Mexican marines accused in deaths By Dudley Althaus
Sent to protect, soldiers blamed in kidnappings
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — The day before his body was pulled from beneath another in a shallow, clandestine grave, Jose Eugenio Hernandez, 14, was detained by Mexican marines at a convenience store in this border city, witnesses told his mother.
The former altar boy apparently had been tortured and shot in the back of the head, Maria de los Dolores Romero said as she leafed through newspaper clippings about the crime.
“The fact they found him is a miracle,” said Romero, 36. A candle flickered beside a photo of her son on a makeshift altar that dominates the parlor of her threeroom home. “I prayed that he would be returned to me, one way or another. I knew that in these times it would be very difficult he would come back to me alive.”
Despite a searing pain over her loss, Romero said, she considers herself blessed. At least she knows her son’s fate. “If they hadn’t found my child, it would have meant an eternity of not knowing,” Romero said.
That certainty has eluded dozens of women in Nuevo Laredo still searching for loved ones they allege were snatched by the marines this year. The case is being pressed by human rights advocates and the United Nations. Mexican navy commanders have ordered an investigation and replaced hundreds of marines in Nuevo Laredo.
Violence unleashed a dozen years ago by a military offensive against Mexico’s criminal gangs has
killed some 150,000 people. But the dead at least have been counted, mourned and laid to rest. It’s the vanished who most haunt Mexico.
More than 37,000 people have been registered as missing across the country, according to government tallies. Advocates for the missing say many others remain unreported. Tamaulipas state, which borders Texas from Nuevo Laredo to the Gulf of Mexico, accounts for the highest number of disappeared — more than 5,300 and counting.
Finding the missing, and achieving a measure of justice, stands among the most daunting challenges facing President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who takes office Dec. 1. Widely known by his initials, AMLO, Lopez Obrador has vowed to replace the onslaught against the gangs with a pacification strategy involving economic development, amnesties and investigations targeting the finances of gang kingpins and protection rackets.
“You are the hope of all of us who are living this pain that has no name,” one distraught woman shouted at Lopez Obrador during a recently televised gathering of families of the missing in Mexico City. “What did they do with my son? Where is my son?”
Searches for the missing take place near Mexico’s Pacific and Gulf Coasts and along the 2,000mile border with the United States, roughly tracing narcotics production zones and trafficking routes.
In Guerrero state, on the southern Pacific Coast, families have uncovered hundreds of bodies in their fruitless search for 43 young men from a rural teacher’s college who investigators say were abducted and almost certainly murdered four years ago by gangsters aided by local police.
Far to the east, relatives this month uncovered at least 174 skulls, as well as clothing, bones and other items, from makeshift graves in Veracruz state. More than 300 more victims were uncovered last year in a pasture bordering a middle-class neighborhood near the port city of Veracruz.
Some 120 miles west of Nuevo Laredo, residents hope to find remains of scores, perhaps hundreds, of people in the ranching town of Allende who disappeared in 2011 when gangsters swept in searching for a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration informant and punished anyone connected to him.
Implicating the marines
Few places have gained more attention than Nuevo Laredo, an industrial and trade gateway on the Rio Grande, about 145 miles south of San Antonio.
Many, if not most, of the victims nationwide were spirited away by one criminal gang or the other, human rights groups say. But local and federal security forces often have been accused as well. What sets the recent disappearances in Nuevo Laredo apart, human rights advocates say, are credible allegations that they were perpetrated by the marines, the government’s most effective force against the criminal gangs.
“Many of these people are reported to have been arbitrarily detained and disappeared while going about their daily lives,” United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in late May in calling for an investigation into the marines’ actions in two dozen of the recent disappearances. “These crimes, perpetrated over four months in a single municipality, are outrageous.”
The Mexican navy responded by ordering the 257 marines who had been stationed in and near Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City where, the service has said, they are being investigated. A smaller detachment of marines sent to the city has been keeping a much lower profile, residents say.
The navy last week vowed to continue the investigation and cooperate fully with outside investigators and families of the missing. The families said they have had no such cooperation.
Nuevo Laredo’s own surge in violence began in 2005, when Sinaloa-based narcotics gangs led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman moved to take control of smuggling routes through the city — the most important land crossing for U.S.-Mexico trade. Guzman was captured for a third time in January 2016 and extradited a year later to stand trial in New York.
With local, state and federal police overwhelmed, the government sent in troops, sparking street battles and assassinations of police, politicians and business owners.
The carnage has flared and ebbed in the city since, as the gangs controlling its smuggling routes and illegal rackets have splintered, been reborn and fended off rivals. Civilians — whether linked to the gangs or simply in the wrong place when violence erupts — have been killed, wounded or disappeared in the mayhem.
“It’s not that it’s so dangerous only just now,” says Raymundo Ramos, the local human rights activist who is representing the families of many of Nuevo Laredo’s missing. “We have been suffering the same thing under three presidents. The navy was sent in to clean up the area now, and things got out of control.”
Some accuse Ramos, who is representing Romero and other women in their push to find loved ones, of doing the bidding of local gangsters to hobble the security forces’ efforts.
“It’s a way to discredit the work I do,” said Ramos, who this year has received the backing of the Mexican government’s human rights commission and numerous independent advocacy groups as well as the U.N. “I don’t document lies.”
Though this year’s disappearances began in January, Ramos and other human rights advocates say most of them came after gunmen ambushed three marine patrols in the predawn hours of March 25 — Palm Sunday — killing a captain and wounding 11 men in his command.
For weeks afterward, the advocates say, the marines went on an avenging rampage against real or suspected members of the gangs. In addition to Romero’s son, more than a dozen people were killed and 37 others disappeared at the hands of the marines this year, Ramos and others allege.
While the gangs prey on the poor and wealthy alike, those allegedly targeted by the federal forces tend to live in sprawling working-class neighborhoods to the south and west of the city. With local police widely accused of colluding with the gangs, the marines and other federal forces remain popular among the city’s middle and upper classes. Many see them as the only bulwark against a criminal abyss.
Residents say the city’s underworld is now controlled by the Cartel del Noreste, (Cartel of the Northeast), a reincarnated faction of the once dominant Zetas gang. But Nuevo Laredo remains a fitfully occupied city, its battle lines constantly shifting.
Turn down one narrow street and risk running into soldiers prepared for combat. Go down another, especially at night, and hit a checkpoint that might be manned by gang members, perhaps disguised as police or troops. Armed clashes between criminals and troops flare up frequently.
Once famous for their border town nightlife, the downtown streets are largely empty after dark. Poorer residents huddle at home in neighborhoods where they’re known. The better-heeled do their partying and dining in Laredo.
Squads of soldiers meet the single daily flight from Mexico City. Government posters line a wall in the airport lobby, pleading for information about 26 missing people.
“Everyone is suffering a psychosis,” said a veteran physician at a public hospital, ticking off stressrelated illnesses and injuries he sees among poorer patients.
The search for answers
Meanwhile, the women Ramos represents continue pressing for answers. They organize to search for clues, bodies or both in rural ditches and lanes in the dry country outside the city. Most of the women insist their loved ones are still alive, detained somewhere, for some purpose. Every fruitless search somehow reinforces that belief, some of them say.
“It’s the anguish of not knowing,” said Maria del Rosario Navarro, 48, who accuses marines of dragging away her 25-year-old son in May when he happened upon a shootout with gunmen. “It’s a slow death.”
Navarro said she recovered her son’s tennis shoes and belt, as well as a pair of glasses of the type used by marines, at the site where he disappeared. Though the marines have denied involvement in the disappearance, Navarro said, “I know God is going to bring him to me.”
Others still missing include a handful of teenage boys, a 26-year old bakery worker who left behind a wife and 5-year-old son, and a 41year-old mechanic who co-owns a car repair business in Laredo. His wife, U.S. citizen Jessica Molina, said he was taken by marines who broke into their Nuevo Laredo home after midnight during Holy Week.
Navarro’s son, Juan Carlos Perez, had recently finished a twoyear jail sentence and was sleeping on the battered couch in her home while he was looking for steady work. Like other relatives of the missing, she insists her missing loved one had no ties to the organized crime gangs.
“When you know someone was on the wrong path, you accept it when things happen,” said Esperanza Torres, 28, who said her younger sister, Margarita, was taken by the marines before being found dead on the city’s outskirts in mid-April. “But that wasn’t the case.”
Miriam Villegas said she last saw her son, Angel, 14, when she sent him from an afternoon family party on Easter Sunday to buy sodas. Witnesses later told Villegas that three pickups filled with marines drove past the boy as he walked along the road, perhaps talking on his cellphone.
The marines stopped and chased down the fleeing boy, Villegas says. Angel hasn’t been seen since.
Villegas, 37, said her marriage has collapsed from the stress of her son’s disappearance. She sent her remaining young children back home to a village deep in Mexico for their safety.
Now living alone in her decaying working-class neighborhood on Nuevo Laredo’s western edge, Villegas continues working the night shift at a factory, earning $70 a week and spending much of her free time searching for her son and the others missing.
“I am going to search and search and search,” Villegas said. “You do it out of desperation.”