Number 8 Juan Hernandez
In July of 2015, Juan Hernandez and his family travelled to Cancun, from San Antonio. Three
days into the vacation, they were visiting the Mayan ruins, at Tulum. While there,
Hernandez told his wife, Karina, that he suspected something had bitten him. His leg hurt and felt
like it was burning. Hernandez would later learn that he’d been bitten by a pit viper, a venomous
snake species found throughout the Americas. He hadn’t felt the attack because the reptile had
sunk its fangs in an area of his leg where he had no feeling due to a previous skin graft. Within a
few hours, Hernandez was in excruciating pain and, as his condition worsened, black and purple spots
started to appear on his body. Hernandez and his wife went to four different hospitals,
searching for one equipped with antivenom. He waited, in agony, for the life-saving medicine to
arrive. By the time it was administered, it was too late. Hernandez bled out, roughly 30 hours
after the bite. In the aftermath, his wife was critical of the country’s medical system which,
she felt, had failed her husband. Number 7 Pat Landers & Karla Baca
In the spring of 2020, during the early stages of the pandemic, 32-year-old Pat Landers and his
girlfriend, Karla Baca, were gunned down while quarantining in Juarez, Mexico. The couple had
met in Texas and had been dating for a few months when travel restrictions prevented Landers from
returning to upstate New York. Baca, a citizen of Mexico, had spent several months outside the
country, and had recently been cleared to start teaching at a primary school in Juarez. The couple
had exited a cellphone store and were driving along the street in a black 2019 Jeep Sahara,
which featured New York license plates. In broad daylight, a hail of at least twenty bullets was
fired upon Landers and Baca. Both were killed as the shots shattered the vehicle’s windshield.
Over a year since the incident, no discernible motive has been found and none of the gunmen
have been arrested. Local police believe that the couple had been collateral victims, caught in
ongoing gangland warfare over control of the drug trade. Since the stay-at-home order, issued in on
March the 23rd, and up until the murder of Landers and Baca, over 100 killings had been reported in
Juarez, according to the KTSM news outlet. Number 6 Giovanni Ramírez
In early May of 2020, Giovanni López Ramírez, a bricklayer from Ixtlahuacán de los Membrillos,
died following excessive force exercised by local authorities. López’s brother, Christian,
pulled his phone out and captured the moment that the police picked him up from the family home,
for allegedly not wearing a mask. In the 96-second video, one officer shouted at Christian to stop
filming while two others violently restrained his brother in the background. Giovanni was
shoved into the rear seat of a squad pickup truck. His family called the mayor, who told
them that they could pick Giovanni up from the municipal jail, the following morning. However,
when they arrived, they were informed that he was at the Civil Hospital of Guadalajara. The family
had been told that he’d been taken to the hospital because the officers “went heavy handed". Upon
arriving to the medical facility, they found that the 30-year-old had passed away from a traumatic
brain injury, while the rest of his body featured lesions as well as a gunshot injury to the left
ankle. Christian released the video of the arrest about a month later. He claimed that Ixtlahuacán’s
mayor, Eduardo Cervantes Aguilar, had offered him over $9,000 but also threatened to kill his family
if he made it public. Within a few days, hundreds of young people protested police brutality
in downtown Guadalajara. They painted graffiti, broke windows and set two squad cars ablaze, to
which the authorities responded with tear gas and other riot-control measures. Mexican actress Salma
Hayek and director Guillermo Del Toro condemned the killing of Giovanni on social media. As more
protests broke out in other areas of Mexico, three officers were arrested on June the 5th of 2020.
Number 5 Andrew Dales In 2009, a young American tourist was savaged
by a crocodile while visiting Cancun. 20-year-old Andrew Dales, originally from Dallas, had gone to
relieve himself at the edge of the local Nicupté lagoon. The area, like other lagoons in Cancun,
featured signs, warning tourists about crocodiles. While less aggressive than other species,
Crocodylus acutus, commonly known as the American crocodile, can grow up to 20 feet and weigh 2,000
pounds. In spite of the warnings, Dales approached the water. A crocodile suddenly snapped at him,
inflicting multiple bite wounds to his leg and neck. Dales also suffered wounds to his head
after the crocodile knocked him to the ground. Fortunately, the reptile relinquished its attack
and Dales’ recovered from his injuries. Number 4 Areline Martinez
In early October of 2020, a young woman from Chihuahua was accidentally shot dead while filming
a fake abduction video for TikTok. 20-year-old Areline Martinez had previously uploaded similar
clips to the social media app which featured her bound, blindfolded and held at gunpoint.
10 or more people were reportedly present as the staged kidnapping was being filmed in the
neighborhood of Rigoberto Quiroz. Martinez and a second fake hostage were struggling while
several men, roleplaying as their captors, were pointing firearms and pretending to attack them.
A .45 caliber handgun then went off and Martinez, a mother-of-one, was fatally shot in the head. The
police were called and most of those present fled the scene, including two men in a Jeep Cherokee,
one of whom was suspected to have shot Martinez. The state’s attorney general
theorized that the shooter had no idea the gun was loaded but emphasized that the legal course
would be followed, including identifying those responsible and determining the origin of the gun.
Number 3 1985 Museum of Anthropology Heist One of the biggest art heists in history
took place in 1985, at Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology and History. It occurred in
the early hours of Christmas Day and the thieves took advantage of the guards being distracted.
Against surveillance protocol, they were all in a single area of the museum, drinking and
celebrating Christmas Eve. The thieves jumped over the fence and entered the building’s Mayan Hall
through an air conditioning vent. They emptied out several display cases and targeted the most
valuable pieces. The thieves made off with 124 small Mayan, Aztec, Miztec, and Zapotec artifacts,
some worth millions of dollars. The heist made national and international news and a number of
theories emerged in the aftermath, proposing a larger conspiracy. Some suggested that the theft
had been orchestrated by the CIA or the KGB, to circumvent a Mexican law that prevented the sale
of pre-Columbian artifacts to private collections. For years, the investigation saw little progress
partly due to the fact that the authorities were looking for professionals. The heist had
actually been perpetrated by amateurs Carlos Perches Treviño and Ramón Sardina García, two
veterinary students in their 20s. In the months leading up to the heist, they’d visited the museum
over fifty times. They took photos, made sketches, studied surveillance patterns and inquired about
which pieces were most valuable. After the heist, Perches and Sardina, fled to Acapulco. An attempt
to negotiate the sale of the artifacts with a middleman would ultimately lead to their arrest,
in June of 1989. In spite of fears that they’d been smuggled out of the country, the vast
majority of archeological pieces were recovered. This topic was first requested by Arin Adams
and has been requested by many others since Number 2 Andrés Mendoza
In May of 2021, a man suspected of being a serial killer as well as a cannibal was
arrested in Atizapán de Zaragoza, following the disappearance of 34-year-old Reyna González.
The woman, wife to a local police officer, had gone to meet 72-year-old Andrés Mendoza.
He was a family acquaintance from whom González had agreed to purchase cellphone parts for her
business. When she didn’t return, her husband went to Mendoza’s residence, a slum dwelling on the
outskirts of the municipality, but wasn’t allowed inside. He returned with more officers and a
series of gruesome discoveries was made after they found González’s hacked body on a table inside.
Mendoza would later claim “I removed the skin from her face because she was very pretty”. Following
his arrest, the former butcher would callously admit to killing several more women since 2001
as well as eating parts of their bodies. He’d meet them at local bars and murdered them once
they refused his romantic advances. After using power tools to smash through the concrete floors,
the police found the remains of at least nine other potential victims,
some of their personal belongings, video recordings of them dying but also a notebook
with the names of 29 women. Even though he’d confessed to murdering and dismembering six women,
the police suspect that Mendoza might actually be among Mexico’s most prolific serial killers. His
trial and the investigation are ongoing. Number 1 Juana Barraza
Juana Barraza, known as La Mataviejitas or Old Lady Killer,
was arrested in 2006 for a series of murders spanning eight years.
Barraza had grown up with an alcoholic mother. She reportedly traded Baraza, for three beers,
to a man who abused her and by whom she became pregnant with a son. Later in life Barraza
developed a strong interest in lucha libre, Mexico’s variant of professional wrestling,
fighting under the name “Lady of Silence”. Her activity as a serial killer began in the late
1990s. By Barraza’s own admission, the trauma of her upbringing influenced her victim selection,
all of whom were women aged 60 or over. She gained their trust, often posing as a government official
offering welfare programs. The women were then strangled or bludgeoned to death before
being robbed. As late as the summer of 2005, the authorities dismissed reports of a serial killer
as sensationalism, an aspect for which they’d subsequently be heavily criticized by the media.
By late fall, the police recognized they were dealing with a killer, whom they suspected was
actually a man disguised in women’s clothes. In January of 2006, the police arrested Barraza
in a borough of Mexico City, as she was fleeing the home of her latest victim, an 84-year-old
woman whom she’d strangled with a stethoscope. Barraza closely resembled a composite model of the
killer’s features and fingerprint evidence linked her to another 10 killings of a suspected 49 in
total. On March the 31st of 2008, she was found guilty on 16 charges of murder and aggravated
burglary, including 11 separate counts of murder. She was sentenced to 759 years in prison.
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