it fell to Carlos Reyes Chaparro, a 21-year-veteran of the judicial system, to take it on. He told us that he “knew absolutely nothing” about the crimes.

By the time Chaparro was put in charge, the only individual ever arrested in the case was already in state custody. Henry Giovanni Velázquez Barrera, alias El Chiapas, had found out about the rescue raid on Facebook, when scrolling on his phone at his home in Vistas Cerro Grande, where he lived with a two-year-old daughter. The news had not particularly worried him; he was confident of not being arrested. A month later, when his employers asked him to bring more men and supplies into the mountains, he agreed. Even after an arrest warrant for him was issued, Henry kept up his recruitment and transport business, until June 2022, when the police captured him almost by chance: he was travelling in a van that was stopped at a checkpoint for a random inspection.

The trial of El Chiapas began in June 2024. While six freed captives identified him as their recruiter, only three, including Andrés, came forward to testify against him. After three weeks, he was sentenced to 22 years and six months in prison for human trafficking, specifically forced labour. When we interviewed Henry that August, at Social Rehabilitation Centre Number 7 in Cuauhtémoc, the 47-year-old seemed resigned to his fate: “That’s how the law is here. What can one say? Nothing. Just keep quiet.”

The Mexican constitution stipulates that a person may be held in pre-trial detention for a maximum of two years. This law is, of course, routinely violated: thousands have rotted behind bars for far longer without getting their day in court. But incredibly, El Chiapas’s judicial right was respected. A year after the first trial, he was sitting for a second, on separate charges, brought in 2023, of trafficking Rarámuri people from Guachochi. At the same time, his initial 22-year sentence was being appealed; a final ruling had not yet been given. So, when the two-year period of pretrial detention pertaining to the second trial expired, on 3 July 2025, he was allowed to walk out of Social Rehabilitation Centre Number 7. When he failed to turn up for a hearing of the second trial the next day, he officially became a fugitive. By then it was too late. The sole defendant in the case of forced labour in the Sierra Tarahumara had fled.

None of the survivors we interviewed ever received psychological treatment. Nor did their families. Some of them had not even been informed that a trial of El Chiapas was underway, let alone that he had been released on a technicality.

By July 2025, when El Chiapas walked out of prison, at least five of the 21 men rescued in 2019 had died in acts of violence, or from chronic diseases.

Ezequiel Barrera Huizar died in November 2019, just four months after the rescue. He suffered from type 2 diabetes. Alcohol had exacerbated his hepatitis C condition. His family suggested to us that the true cause of his death was the lasting trauma of all the punishments he had received in captivity.

Sergio González Cruz, who appeared at the Las Estrellas checkpoint in July 2019, died in May 2022, two weeks short of his 36th birthday. His official cause of death was asphyxia by hanging.

Ernesto Hernández Porras died in November 2023, aged 44. His official cause of death was septic shock resulting from pneumonia. According to his death certificate, he had been suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis for several months.

José González González died of a traumatic brain injury in June 2024, two months shy of his 40th birthday.

Hipólito Ponce de León González was beaten to death on the streets of Vistas Cerro Grande in July 2025, aged 41.

Neither the federal nor the Chihuahua state authorities had carried out preventive actions to help other people avoid what the 21 rescued men had gone through. An official from the prosecutor’s office told us that he believes several camps are still operational in the mountains around Yoquivo.

Nothing has changed in Vistas Cerro Grande. Between 2021 and 2025, on just the one street where Hipólito lived, we met five other young people who had been lured into the mountains. They alluded to other neighbours who had been similarly deceived.

El Chiapas remains on the run.

After interviewing Andrés, we showed him the photograph that the state agents took at the Las Estrellas checkpoint after the big rescue operation. At first glance, the men all looked alike. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he began to recognise individuals. He remembered details, nicknames: El Azul, El Neto, El Oaxaca, El Rocker.

“This guy cried every day,” he said of a man wearing a Superman sweater. They called him Torreón, or Rambo. “Every day he’d say: ‘Damn it, I want a hamburger. I used to eat and work out, I used to cycle all the time, I was really in shape.’”

He pointed out another man in the second row, wearing a blue cap: “This guy really wanted to listen to Guns N’ Roses.”

El Porras, in the last row: “He was cut up thinking about his three-year-old daughter – he wanted to see his little girl.”

El Chivo, in the first row: “He was always complaining. He wanted to beat the shit out of the men who captured us, but he was old. He said he had very pretty daughters.” The other captives called him uncle, or father-in-law.

“You look at this and see a rescue photograph, but we also see it as a photo of humiliation. We don’t look like ourselves; we don’t look like people,” Andrés said when he finally glanced up from the image.

“If you look closely, we’re all in shreds – we look like, What? What do you mean, a photo? What do you want to prove? Only a few, if you look closely, are happy.”

This is an edited version of a longer investigation by the Quinto Elemento Lab team. The original story in Spanish can be read here.