La Gallera: Los Zetas’ extermination camp in northern Veracruz, Mexico

Since 2006 and the official fight against drug trafficking in Mexico which has left at least 116,000 people missing and 500,000 people dead, clandestine spaces and traces of violence left by mass disappearances have multiplied and with them the searches for missing persons. I describe here a specific clandestine space of disappearance in the north of Veracruz, called “La Gallera,” which was an “extermination camp” of the cruelest kind, created by Los Zetas Cartel. In February 2020, I joined the 5th National Brigade for the Search for Missing Persons with many collectives of family members from many states. But this “clandestine cemetery” saw multiple exhumation processes before we arrived in February 2020. I will cross-reference my ethnographic observations of these searches with journalistic and documentary sources, as well as elements from an interview with Maricel Torres, representative of the collective Familiares en Búsqueda María Herrera Poza Rica, to show the complexity of exhumations and the forensic, analytical and sensitive challenges. Then I will make a historical reconstruction of Los Zetas that expanded in northern Veracruz in order to propose a contextual analysis necessary to understand the criminal logics of the perpetrators and the repressive logics behind the human remains.