Government Leaders: The Gravediggers

Borderland Beat 

It is the war's worst slaughter. In Coahuila in 2011 Los Zetas disappeared 400 people. The PRI [Party of the Institutional Revolution, Peña Nieto's party] state government investigated but, instead of reporting it, passed the information to the Attorney General's Office (PGR) of Marisela Morales and Felipe Calderón, who secretly buried it.

In the municipality of Allende, two young men from wealthy families and prestigious private universities--José Luis Garza Gaytán and Héctor Moreno Villanueva--worked for Los Zetas; one day they fled to the United States with five million dollars [sic] and a notebook containing compromising information. Drug boss Zeta-40 spoke clearly: if the fugitives didn't return the money and notebook, Los Zetas would kill their families. They didn't respond, and the Zetas occupied Allende (March 2011); then, aided by police in the municipality governed by the PAN [National Action Party of President Calderón], they snatched [disappeared] about 300 men and women, elderly and children, relatives and employees; they took the opportunity to kill 100 of them.

The 400 evaporated. To avoid a scandal similar to the one caused by the execution of 72 migrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas (August 2010), the Zetas incinerated the majority of the bodies in the desert, and one hundred in the facilities of the State Prison of Piedras Negras (one of the "cooks" who did the job in the prison explains that some were alive, but he feels good for not having executed any "woman or child").

The terrified and defenseless population kept silent. The government of Coahuila, according to then Attorney General Jesús Torres Charles, made ​​"very serious preliminary investigations" that it delivered to the PGR [Attorney General's Office] of Marisela Morales who, for those dates, had already compiled the names of disappeared persons received by state prosecutors (by the end of 2012, the list exceeded 26,000 persons).

On this secret list--leaked to the press in the last days of the Calderón administration--no disappeared persons from Allende in 2011 appear. Perhaps they hid the information that Felipe Calderón received in that year because he was already wandering through the labyrinth of denial; he said that he had not declared war on drug trafficking and remained silent on the humanitarian tragedy.

Little by little the outline of the massacre became known. On March 26, 2011, the story appeared in Borderland Beat, but it was ignored. In November of 2012, current Governor Rubén Moreira spoke publicly of the

"destruction of more than 40 houses" and that "a great many people have disappeared and are feared dead."

A month later, Juan Alberto Cedillo published the first of a series of reports in Proceso, and in 2014 more articles have appeared: a good chronicle by Diego Enrique Osorno and different texts in El Siglo de Torreón [Coahuila], La Jornada and El País [premier Spanish newspaper], among others.

We lack details, but the populace remains secretive, because it knows that it is still at the mercy of the murderers. Their defenselessness is absolute, because even the bureaucracies paid to serve them pretend not to notice. On the web page of the Commission for Human Rights of the State of Coahuila (presided over by Xavier Díez de Urdanivia), nothing is said about the disappeared. The organization Forces United for Our Disappeared in Coahuila (FUUNDEC) says that the Commission is "irrelevant," "passive" and devoid of "results."

The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) cut and run, as usual. Its head, Raúl Plascencia, was in Coahuila in June of 2013 at a forum on the topic. He came out with a string of splendid phrases ("Mexico no longer tolerates a single disappearance"), but made ​​no reference to the disappeared from Allende or from Coahuila. It wasn't until May 2014 when the CNDH finally responded to the Allende case. It is natural that FUUNDEC, United for Our Disappeared in Mexico (FUNDEM) and other organizations claim, among other criticisms, that they did not find in the CNDH "the response that we were hoping for."

Mexico is the country of defenselessness and impunity. The "narco-university students" who caused the slaughter are protected witnesses in the United States. Enrique Peña Nieto named Marisela Morales consul in Milán, one of the fashion capitals. Felipe Calderón does not explain why he hid information about the disappeared persons, and on June 24 he had the gall to tell Christiane Amanpour of CNN that his

"strategy was to protect [...] and provide security for Mexican families [.. .] it was correct."

Z400 ended up in jail but, according to an unconfirmed source, he is not charged with the Allende massacre. In Mexico criminals disappear, and government leaders are the gravediggers for the bad news.

Source: Reforma,  translated by Jane Brundage mexico voices.