A masked cartel assassin has come forward in an Italian television interview to claim he personally burned 250 bodies at a remote Mexican ranch where he says more than 500 people were executed.
The self-described hitman, whose face was hidden during the broadcast, told Italy’s RAI public network on Oct. 10 that he earns roughly $220 weekly working for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. He has spent the last 18 months feeding tips to a volunteer search collective hunting for disappeared relatives across western Mexico.
“In the cartel, a hitman always earns the same wage,” he said. “I might kill five people in a single day, but my pay remains the same. A life doesn’t cost much.”
The killer said the cartel made hundreds of victims vanish at and around Rancho Izaguirre, a property in Teuchitlán, a municipality in Jalisco state. He first connected with the Jalisco Search Warriors, a volunteer group, and pointed them toward the alleged extermination site.
“They’ll never find them,” he warned. “If they keep searching, they might find more bodies in the area surrounding the ranch.”
Indira Navarro, leader of the Jalisco Search Warriors, told The Post on Thursday that she first heard of Rancho Izaguirre in February 2025. Anonymous callers — kidnapping victims lured with fake job offers who managed to escape — reached her alongside the cartel operative himself.
A March 5 visit by Navarro and volunteers turned up hundreds of clothing items and human bone fragments, embarrassing Mexican authorities who had dismissed the location. The Jalisco state prosecutor’s office had downplayed the ranch as merely a cartel training ground after a National Guard raid in September 2024, which netted 10 arrests, two rescued kidnapping victims and one dead body.
The bone fragments recovered in March went to the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office but have not been matched to any missing persons. Mexico’s federal Attorney General’s Office, the FGR, later seized control of the case and convicted the 10 cartel members, sentencing each to 141 years in prison in July 2025.
This week the federal prosecutor’s office moved to discredit the assassin’s televised confession.
“Regarding a video in which an alleged member of a criminal group claims to have carried out a mass incineration of people at the property known as Rancho Izaguirre, located in the state of Jalisco, the FGR states that this claim is false,” it said Wednesday, noting that forensics teams had processed 92% of the site.
Navarro rejected that assessment outright. She said the hitman’s guidance had repeatedly led volunteers to locations showing signs of burned human remains, and that his voice was unforgettable.
“He was one of the witnesses who provided us with information,” she said. “Why do I remember him? Because he contacted us again later in [June 2026], and his voice was very distinctive — unmistakable.”
The search leader said the same informant directed her group to a second location in April 2025, across municipal lines in Ahualulco de Mercado. There she said volunteers discovered extensive evidence of cremated bodies.
“At that time, we found a vast number of charred human remains there,” Navarro said, adding that more than 1,000 body fragments were recovered from that site.
Navarro has had no contact with state or federal prosecutors since the hitman’s interview aired, she said. The cartel itself is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. Government, and according to Mexican authorities has operated the Teuchitlán ranch since 2021.
The assassin’s account, if even partially verified, would add to a staggering toll of disappearances linked to Mexico’s drug wars. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel has emerged as one of the country’s most powerful and brutal criminal organizations, expanding its territorial control through extreme violence even as it maintains disciplined internal structures — including, the hitman suggested, fixed wages that do not rise with body counts.
Navarro’s group continues its independent searches as official investigations proceed on parallel tracks that rarely intersect with the volunteers’ work.