The convicted abductors were first arrested in 2011
Eighteen people convicted of the abduction of 72 migrants who were killed by the Zetas drug cartel in Tamaulipas in 2010 have been sentenced to lengthy jail terms.
The federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) announced Tuesday that a federal judge had sentenced 15 men and three women involved in the crime committed in San Fernando, a municipality south of Matamoros in the northern border state.
In August 2010, the navy found the bodies of 58 men and 14 women – mainly Central American and South Americans – on a farm after engaging in a gunfight with members of the Zetas.
Authorities were alerted to the massacre by a survivor, a migrant from Ecuador. The undocumented migrants were offered work with the Zetas but were killed when they didn’t accept, according to the Ecuadorian, who escaped after pretending he was dead.
The FGR said that the 18 people involved in the abduction of the migrants prior to their murder were all arrested in 2011. They were found guilty on charges including kidnapping, organized crime, possession of firearms and drug trafficking.
However, none was convicted of the murder of the migrants. The guilty parties received prison sentences ranging from 13 years to 58 years.
Documents made public by the Attorney General’s office in 2014 revealed that local police collaborated with organized crime in the murder of the migrants.
The presumed mastermind of the massacre, Martiniano de Jesús Jaramillo Silva, was arrested in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, in 2017. However, the regional leader of the Los Zetas Vieja Escuela (Old School Zetas) criminal cell in Tamaulipas spent only two days behind bars before he died of kidney failure in a Mexico City hospital.
An additional 193 bodies were found in 47 clandestine graves in San Fernando in 2011. The victims – both men and women – were also killed by the Zetas.
With reports from La Razón
Sinaloa journalist murdered
Luis Enrique Ramírez is the ninth journalist to be killed in Mexico in 2022
A journalist was found dead in Culiacán, Sinaloa, on Thursday, state authorities said.
The lifeless body of Luis Enrique Ramírez Ramos, director of the Sinaloa-focused news website Fuentes Fidedignas and a columnist for El Debate, was found on a dirt road on the south side of the state capital.
Sinaloa Attorney General Sara Bruna Quiñónez Estrada told a press conference that the body of the 59-year-old journalist was wrapped in black plastic.
The Attorney General’s Office (FGE) said in a statement that an autopsy determined that Ramírez had suffered a brain injury due to blows to the head. “There were no signs of torture, except for the blows to his head that caused his death,” it said.
The FGE said that Ramírez left his home at approximately 3 a.m. Thursday and members of his family didn’t hear from him after that. Fuentes Fidedignas reported that he was abducted near his Culiacán home.
The FGE said that an investigation into his murder had been opened and that it would consider motives related to his work as a journalist.
Ramírez, an award-winning journalist who contributed to some of Mexico’s leading newspapers during a 40-year career, received threats in 2010 and went into hiding after three of his friends were murdered. He said in a 2015 interview that he and his slain friends were all privy to sensitive information about former Sinaloa governor Mario López Valdez and ex-government secretary Gerardo Vargas Landeros, who is now mayor of Ahome, a coastal municipality in the north of the state.
Ramírez said that the threats he received came from the state government. Quiñónez Estrada noted that he had spoken of being intimidated in media interviews but had not made any complaint to the FGE.
A complaint he filed with the federal Attorney General’s Office got nowhere, the newspaper Reforma reported.
Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha, who took office for the Morena party in November, lamented the death of Ramírez, who he described as a friend. He said in a Twitter message that he had spoken to the attorney general and advocated an “immediate, rigorous and exhaustive investigation” into the crime.
Ramírez is the ninth journalist killed in 2022 and the 34th to be murdered since President López Obrador took office in December 2018.
With reports from Reforma
