What is happening in Valle de Bravo?

El Diario.mx (August 12, 2014)

By Raymundo Riva Palacio; Translated for Borderland Beat by un vato

I found this article interesting because is shows that the lawlessness in Mexico is beginning to affect the social and economic elite. As the article shows, Valle de Bravo is a favorite retreat for Mexico City's financial and social elite.--un vato.  

Distrito Federal.-- Valle de Bravo is one of the magical cities in the State of Mexico. It possesses a lake where Mexico City's elites show off their sailboats and water ski, race in motocross events and with their $4,000.00 bikes, or ride horses in the mountains. This city has for years been the preferred weekend destination for the capital city's high society.  The town, with winding, cobblestone streets and colonial architecture, has an alpine temperature, which causes chimneys to be lit in the residences. If you have never been to Valle de Bravo, and are thinking about it, don't even think about it. Don't do it.

In Valle de Bravo, they are carrying out kidnappings with a speed that amazes as much as the surrender by the authorities or the inexplicable passivity in attacking this phenomenon , which is spiraling. "We have three active cases," admits the Secretary of Governance for the State of Mexico, Jose Manzur. Those who know what is happening suggest there more.  Activist Isabel Miranda de Wallace said on Tuesday that many people don't report kidnappings in Valle de Bravo, which is why the crime statistics do not coincide with reality in that city.  Recent events support the alarm that has been triggered.

This weekend, several persons who were hiking along its mountain trails were kidnapped.  Last week, a foreign couple who was going to spend the weekend in that town ran into a road block at the entrance to Valle. The men were dressed like Federal Police, but apparently were drug traffickers from Michoacan, and have kept them in captivity since then. The weekend before that, only the payment of millions in ransom money prevented the death of the victim.  "We don't have the capacity to control this", admitted a high level Mexico State government official.  So then, one may add, each person needs to assume responsibility for his own safety.

"The law here can't do anything", a kidnapper told a rescue negotiator. Either the family pays or they (the victims) pay.  The ransom payments are in the seven figures and local authorities have advised those that still waste their time filing criminal complaints -- because they don't have any support from the authorities-- to pay up and prevent the loss of a life. Kidnappers don't worry about local or state authorities. But if the Army or the Federal Police get close to the areas where they are keeping their victims, they will kill them, they warn.

Valle de Bravo today is an archetype of the law of the jungle, but the problems have been incubating since 2010, when the problem of violence tied to organized crime first put an end to the naivete of the people that still went there on weekends. Neither state or federal police did anything to attack the criminals and put a stop to the violence.  Drug cartels are tied to illegal loggers, and they work in uncontrolled criminal tandem. In 2012, employees of Probosque, a decentralized agency attached to the Mexico State government, went there to investigate a report of illegal logging. They ran into a meth lab. The drug traffickers dismembered them. Even then, nothing was done.

The current insecurity in Valle de Bravo got worse at the beginning of Spring, when criminals began to flee from Michoacan. That municipality -- which border Atlacomulco -- President Enrique Pena Nieto's hometown--, is located 74 kilometers from Zitacuaro, where Michoacan's Tierra Caliente region begins, and 15 minutes from Temascaltepec, port of entry for travelers from Arcelia, located in the Tierra Caliente region of the State of Guerrero, 135 kilometers away. Luvianos, the center of drug trafficking in the Mexico State area, is located 165 kilometers from Valle de Bravo.

People who traveled frequently to Valle de Bravo have stopped going to their old vacation sanctuary, which is now in second place in numbers of home robberies. Criminal groups have several patrons there. There is a part that is tied to organized crime, but there is another one that appears to be more local.  A kidnapper, for example, told the negotiator that he was not an evil person, but that he needed money, which suggests economic desperation. The same could be said about what's happening in the highway from Toluca to Valle de Bravo, where people throw stones at cars from bridges to make them stop so they can rob them.

Violence in Valle de Bravo spiraled again after January, when Jose Luis Garduno, plaza chief for the Caballeros Templarios, was captured, and it increased in March. When they arrested Garduno, it was said that he got protection from the municipal police, but that lead was never followed up. It is not a minor detail. Sources within the Mexico State Attorney General's Anti-kidnapping Group say that the criminals in Valle de Bravo are protected by the municipal police, but nothing happens.

There are Army patrols in the municipality, and a Marine unit was recently stationed there, but it's the same old thing.  Kidnappers make fun of them and the crime rate keeps going up. And the authorities? They're doing well, thank you. And yourself?