Family seeks release of US woman

Count of bodies in Mexico mass graves rises to 48

SEATTLE, Nov 27, (Agencies): The family of a US woman who leads a vigilante police force in Mexico has enlisted a human rights group to help push for her release after three months in custody on kidnapping allegations.

Nestora Salgado, a US citizen from the Seattle suburb of Renton, was arrested Aug. 21 in the state of Guerrero, south of Mexico City, where she had been leading a vigilante group targeting police corruption and drug cartel violence.

Under state law, indigenous communities such as her hometown of Olinala are allowed to form such forces.

“They have no real case against her,” her daughter, Grisel Rodriguez, told The Associated Press. “There’s no proof at all. We’re hoping that because this is a political case, that with a little bit of political pressure from here they will release her.”

The family has enlisted the help of the International Human Rights Clinic at Seattle University School of Law, which filed a petition for her release on Monday with the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, based in Geneva. The petition claims Salgado is being held because she opposed government corruption and violence by drug cartels.

Salgado, 41, has been accused of kidnapping in connection with the arrest of several teenage girls on suspicion of drug dealing and the arrest of a town official for allegedly trying to steal a cow at the scene of a double killing. According to the petition, the cow belonged to the victims.

The Guerrero state government said following the arrest that authorities had received complaints from the families of six kidnapping victims, including three minors, and that ransom had been demanded. The investigators said they obtained a warrant for the arrest of Salgado and that her rights were being protected throughout the process. Thirteen suspects in all were taken into custody.

Objectives

“The government of Guerrero has as one of its objectives to protect its citizens and to work to create conditions of tranquility,” said spokesman Jose Villanueva. “To obtain that, absolutely everyone must follow the law; not one individual or group can impose their own methods or criteria in applying justice.”

Salgado grew up in Olinala, a mountainous town of farmers and artisans. She moved to the US when she was about 20, settling in the Seattle area and working as a waitress and cleaning apartments, her daughter said. Her husband, Jose Luis Avila, has worked in construction.

Beginning in 2000, Salgado began returning to her hometown a month or two at a time, bringing blankets, clothes, toys and other donations, Rodriguez said. Each time, more people in the impoverished community of 8,000 people asked her for help.

Salgado suspended her trips after being paralyzed in a car accident about a decade ago. Through rehabilitation, she regained 90 percent of her mobility and in recent years has resumed visiting Olinala, but she continues to suffer from painful neuropathy — a serious concern for her continued detention, Rodriguez said. She said her mother was held incommunicado for weeks, only appointed a lawyer a month ago and can’t make long-distance calls home.

The killing of a taxi driver who refused to pay protection money to a cartel sparked Salgado and others to form the vigilante group, which mounted patrols to protect residents from the gang, according to the clinic’s petition.

Vidulfo Rosales, Salgado’s lawyer, said he hasn’t been allowed to see his client even though he filed a petition to do so 20 days ago.

“They are distorting the facts,” Rosales said, adding Salgado was acting as a “representative of the community police.”

Also: MEXICO CITY: Mexican authorities Tuesday released a US- born teenager who was convicted at age 14 for working as a hitman in a case that highlighted the recruitment of children by drug cartels.

Now 17, the boy known as “El Ponchis” served three years in a juvenile detention center in the central state of Morelos for slitting the throats of four people and hanging them from a bridge.

Edgar was released before dawn and later took a flight to San Antonio, Texas, where his mother lives, officials said.

The case brought attention to the use of children by drug gangs to commit crimes in Mexico — from working as lookouts to dealing drugs and in some cases committing murder.

A 2011 study by the non-profit Children’s Rights Network of Mexico found that drug cartels recruited around 30,000 teenagers.

Edgar was arrested by soldiers in December 2010 at the airport in the central city of Cuernavaca as he tried to board a flight to the United States.

The soldiers later put him in front of television cameras, and he admitted to killing four people.

The boy said he had been kidnapped, drugged and threatened into committing crimes for a reputed leader of the South Pacific drug cartel, Julio de Jesus Radilla, alias “El Negro,” who was detained in 2011.

Edgar was sentenced to the maximum three years in juvenile detention under Morelos state law. MEXICO CITY: A Mexican federal official says that the number of bodies found in mass graves in western Mexico has risen to 48.

The official who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss the case says many of the bodies were bound or gagged and some showed signs of torture.

Authorities earlier reported 42 bodies, but six more were found.

The graves are in La Barca, a town in a remote area by Lake Chapala, which is popular among tourists and American retirees. The region is site of a turf war between the Knights Templar and New Generation cartels.

Agents were led to the mass graves by local police officers who confessed handing over two missing federal detectives and other people to New Generation gunmen.