The Cartel, the Stolen Newborn, and the Mother Left for Dead

L
eslie Godínez Carillo had one dying wish as she lay on a bloodstained tarp in a squat, green house on the outskirts of Juárez, Mexico. In a scene straight from a horror movie, Carillo’s stomach was savagely cut open, blood everywhere. But, according to investigators, she managed to ask in her last moments, “Can I hold the baby?”

The seconds-old infant was placed on Carillo’s chest. She’d waited for the past seven months to meet her son, but it only lasted for a moment. The baby was taken away. And Carillo was brutally stabbed to death, her body tossed into a shallow grave that had been dug in the backyard behind the house. 

It was Martha Alicia Méndez Aguilar, known on the streets of Mexico as La Diabla or the Devil, who allegedly masterminded the rudimentary cesarean section on Carillo, according to court documents and interviews with an American Intelligence official and a Mexican police officer who investigated the crime. Méndez Aguilar is accused of working that day with at least four accomplices, including a 16-year-old — Maria, who is in protective custody — and a 19-year-old named Joselin. (Maria’s name has been changed in this story for her protection.) Without medical training, someone in the group was guided by a nurse on a smartphone screen giving instructions on how to extract the infant, according to court documents.

The plan, according to a statement made by Maria, was to take the newborn to a middleman waiting at a nearby superstore who would take the baby boy in exchange for payment. (Méndez Aguilar denies being the mastermind of the operation. She later told cops that she waited outside of the house until Joselin and a young man in a hoodie came out with the baby and told her to take him to the store, but she refused. Méndez Aguilar claimed an “older man” threatened to pin the whole thing on her if she didn’t cooperate.)

Next, the newborn would be transported across the border in El Paso, Texas, where a buyer would be waiting. The going price for a stolen child? As much as 250,000 pesos or roughly $14,000 each, according to an American intelligence official and a Mexican investigator.

But Carillo’s son was having trouble breathing. According to the Mexican investigator and court documents, it was the nurse who told Méndez Aguilar to take the baby to the hospital. Méndez Aguilar later told cops it was her decision — that the infant wasn’t sick and that she wanted to save him from being taken away.

Once they got there, Méndez Aguilar said the baby was hers. The medical staff called police, who arrived to arrest Méndez Aguilar.

Méndez Aguilar has been accused of orchestrating an insidious human trafficking ring that started back in July targeting indigent pregnant women. Carillo was one of multiple alleged cases, according to a statement from the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). The Trump administration has claimed Méndez Aguilar was affiliated with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), considered by the Mexican government to be one of the most powerful cartels in Mexico. (Méndez Aguilar has disputed being part of CJNG.) 

Carillo’s death follows a long pattern of violence against women in Juárez. And the brutal alleged scheme to sell newborns fits into a larger web of illicit operations that range from the mundane to the truly heinous. Estimated to control roughly $20 billion in assets, CJNG has moved beyond cocaine and fentanyl trafficking to systemic extortion of agricultural industries from avocados to poultry to illegal fuel siphoning and deceptive timeshare schemes. This year, federal authorities in the U.S. targeted 13 companies linked to the cartel’s timeshare fraud schemes.

“This is one example of what terrorist cartels will do to diversify their revenue streams and finance operations,” Joe Kent, NCTC director, said in a September press release announcing Méndez Aguilar’s arrest. “NCTC remains committed to disrupting all aspects of terrorist cartels and their operations. And in this case, the lives of innocent women and children depended on it.”

IT’S LATE OCTOBER, AND I’M WALKING across the Bridge of the Americas, the concrete structure on the U.S.-Mexico border connecting El Paso and Juárez. I’ve teamed up with Katarina Szulc, a Canadian investigative journalist who covers Mexican cartels. In August, Szulc broke the story of pregnant women being killed in Juárez on her Substack and podcast Borderland: Dispatches, which gets hundreds of thousands of views. We’re heading to Juárez to talk to Carillo’s mother and a Mexican police officer. We enter Mexico with little more than a cursory glance from a border guard sitting next to a metal detector. In the parking lot, we meet up with a friend of Szulc’s, who drives us in a 1990s-era SUV into town.

Juárez is gritty and industrial with a reputation for violence. It smells of diesel, fried everything, and dust. There are maquiladoras throughout the border town — factories where an endless, churning supply of workers builds auto parts and computers. It’s impossible to drive a mile without seeing convoys of white school buses purchased from Canada and the United States taking workers to the assembly lines.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, a 1994 accord between the United States, Canada, and Mexico to eliminate most tariffs and create a free-trade zone in North America, transformed Juárez into a global manufacturing hub. Jobs in the factories led to a population boom as thousands migrated — many of them young women who lacked job prospects in rural Mexico  — to Juárez seeking work. Women, who at one point made up around 70 percent of the total workforce, were often paid significantly less than their male counterparts. While jobs and trade grew, the city’s infrastructure and public services struggled to keep pace. 

It wasn’t long before the women of Juárez began to disappear, their dead bodies discovered across the city. More than 2,526 women and girls from 1993 to 2023, according to a UN report, were victims of murders so savage and systematic they adopted a new word for it: femicide. As we drive through the city, it is impossible to miss the pink rectangles with black crosses painted on walls and lampposts. Each where missing or killed women were last seen or known to be.

This crisis began a full decade before Carillo was even born. For 30 years, the high-risk environment for women in Juárez has been a known problem, yet in spite of years of organizing and activism, little has changed in terms of policy, government overhaul, or the operation of law enforcement. In Mexico, around 10 women and girls are killed every day by intimate partners or other family members, according to the United Nations. The likelihood of conviction is minimal, given that the national impunity rate stands above 95 percent. 

While women are routinely killed in Mexico, Carillo’s death marks a horrifying shift. The victims of this alleged ring were being targeted specifically for their pregnancies and murdered so that criminals could gain access to their babies, a scheme so gruesome it shocked even the Mexican authorities.

Stefano Ritondale, a former Army intelligence officer who now tracks cartel developments as All Source News on X and works for Artorias, an AI-driven intelligence firm, says Méndez Aguilar’s alleged cell was following the same playbook as kidnapping cells in Northern Mexico, but in a more brutal way. “There needs to be a conversation about how Mexican cartels have normalized violence,” Ritondale says. “And if this story isn’t the shock that wakes people up, that is a damning statement in and of itself.”

Szulc got a tip in August about pregnant women being kidnapped and murdered and their newborn babies getting trafficked to families in El Paso. The 24-year-old former journalist’s investigative scoops on cartels and corruption attracted the attention of the podcast company Ironclad. A celebrity on the cartel beat, her show is appointment listening for those tracking border news. When we cross back to El Paso, Szulc gets recognized by an American border agent who is a fan. 

At first, Szulc didn’t believe the tip. But her source sent images, names, and details. Szulc learned Méndez Aguilar’s phone contained contacts from both the Juárez Cartel and CJNG and an American living in El Paso who acted as a middleman. 

“This became really clear that this was a widespread operation that transcended the border,” Szulc says.

After crossing into Juárez, we head to a local brunch spot to meet with one of the Mexican police officers familiar with the case. We tuck into a corner table near the front, out of earshot of the other diners. A waiter catches wind of a snippet of our conversation at one point during our two-hour interview and then, for the rest of our meal, avoids the table as the Mexican police officer, who is dressed casually in a flannel shirt and jeans, lays out the case in detail, including how it ties into the cartel’s operations.

TO UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED to Carillo, you first must appreciate the illicit economics of Juárez. As we talk over coffee, the officer explains there are two main factions — La Empresa (the Company) and La Línea (the Line) — that make up the Juárez cartel. (Historically, the Juárez cartel has been separate from the CJNG, though lines are increasingly blurred, believes Szulc.)

During the Biden administration, massive migrant caravans primarily from Central and South America arrived in Juárez looking to cross the Rio Grande. The cartels initially posed as “coyotes” charging to help the migrants cross the border. The fee typically started at $8,000. To make more money, cartel members kidnapped migrants and held them for ransoms of up to $18,000 per person, the Mexican officer explains. The fee can rise up to $50,000 for migrants coming from other continents, according to Border Patrol testimony to Congress in 2024. The Mexican officer tells us his squad rescued 70 people in October 2024 from one safe house in Juárez that could have netted the cartel more than $1 million.

The cartel viewed migrants as a low-risk, high-profit commodity, says the officer, unlike drug shipments that risked seizure. Kidnapping migrants was also difficult to prosecute because most victims returned to their home countries or escaped across the border before they could testify. Without victims, those detained by police were frequently released. The Mexican judicial system implemented an “Anticipation of Evidence” measure in 2014, allowing victims to give their statements to a judge shortly after rescue. This statement could then be used for prosecution, even if the victim subsequently left the country, resulting in some detainees remaining in prison.

All through 2024, the Darién Gap, a critical artery for people heading for the U.S. southern border, saw more than 300,000 migrants passing through. But after the 2024 election, the flow of migrants all but ceased. From January through March 2025, the number of people traversing the gap had plummeted by 98 percent. The United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner recorded only 2,831 crossings, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) recorded more than 2,800 requests for return assistance from migrants stranded in Mexico.

Faced with the sudden loss of millions of dollars in income, the cartels pivoted in the months after the election to kidnapping residents of Juárez. The first half of 2025 saw a 10-year high in kidnapping reports in Juárez, with 36 incidents documented according to Mexican government data analyzed by Insight Crime, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Some of the victims were men lured through social media. The Mexican officer explains how a fake Facebook profile of a woman would arrange a meeting at a specific address in Juárez. When the target got to the address, the cartel was there waiting. After abducting the man, the kidnappers would become violent, cutting off fingers, ears, or nipples to pressure families into paying ransoms quickly, the Mexican officer says. 

The whole operation was run out of the CERESO 3, the state prison in Juárez, according to a statement by Maria to police and the Mexican officer. The officer says members of the La Empresa faction acquired a Starlink satellite internet kit and routed the ransom and catfish calls through call centers in other countries, causing the geolocation data to point to places like India, Bangladesh, or Europe. It was this kidnapping ring that started targeting low-income women last summer, which is how Carillo found herself in the group’s crosshairs.

AFTER MEETING WITH THE MEXICAN officer, we head across the city to meet with Carillo’s mother, Mirta, at a law office in an industrial area near the Paso Del Norte, one of six crossings between El Paso and Juárez. The law office is in a simple two-story building. We meet Mirta out front, and we’re ushered into a nondescript conference room.

Mirta arrives wearing a maroon work shirt over a black T-shirt. Her employment pass from a nearby factory still hangs from her neck. Sitting next to her lawyer, she speaks softly as she tells us about her daughter.

Mirta takes out her phone to show us pictures of Leslie singing and dancing at a family party, wiping back tears at the happy memory. She swipes to more recent photos in her phone. There’s her three-year-old granddaughter — Leslie’s first child. Mirta remembers her daughter as a good mother and daughter who loved to make spaghetti with Alfredo sauce. She was a homebody who mostly hung around with her mother and family, rarely venturing far from home. 

Leslie fits a long-standing profile of missing women in Juárez: young, impoverished, vulnerable, and looking for work. She lived in the poor outskirts of town near the factories and had been looking for money as she prepared for the birth of her second child. She dreamed of buying a house for her growing family and had plans to get a job at one of the factories after the birth of her son to save for rent or a down payment. Her mother says she also talked about her hope of meeting a wealthy man who could help take care of her and her children. The fathers of her children are “absent,” Mirta says.

Like many young Mexican women, Carillo posted often on Facebook. She shared photos of her growing belly and wrote about how thrilled she was to have another baby and how eager her daughter was to have a little brother. It was through social media that she was contacted by someone inside the CERESO 3 jail this summer.

The message Carillo received was from a person listed with the name Juaritoz. The messages between Carillo and Juaritoz were friendly, explains Szulc, who reviewed the account before it was deleted. Eventually, he asked Carillo to go with his aunt to pick up some money. 

“You’re going to pick up the money and you’re going to deposit it to me,” the message said. 

Carillo would get a portion of the money if she did this handoff. Out of work and in need of cash, the offer was too good for her to pass up. But she was worried.

“Why me?” Carillo wrote back to the man. “And am I going to be in trouble?”

“No, no, no, you don’t worry about it,” the man wrote back, according to Carillo’s mother, Mirta, and Olivia Aguirre, Mirta’s lawyer.

The meeting was set for the night of Aug. 20, but Carillo’s mother forbade her to go on a Wednesday night because she had a daughter to put to bed. The meeting was moved to Thursday afternoon. 

According to a statement Maria later gave to police, she and Joselin picked up Carillo in an Uber and drove to a green house, where they were met by two other women Maria refers to in her statement as Jaime and Amy. Maria, who said she knew Jaime and Amy from a party, said she believed they were a couple but did not know their full names. She described Jaime as having tattoos, a cheekbone piercing, and masculine attire. Amy was thin with maroon hair. After Méndez Aguilar arrived, Maria says all six entered the residence. Once inside, she told cops Jaime and Joselin restrained Carillo and tied her to a bed. “She didn’t ask for help, didn’t scream, and didn’t put up resistance,” Maria told investigators. (A public defender for Joselin declined to comment. She is charged with aggravated femicide and attempted aggravated homicide and has not yet entered a plea.)

“If this story isn’t the shock that wakes people up, that is a damning statement in and of itself.”

Stefano Ritondale, former Army intelligence officer

Maria remembers Jaime stabbing Carillo in the abdomen with a kitchen knife. “I didn’t know they were going to do that to Leslie,” Maria claimed to investigators. “I got scared, and my friend Joselin did, too. Fear of them, we stayed.”

THE MORNING AFTER MÉNDEZ AGUILAR’S ARREST at the hospital, the gruesome scene back at the house was discovered. An autopsy later ruled Carillo sustained stab wounds and died from severe blood loss caused by the removal of her uterus. 

When Méndez Aguilar was taken into custody, the police seized her phone. The Mexican officer says the phone — given to the U.S. government for analysis — proved to be a gold mine of evidence. Included in the contacts, the Mexican officer claims, were Méndez Aguilar’s accomplices, CJNG members, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers. This was how they planned to smuggle the babies across the border, the officer says. Requests for comment to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and CBP were not returned.

The alleged CJNG connection was important because it would tie the operation — at least tangentially — to one of a dozen or so cartels designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations. Under the new FTO framing, U.S. agencies wield more expansive tools, including intelligence, sanctions, and military support to track down the cartels and their affiliates, beyond reliance on traditional criminal prosecutions.

While the Mexican investigators gathered evidence, Méndez Aguilar was released. Members of the La Empresa faction of the Juárez cartel, she said, were waiting for her. She made no mention of CJNG but she told the court a member of La Empresa demanded 300,000 pesos ($16,000) for the baby and threatened to set her up for trafficking if she didn’t pay. “That’s why I’m here,” Méndez Aguilar told the court in September, implying that she wasn’t the mastermind the Trump administration has accused her of being.

Meanwhile, the Mexican anti-kidnapping unit focused on Maria, the teenage accomplice who they learned through informants was being hunted by La Empresa after Méndez Aguilar’s arrest, according to the Mexican officer. He says with data from Méndez Aguilar’s phone, the police geolocated Maria’s phone using her Facebook contacts to a drug house. They raided the house and took the teenager to nearby Chihuahua City to interrogate her.

Maria explained to cops how Carillo was murdered and confirmed the intent to sell the baby to a family in El Paso. Méndez Aguilar called her via WhatsApp on July 17, 2025, asking if she knew any pregnant girls because she had a buyer.

“I’m going to sell them to a gay couple,” Maria said Méndez Aguilar told her. “Get me a ‘paquetito’ (referring to a baby).”

Maria said she met Méndez Aguilar through her son, Martin, who goes by the street name “El Buho” (the owl) and is in CERESO 3 prison. 

Mexican authorities arrested Méndez Aguilar again Sept. 2. Joselin was arrested in December and has not made any statements.

Meanwhile, Carillo’s mother waited for her daughter to return after her Facebook meetup. She tried to call and message, but her daughter’s phone was off. Carillo’s mother went to the police to file a report the next day, but she says they refused to take it, telling her it was likely Carillo was just out with friends. Days after Carillo disappeared, the missing person report was filed on the same day her body was recovered, Mirta tells me.

IN SEPTEMBER, MÉNDEZ AGUILAR ARRIVED IN a Mexican court. She faces charges of aggravated femicide and attempted aggravated homicide against the baby, potentially leading to a sentence exceeding 100 years. She pleaded not guilty and is represented by a public defender. Attempts to reach her and her public defender were not successful. Maria is under police protection as a confidential informant, according to the Mexican officer. A trial is expected to take place at the end of 2026, according to Aguirre. 

While the Mexican side of the story has been covered, little is known about the American middleman, the alleged nexus between La Diabla and the American buyers in El Paso. Méndez Aguilar was en route to meet him, according to the Mexican officer and Maria’s statement, when she detoured to the hospital. 

Szulc received a name for the middleman from the Mexican police officer and confirmed it with multiple American law enforcement sources. A former law enforcement official in El Paso tells Rolling Stone that the man was a known criminal in El Paso. We tried to call a number associated with the suspect, but there was no answer. Calls to the ODNI, the agency that provides oversight to the Intelligence Community, were referred to previous social media posts and press releases. The FBI is now digging into the American side of the case, according to the Mexican officer. (The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.)

“It seemed like there was some sort of agenda in terms of vilifying the southern part of the border as opposed to the very people funding this operation,” Szulc tells me.

After Méndez Aguilar’s arrest, the case was splashed across conservative social media channels, which claimed it as a victory in the administration’s ongoing war against the cartels and targeting of drug traffickers, especially because of the ties they claimed the ring had to CJNG.

But reality is more complicated. 

The “La Diabla” case is evidence of our failed border policies across both the Trump and Biden administrations and the result of a globalized world where powerful, organized groups like drug cartels wield outsized influence. Nothing about the way these cartels operate is rudimentary. They have experts in every field and are adapting faster than the U.S. can counter. Cartels will secure new income streams whenever revenue falters. Carillo’s murder and the kidnapping and attempted sale of her newborn son was the solution to a math problem for the cartels and spun into a propaganda victory for the Trump administration.

But back in the Juárez law office conference room, it is a tragedy. 

At the end of our interview, Carillo’s mother, Mirta, scrolls to the most recent photo of her new grandson. Her daughter might be gone, but there’s a healthy baby boy, who now lives with her and his sister. Mirta describes the family’s new Saturday ritual of sitting on the couch and watching videos of Carillo. The little girl often asks where her mother went. Mirta answers, “Leslie is in heaven.”

— With additional reporting by Katarina Szulc