An Allende police radio operator who worked closely with the shift commanders said in his declaration that a ranking Zetas member[17]would sometimes come by the police station and take people from city jail cells with the full knowledge of the police director and commander, both of whom, he said, were paid by the Zetas. Access request to Mexicos National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH), Freedom of Information Act request to DEA. Senior officers, including the police director, commander, and shift commanders, were paid more handsomely than regular cops. On the evening of March 20, 2011, Yuliana Lpez Ibarra heard the sounds of gunfire and the desperate cries of her mother-in-law coming through the tiny speaker on her husbands cell phone. The town's mayor believes 30 to 40 Allende families were exterminated, and he has a list of 34 houses that were destroyed. It is estimated that over 300 went missing or killed in March of 2011. And when I finished tying him up, I put him in the back of the truck, and there were already bodies in the trunk.- Declaration of Zetas member, September 19, 2014. [W]e all went in shooting and tied up all the people that were found inside the ranch. In the worst cases, civilian authorities were little more than subcontractors of the Zetas criminal organization, involved in shakedowns, kidnappings, drug trafficking and numerous murders, not over a period of weeks or months, but for many years. Thats the last thing I know about my family., Almas brother, Hctor Reynaldo Prez Iruegas, also witnessed part of the attack and was one of the first to file a missing persons report in the case. And from previously I knew that all of the Allende municipal police were linked to or worked for the Zetas.-Revised declaration of Christian Alejandro Lpez Tamez, December 17, 2014, Firefighter Jess Gerado De Len Ramos, too, spotted various units of the municipal police at the entrance to the ranch, including police director, Roberto Guadalupe Trevio Martnez, and shift commanders Maria Guadalupe Avalos Orozco and Rogelio Javier Flores Cruz, who he and others described as key links between the police and the Zetas. Relatives of victims wait in anguish for news after a shooting July 1 at a drug rehabilitation center . Prior to 1832 the settlement was known as San Juan de Mata.. Los Zetas Massacre. So they formed them into rows of people and later took them to the ranch of the [deleted] where they killed and burned them together with people from Allende. And what I did, in that place, together with [Chucho] was carry containers filled with gasoline and diesel to the bodega, which was filled with hay. A fire department volunteer described the scene as they approached. The recent violence is also a reminder that Mexican authorities have largely failed to protect the countrys civilian population from historically high levels of violence or to alleviate the effects of an ever-deepening security crisis. Ten years ago, the Mexican municipality of Allende was the site of one of the worst human rights atrocities ever seen in the country:a three-day rampage that punctuateda larger wave of violencein which theLos Zetas criminal groupkidnapped, murdered, and later burned the bodies of as many as 300 victims, many of them from Allende but also from nearby towns like Villa Unin and Piedras Negras, a city 35 miles to the north that lies just across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas. And this began to occur more or less in the years 2010 and 2011, which was about when Los Zetas got started in the region.- Declaration of former Allende police official, November 12, 2014, 15:20. Ten years later, the case has wide-ranging implications after investigative reporting in the U.S. and Mexico have linked the massacre to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and top Mexican security institutions. His wife recalled the ominous last moments she spent with her husband on March 18, 2011, the night that he and his friend, Hector Lara, disappeared. I recall that he was light-skinned, thin, of medium height, around 20 or 25 years of age, and they brought him in with his hands and feet tied up and with his face covered with tape.- Declaration of Zetas safe house guard, part 2, March 2, 2016, After a few days, he said, members of Los Zetas came and took him away in the bed of a pick-up truck, adding that he heard that they were going to turn him into roast beef, which is to say, that they were going to cook him.. Bone fragments found among the burned out ruins of the Garza Ranch, January 28, 2014 (Source: Document 41: Forensic Anthropology Technical Report, April 11, 2014). Beginning as a group of deserters from an elite unit of the armed forces at the service of the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas would go on to become one of the most powerful and feared cartels in Mexico before infighting and the loss of leaders started the organization's decline. Garcas friend, Everardo Elizondo, worked part-time at Luis Garzas ranch and also raised fighting cocks. The attack . En el rancho Los Tres Hermanos rociaron los cuerpos con gasolina y los metieron de a uno en toneles de metal para prenderles fuego: "Despus de cinco o seis horas se cocinaron los cuerpos . 202-994-7000 ornsarchiv@gwu.edu, Special thanks to former National Security Archiveintern Emily Taylor for her assistance with this collection. Sergio Aguayo is a prominent Mexican human rights investigator at the Colegio de Mexico, which last year launched an independent probe into the Allende massacre. Leave them. At the moment the cooking of the corpses was finished, the ashes were thrown in a well, and later covered with earth, and they flattened it so that no one could see anything.- Declaration of Zetas member, September 19, 2014, The focus on eliminating physical evidence and destroying crime scenes almost certainly played at least an ancillary role in impeding justice in the Allende case. By Theodore Bunker | Friday, 06 August 2021 02:11 PM EDT. "How the U.S. In Coahuila we were hearing the word being passed from municipality to municipality, about a large scale Zeta massacre in several towns of "The Five Springs", (Los Cinco Manantiales) including Allende. ALLENDE, Coahuila - Only abandoned and destroyed farms and the self-imposed silence of the inhabitants of Allende remain after the massacre perpetrated in this city in . The plan, he said, was to kidnap and kill everyone. When more Zetas and various patrols of the municipal police arrived later they knocked down the main gate of the Garza ranch by ramming it with a truck, according to Jimnez. September 29, 2020, Five Years Later, the Search Continues As CrimeOnline previously reported, the victims were part of a faith group who lived in Sonora, an established faith-based city in Mexico, around 70 miles from Douglas, Arizona. The files also include a statement from the caretaker of a Los Zetas safe house where the younger Sergio was held for several days after his abduction in August 2012 and before being killed and cremated by Los Zetas. [F]rom the road you could see smoke coming from inside the ranch. Fax: 202/994-7005Contact by email. I n the dead of night on Jan. 28, 1918, a group of white Texas Rangers, U.S. military men and local ranchers burst into the homes of Mexican and Mexican American . The Seminar on Violence of the Colegio de Mxico had access to many of these files in preparing its groundbreaking reports on Allende and a second report on how the Zetas gained control of authority structures in Coahuila, including the state prison in Piedras Negras. The attack at Allende began on the night of March 18, 2011, when the Zetas and their collaborators launched a coordinated three-day sweep through the town, situated only about 25 miles from the U.S. border. -Declaration of Allende volunteer firefighter, December 17, 2014. The police radio operator said that the director, Trevio, and the commander, Hernndez, were paid as much as five times what ordinary officers were given. [18]Others have called on Mexico to prosecute top Coahuila state officials, including former governors, for allowing criminal violence to flourish. 1:07. The perilous path Central American migrants take while traveling through Mexico to reach the U.S. border has been an area of . [6]In January, the bodies of 19 Central American migrants werefound in Tamaulipas, a neighboring Mexican border state and the site of hundreds of still largely unexplained migrant murders over the past eleven years. People from the town stole the furniture, vehicles, and machinery [from the houses] and sold it for scrap metal.- Declaration of Germn Zaragoza Snchez (El Canelo), April 8, 2014, 10:00am. Beyond criminal prosecutions, the Mexican government also has a specific legal obligation to divulge information related to cases, like Allende, that constitute clear violations of human rights and humanitarian law, raising the hope that additional information may come to light through the countrys access to information law. See reference here. Much of the worst violence occurred at a pair of ranches owned by the Garza family and located outside of the city center along the highway. See Allende, el infierno: Los testigos de la masacre, Zcalo (Coahuila), July 10, 2017. Elvira Espinoza and her husband were among the first to inform federal authorities about the violence, telling investigators that she and her husband reported the disappearance of Arturo, Liliana and the three children to the military garrison along Highway 57, just outside of Allende. In the latter group was Csar Alfonso Garca Ramrez, who had just returned home to Coahuila for a visit from his job in Texas. He said he recognized many of the Zetas gathered there.[13]. Local media, fearing reprisals, did not report the violence until years later. We continued to advance until we arrived at the ranch, where I saw that there were several police patrols from this city, colored white and blue, and a number of police, among others I remember [deleted], [Mara Guadalupe Avalos,] [deleted,] the director And it seemed like the police were guarding the place. El Gobierno de Mxico ofreci este jueves una disculpa pblica a los familiares de las vctimas de la masacre de Allende, una comunidad del norteo estado de Coahuila donde entre el 18 y el 20 de marzo del 2011 alrededor de 300 personas fueron masacradas por narcotraficantes. Photograph via . [12] While the names of Zetas, police officials, and witnesses are for the most part redacted in the volumes released through CNDH, a previously published portion of El Pjaros declaration reveals some of those redacted names. [14] In many cases, the names of the people identified by firefighters Lpez Tamez and De Len Ramos are legible behind clumsily applied redactions. Authorities investigating the massacre reported numerous hijackings of passenger buses on Mexican Federal Highway 101 in San Fernando, and the kidnapped victims were . A longtime resident of Allende, Herrera knew or was familiar with many of the people he saw at the ranch, including the Zetas, their police accomplices, and many of the victims. [7] GAFE stands for Grupo Aeromvil de Fuerzas Especiales (Airmobile Special Forces Group). September 27, 2019 1:06 PM EDT. Over the course of six episodes, "Somos." gives a platform to the victims of the Allende massacre to tell their stories. * * * * *. Suite 701, Gelman Library Just a few people. Thompsons reporting and the U.S. investigations strongly suggest that the former SIU chief may have been part of a criminal conspiracy that sparked the Allende massacre. But a few minutes later he called me saying that neither his father nor his sister were answering and that there were many trucks and armed men guarding the entrance to the ranch. He went on to say that now that Mexico has reformed its National Security Law, authorities from the U.S. could find themselves connected to another massacre similar to the incident in Allende.
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