Andrés Mendoza

Andrés Filomeno Mendoza Celis was born on 29 November 1947 in Zimatlán de Álvarez, Oaxaca, Mexico. Little verified information about his parents or childhood has been made public. He later moved to the Mexico City metropolitan area and for more than 30 years lived in a house on Margaritas Street in the Lomas de San Miguel neighbourhood of Atizapán de Zaragoza, State of Mexico, where he also rented rooms to a family.

No details of Mendoza's schooling or formal education have been made public in reputable sources.

Mendoza worked for several years as a butcher at a slaughterhouse preparing meat for human consumption in Tlalnepantla, State of Mexico. Investigators said this experience gave him knowledge of how to cut and dismember bodies. In 2015 he served as president of the citizen participation council (Consejo de Participación Ciudadana) of his neighbourhood during the municipal administration of Ana María Balderas Trejo. Photographs found in his home showed him at political events, and prosecutors said he used his community role to offer women help, groceries or work.

Mendoza was arrested on 15 May 2021 after Reyna González Amador, 34, disappeared on 14 May. Her husband, a police officer, went to Mendoza's house, returned with a patrol unit, and officers found her dismembered body in a hidden room. Excavation of the property uncovered thousands of human bone fragments under concrete floors, more than 4,000 by 2022, linked to at least 19 people: 17 women, a child and a man. Officers also found identity cards, clothing and belongings of women, video and audio recordings, and notebooks with names, dates and descriptions, one entry dated 1994. Prosecutors said the true number of victims could exceed 30. In his statement Mendoza said he met most of his victims in bars in Tlalnepantla, invited them home, and stabbed them. Some reports said he admitted to cannibalism.

Mendoza received eight convictions between March 2022 and February 2024. In March 2022 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the femicide of Reyna González Amador. On 17 October 2022 he received 55 years for another femicide. On 18 January 2023 he was sentenced to 92 years for femicide, homicide and the disappearance of a woman and a child. During 2023, further 55-year sentences were handed down on 29 March, 10 July, 23 August and 6 December. On 8 February 2024 an eighth sentence included reparation payments to victims' families. Media reports said his combined sentences exceeded 400 years.

Mendoza lived alone in his Atizapán house for decades. No marriage or children have been documented in reputable sources. After his death, reports said authorities were searching for a sister to hand over his remains, and that no relative had come forward to claim the body.

The Atizapán case became a national symbol of femicide and of failures to investigate disappearances of women in the State of Mexico. Many of the victims worked in bars and service jobs, and several families had reported them missing years earlier without result. Forensic identification of the remains continued for years, and when he died campaigners said the full number of victims might never be known.

In June 2022 Mexico's Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation produced the documentary miniseries "Caníbal: Indignación total", broadcast on Las Estrellas, examining the case from his arrest to the forensic work at the house. El Universal columnist Javier Tejado Dondé, involved in the series, reported that Mendoza had been influenced by the film The Silence of the Lambs; psychologist Feggy Ostrosky, who interviewed him, rejected that claim, saying he told her he only watched Mexican films.

Mendoza died on 29 October 2026, aged 78, at the Centro Penitenciario y de Reinserción Social in Tenango del Valle, State of Mexico, where he had been held since 2021. State of Mexico security secretary Cristóbal Castañeda Camarillo confirmed that he died during the night and that he had been housed in an area for older and vulnerable inmates. The preliminary cause was given as complications of existing health problems, with reports citing hypertension, type 2 diabetes and respiratory illness. An autopsy was ordered and no final forensic finding has been made public. Reports said his body had not been claimed by relatives.