Mexican courts back US woman who accused a fake Tijuana clinic of malpractice

The clinic and the surgeon vanished as if they had never existed. Months after undergoing weight-loss surgery at a clinic in Tijuana, Julia Carpenter, a 40-year-old U.S. citizen, began to notice signs that something was seriously wrong with her body. It was 2024. Back in Oregon, where she lives, doctors first diagnosed her with pneumonia and over the next nine months performed three surgeries to repair the damage. During the procedure in Mexico, her intestine was stapled, causing an obstruction at the gastric remnant. In February 2025 she filed a medical malpractice complaint with the Baja California Medical Arbitration Commission (CAMEBC), the body charged with resolving disputes impartially; six months later it rejected her case. The commission refused to review her complaint on the grounds that it had “no jurisdiction.” But the case has now taken a turn. Mexican courts have sided with her: they found she was denied her rights and ordered the commission to accept the complaint.

On September 4, a federal district judge in Baja California overturned that decision as a result of a writ of protection. The judge said the commission violated Carpenter’s human rights by delaying its resolution and ordered it to accept the medical malpractice complaint. The judge also questioned the commission’s decision not to carry out the necessary and relevant analyses when it argued the complaint could not be admitted “because it involved possible criminal offenses.”

Carpenter’s lawyers are also pursuing a criminal case against the surgeon who performed the operation, Mauricio N, and against the clinic that at the time was called Beauty and Light Medical Solutions in Tijuana. They have listed violations of the woman’s rights and a series of inconsistencies in the commission’s actions. “They protect each other, because at the end of the day this Medical Arbitration Commission regulates all the doctors in Baja California. So everyone knows one another. In other words, they wash their hands by saying that, since there could be crimes involved, they’d better dismiss the complaint,” says Javier Bravo of the law firm Bravo y Moncada Abogados. “The Medical Arbitration Commission should have admitted the complaint and dissected the actions. That is, separate the criminal offenses allegedly committed by Dr. Mauricio N and the clinic from the medical malpractice. We are talking about a U.S. citizen who approached an authority seeking justice or to be heard. And yet that authority engaged in excessive silence, as the judge says in her ruling. An administrative silence of more than 110 calendar days,” Bravo explains. The ordinary timeframe for bodies like the CAMEBC to resolve a medical malpractice petition is about 30 days on average.

The CAMEBC, asked by EL PAÍS about the federal judge’s ruling, replied by email that it cannot provide confidential information and reserves the right to offer more information about the case. It also stressed: “As of the date on which these actions were taken, this entity has not been legally, duly or formally notified of any resolution relating to the constitutional proceeding initiated by Ms. Carpenter.”

Between November and December 2023, Carpenter decided to undergo surgery to help prevent health problems she had seen up close in her mother. “The reason I had the surgery was because my mother recently died. She fought a lot for her health because she was overweight and that contributed to many other problems as she aged and ultimately led to her death. I wanted to get ahead of things and try to make sure I would not suffer like she did,” she told this newspaper in May 2025, when her life and that of her husband had been completely transformed as they devoted themselves to her care and to the medical procedures she will have to undergo for the rest of her life.

Regarding her current health, Bravo adds: “Fortunately, she is now well. She has recurring appointments with her doctors, because we must remember that Julia’s intestine was left 20% obstructed for life, which means she will never stop seeing doctors, she will never stop having recurring checkups because of the malpractice performed on her in Tijuana.” Carpenter paid $6,499 in total (just over 113,000 Mexican pesos) for services in Tijuana. She contracted them without knowing a single word of Spanish, so until the procedure in February 2024 she believed she would receive a gastric bypass and a cholecystectomy, which is the removal of the gallbladder. Her lawyers say that in San Diego — where her flight landed and from where she and her husband were taken to Tijuana — she was given an alleged translation of the consent form she would have to sign to be operated on.

However, a couple of months later, when her health problems worsened, her husband contacted a doctor who allegedly supervised the clinic; that doctor refused to share detailed documents about the surgery. She confirmed via email that, according to the records, the procedure had been an ileal-duodenal anastomosis (a technique that directly connects the duodenum, the first part of the small intestine, to the ileum, the last part), and not the agreed-upon bypass. That was the last communication they had with the doctor. They also allege there were several inconsistencies in the process. According to the lawyers, Dr. Mauricio N’s certificate, issued by the National Regulatory Committee of Medical Specialty Councils, (CONACEM) had been expired for four days at the time of Carpenter’s operation.

There are cases similar to Julia Carpenter’s. Last August, data from the CAMEBC itself revealed that up to that point in 2026, the agency had attended to 1,116 people with complaints about medical services, both public and private, in Baja California. About 450 complaints were filed against private doctors. A month earlier, the Tijuana City Hall — 80% of Mexico’s plastic surgeries are carried out in the municipality — launched an alliance between the Tourism and Conventions Committee, the Baja Health Cluster and the Association of Recovery Centers (ACERBAC) to try to regulate medical tourism and the fraudulent clinics that abound in the region. According to local authorities, 97 post-operative care facilities operate in Tijuana and fewer than seven are registered.

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