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Newly released Department of Justice files contain disturbing allegations that at least two young women were murdered at Jeffrey Epstein’s remote New Mexico ranch and buried somewhere on the vast property—claims that have gone uninvestigated. That’s right. Federal and local authorities have never once searched the 7,560-acre compound despite knowing of abuse allegations there for more than 30 years.An email dated November 21, 2019, included in the most recent DOJ document release, states that “two foreign girls were buried on orders of Jeffrey and Madam G” somewhere in the hills outside Zorro Ranch. The email, sent from an encrypted ProtonMail account by someone identifying themselves as “a former staff at the Zorro,” alleges the girls “died by strangulation during rough, fetish sex.”The sender wrote: “What is damning about Jeffrey Epstein is yet to be written. Did you know somewhere in the hills outside the Zorro, two foreign girls were buried on orders of Jeffrey and Madam G?”“Madam G” is understood to reference Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime associate now serving 20 years in federal prison for sex trafficking.The FBI never searched Zorro Ranch. Let me repeat that: The FBI never searched Zorro Ranch. Not when Epstein was arrested in 2019, and several local former staff members finally felt safe to come forward about what they’d seen. Not after his death in federal custody. Not after multiple victims testified to sexual abuse at the property.While federal agents obtained search warrants for Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse and his Caribbean island, the New Mexico ranch—where some of the most serious allegations were centered, and where several curious structures can be seen in aerial photo and video of the property, including what appears to be an industrial-grade landfill—not so for Zorro Ranch. Even a 2019 FBI tip from a retired New Mexico State Police officer who lived near the ranch and reported a "suspicious barn" with what appeared to be a "sally port" (secure double-door entry system like in prisons) and crematorium have gone untouched.New Mexicans want to know why.“We Know Jeffrey Epstein Had Friends in Very High Political Places”Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers, described being brought to the ranch as a teenager. In her unpublished memoir (she wrote two, and one, THE BILLIONAIRE’S PLAYBOY CLUB, remains unpublished, while NOBODY’S GIRL was published last year) included in earlier file releases, she called it “a lavish Mediterranean looking castle” where she was repeatedly assaulted and raped. Annie Farmer testified during Maxwell’s trial about being brought to Zorro Ranch and subjected to sexual assault and rape.Giuffre stated in depositions that Epstein brought in “foreign girls who couldn’t communicate in English,” noting that “Epstein laughed about the fact they couldn’t really communicate, saying that they are the ‘easiest’ girls to get along with.”The newly released DOJ files include photographs captioned “Zorro Aug 2002” showing young women with their faces redacted. Other images show Epstein at the ranch with his dogs. Flight logs document hundreds of trips to the property’s private airstrip over two decades.Despite this evidence, no federal search ever occurred.In August 2018, a year before Epstein's arrest, the ranch's perimeter fence was cut and several buildings were broken into—a burglary in which a gun safe containing an estimated 30-40 firearms, along with antique weapons and lamps, was taken. The timing and specificity of the break-in raised questions: how did supposed trespassers know where to find a gun safe on a 7,560-acre property, and were they removing evidence before an investigation could begin?The ranch's managers, a New Zealand couple named Brice and Karen Gordon who had run the property for two decades, vanished after Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest in 2020. "Nobody knows where they are," one investigator noted. "Some people say maybe New Zealand. Who knows?" Meanwhile, the FBI—armed with legal authority and search warrants for Epstein's other properties in New York and the Virgin Islands—never searched Zorro Ranch at all, even after multiple victims testified to being sexually abused there. The property remained untouched by federal law enforcement until it was sold in 2023 to the anonymous San Rafael Ranch LLC, and still remains unsearched.“We know that Jeffrey Epstein had friends in very, very high political places in New Mexico,” said State Representative Andrea Romero, who is currently pushing for a truth commission to investigate what happened at the ranch. “Why was New Mexico part of this story? But also why was there not a lot of information about that?”A History of Looking AwayEpstein purchased the property in 1993 from former New Mexico Governor Bruce King for approximately $12 million. Members of the King family appear in Epstein’s “Little Black Book” of contacts. Epstein donated money to Gary King, Bruce King’s son, who served as New Mexico Attorney General from 2007 to 2015.After Epstein’s 2008 conviction for sex crimes in Florida, he was not required to register as a sex offender in New Mexico. The state continued to lease him public land—1,200 acres that were part of the ranch property.DOJ emails reveal Epstein’s connections with former Governor Bill Richardson, who allegedly assisted Epstein after his conviction. In a November 2010 email, an Epstein aide wrote that Richardson “has spoken to Governor Crist but he doesn’t have an answer yet.” Richardson’s name appears throughout the files. A woman who filed a civil suit against Epstein alleged in an unsealed deposition that Ghislaine Maxwell sent her to New Mexico to perform a “massage” on Richardson at Zorro Ranch.Richardson, who died in 2023, repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and claimed he only visited the ranch once.The files indicate he was lying.Sold to Unknown OwnersIn 2023, four years after Epstein’s death, Zorro Ranch was sold to San Rafael Ranch LLC—a limited liability company created just one month before the purchase. The sale price has not been disclosed, though the property was originally listed for $27.5 million before the price reportedly dropped to $18 million.The identities of the new owners have never been revealed.The property has been renamed Rancho de San Rafael.The agent of record for the LLC is Charles V. Henry, a real estate attorney in Santa Fe. His office address is the same as the address for the agent of record on the Zorro Ranch LLC, another real estate attorney, now disappeared from the public eye, named Janice M. Ahern. It is not unusual for agents of records on secret LLCs to be their real estate attorneys. What is unusual is having both the seller’s and buyer’s agent in the same office.Historical Context for Child Sex Trafficking in New MexicoNew Mexico has been called New Mexico since 1598—longer than almost any place name in what is now the United States. Despite widespread misperception, the name “New Mexico” comes not from the modern nation of Mexico, which did not exist until 1821, nor from the United States naming the place. Rather, this region was named the Province of Nuevo Mexico by Spanish colonizer, Juan de Oñate in 1598, and the name has remained to this day. Oñate named it after the Aztec city-state of Mexica (modern-day Mexico City), from which both New Mexico and Mexico itself derive their names — New Mexico having been named 223 years before the modern nation of Mexico existed.This territory, roughly the size of modern Germany, spent 223 years as part of New Spain (1598-1821), 25 years as part of Mexico (1821-1846), 66 years as a U.S. territory (1850-1912), and has been a state for only 114 years — and always it was called New Mexico. For the majority of its recorded history as “New Mexico,” it has been a place where Spanish and later Mexican and American authorities governed a vast, remote territory where crimes could be committed far from oversight, often against Indigenous women and girls.And for much of that history, it has been a place where children were taken, sold, used, abused and murdered, by the very wealthy.The Genízaro System: Turning Children Against Their FamiliesIn Spanish colonial New Mexico, Native American children—primarily girls, but also boys—were purchased at rescate (”rescue”) markets in Taos and Santa Fe. Captured in raids or warfare, these children were purchased and placed in Hispanic households as genízaros, a term borrowed from the Ottoman Turkish yeniçeri, or Janissaries—the elite slave-soldiers created through the devshirme system, in which Christian boys were forcibly taken from Balkan villages to serve the Ottoman Empire.The devshirme was explicit in its cruelty: Ottoman officials would sweep through Christian villages every four to five years, demanding lists of baptized boys from local priests. They took children as young as four, as old as eighteen, selecting the smartest, strongest, and most physically perfect. Parents who resisted were punished. The children were converted to Islam, given Turkish names, and trained as warriors. Then, they were sent to slaughter their own families and villages, because their captors knew the people would be too heartbroken to fight back against their lost sons.The genius of the system—if genocide can have genius—was that it created a military force with no loyalty to family or homeland. These boys, torn from their villages, became the instrument of Ottoman expansion, often deployed to conquer the very regions from which they’d been taken.Spain replicated this model in New Mexico. Genízaro boys, kidnapped young and raised in Spanish households, were trained as soldiers and scouts. They became essential to New Mexico’s frontier defense, serving as “shock troops” deployed against the very tribes—Apache, Comanche, Navajo, Ute, Puebloan—from which many of them had been stolen.The Spanish understood what the Ottomans had perfected: a child taken young enough, brutalized sufficiently, stripped of language and identity, could be turned into a weapon against his own people. Families wouldn’t fight as hard if they knew their own children—now armed, now Christian, now loyal to Spain—stood in the opposing ranks.Genízaro settlements like Abiquiú and like my own hometown of Belen were established in the 1700s as buffer communities on the most dangerous frontiers, human shields placed between Spanish colonists and unconquered tribes. These detribalized Indians were given land grants in exchange for military service—sent to fight and die protecting the very system that had enslaved them.A twelve-year-old girl in 1770s New Mexico might have been sold for two horses. A boy, worth half that in trade, could be worth everything as a soldier. By 1793, genízaros comprised nearly one-third of the territory’s population.So when people pretend like the land that is now part of the United States never engaged in the enslavement of Indigenous people, they’re wrong. It did. And Spain, like Epstein, preferred children, because they were easier to break, mold, and control.The Genízaro system wasn’t officially abolished until Mexican independence in 1821, though debt peonage and forced servitude persisted long after. The children simply disappeared into society, their origins becoming a source of shame. The term genízaro eventually became a racial slur used throughout northern New Mexico, the equivalent of the N-word, though many people in recent years have embraced it proudly.History RepeatingThree centuries later, in the same remote landscape, foreign girls who “couldn’t really communicate” were allegedly brought to a compound owned by a man with ties to this land’s governors and political elites—a compound that, despite multiple allegations of abuse and now allegations of murder and burial, has never been searched by law enforcement.The pattern holds: isolated geography, captive children unable to speak the language, powerful men with political connections, and authorities who choose not to see.Epstein’s Zorro Ranch sits in the same high desert where genízaro communities once served as human shields. The land has been used for these purposes before. The infrastructure—geographic isolation, political protection, institutional indifference—was already in place.Calls for a Truth CommissionState Representatives Andrea Romero (D-Santa Fe) and Marianna Anaya (D-Albuquerque) are introducing legislation to create a truth commission with subpoena power to investigate Epstein's 26 years operating in New Mexico.It’s no coincidence that the two United States lawmakers with the courage to demand accountability are both native New Mexicans, and descendants of the Genízaros. They carry the collective scream of the women and children harmed in this land in the name of empire in their very souls, as do I.“This is about justice,” said Romero. “This is about the pursuit of the ability of survivors to have their place of justice in our state—and to make sure it never happens again.”The commission would examine what officials knew, how crimes were reported or unreported, and “how the state can ensure that this essentially never happens again.”But without a search of the property, without knowing who now owns it, without any accountability for why federal agents never set foot on the ranch despite years of allegations, the questions multiply.In a place called New Mexico for 428 years—a place that has been buying and selling children for at least 300 of them—the land remembers what authorities prefer to forget.Genízaros were finally recognized by the New Mexico Legislature in 2007 as Indigenous people.Their descendants are reclaiming that history, transforming a slur into a source of pride, demanding acknowledgment of what happened.And we will find the truth.----Written By Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez