It isn't the disappearance, it's the pulverization. It isn't the revelation, it´s the confirmation. Five young people [four young men and a sixteen year-old girl] who were passing through the streets of Tierra Blanca, Veracruz, were detained, beaten, tortured, burned and ground up in a sugar cane mill on a ranch in Tlalixcoyan, a neighboring town. So a state trooper, a participant in the slaughter, confesses.
In another incident, early on Tuesday, March 1, an unknown number of people were kidnapped from the Peoples' Theater, a property of the municipality of Cuautlancingo, Puebla, during a cockfight involving illegal betting. Among the hostages were two owners of fighting cocks. During the shooting, municipal police did not intervene to prevent it but created a fence around it to conceal it. Hours after the shooting, the remains of a dozen people were found in Yepazotla, in the neighboring municipality of San Andrés Calpan. They were melted in acid in some oil drums and other were cremated. Such was the fate of the owners of the fighting cocks and other participants at the party.
In both cases local police agents were involved in criminal operations.
The person responsible for the events in Tierra Blanca is Marcos Conde, police commander in that region of Veracruz and most trusted by the head of state public security, Arturo Bermudez, who is pointed out by many as the right arm of Governor Javier Duarte.
In the Cuautlancingo case, PAN [National Action Party] Governor Rafael Moreno Valle has tolerated everything with the PAN mayor Jose Felix Casiano. Why wouldn't the mayor have fun with cockfighting in front of city hall! As if lacking evidence, the dead roosters from the event were left outside city hall. The response of the state authorities in the face of the shooting and the disappearance of the people was to arrest six franeleros [car window washers on the streets]! They are accusing them of "making false statements". And the mayor and Governor Moreno Valle aren't poking out their heads to address the issue.
Veracruz governor Duarte shows off state crime-fighting statistics with criminal acts. Between 2014 and 2015 his strategy led to the killing of more than half a hundred criminal suspects. According to official reports, the criminals were shot down in rough clashes with police. But when the state government exhibited photographs of their operations, the suspects appeared with coups de grace and one after the other with weapons in their hands. The photographs are evidence of a simulation, because the police actually had full permission from the state authorities to carry out summary executions.
The parents of the Tierra Blanca young people are right. The responsibility for the disappearance and death of their children does not end with a police agent but with the intellectual authorship by a governor who ordered his security secretary to commit crimes against humanity as an institutional policy to manipulate the statistics of alleged crime fighting.
The policeman Rubén Pérez, a subordinate of Conde, confessed in his statement to the investigative police that young people kidnapped by policemen were taken elsewhere to evade surveillance cameras and then to the El Limón [Lime] Ranch to be beaten with belts and decapitated with axes. They were then cremated and ground up. Conde ordered and witnessed it.
It isn't a revelation, but a confirmation. Torture and disappearance in Mexico are not an act of common criminals, but old police methods as part of their acts of power to maintain control of criminal activities such as extortion, kidnapping, drug trafficking, migrants or stealing oil and gas.
The original responsibility is on those in government offices who have built and covered up this system of criminal operation. Yes, it's the governors. And, yes, they should go to jail.
It's the pulverization of victims and also the pulverization of the institutions. So we go on.
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*Roberto Zamarripa De La Peña is a graduate of Communication Sciences at the Metropolitan Autonomous University, Xochimilco campus. He has been a reporter and editor specializing in political issues. He is the author of the book "Sonora 91, History of Politicians and Police." His stories are included in the anthology "The End of Nostalgia" and "Special Envoys".