Rotten Police
Mexican Police Helped Cartel Massacre 193 Migrants, Documents Show
DECEMBER 22, 201411:08 PM ET
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Pablo
Cote holds a photo of his deceased father of the same name in July 2013 in
Tlaxcala, Mexico. Cote was kidnapped while driving back from the U.S. border to
the east-central state of Tlaxcala. He was beaten to death, part of the mass
killing of 193 bus passengers and other travelers by the Zetas.
Ivan
Pierre Aguirre/AP
Local police in the city of San Fernando
in northern Mexico were involved in the 2011 massacres of 193 mainly Central
American migrants whose bodies were found in mass graves, according to federal
prosecutors.
The claim appeared in a memo
sent by Mexico's Attorney General's Office to The National Security Archive, a Washington
D.C.-based research organization that solicited the information under Mexican
transparency laws. It published the memo on its website on Monday and
highlighted the similarities in the case to what happened with the 43 teachers
college students who disappeared in southern Guerrero state in September.
The students were abducted by local
police linked to a drug cartel in the city of Iguala and handed over to the
members of the Guerreros Unidos gang who after killing them are believed to
have burned their bodies and dumped the remains into a river, according to
Mexico's government.
The case has generated angry protests in
Mexico and abroad over the alleged involvement of police and corrupt officials.
Reports have emerged of mayors and police forces in cities in parts of Mexico
being on the payroll of cartels.
In San Fernando, a city of 60,000
inhabitants in Tamaulipas state near the Texas border, local police worked as
lookouts for the brutal Zetas drug cartel, as well as turning a blind eye to
cartel activity, according to members of the Zetas cited in the memo.
The Zetas were fighting for control of
human trafficking networks with the Gulf Cartel. In 2011 there were many cases
of the mass kidnapping of migrants heading north to try to cross illegally into
the United States. Officials have said that most of the bodies found in and around
San Fernando belong to migrants kidnapped off buses and killed by the Zetas,
some because they refused to work as drug mules.
In the memo, detained Zetas told
authorities that local police helped in the "intercepting of people."
This is the first time the Attorney
General's Office has declassified documents related to the mass killings of
migrants perpetrated in northern Mexico in recent years. These are the killing
of 72 migrants in San Fernando in August 2010, the discovery of at least 193
bodies in 47 clandestine graves in San Fernando between April and May of 2011,
and the discovery of 49 human torsos in Cadereyta in the neighboring state of
Nuevo Leon in May 2012.
The Foundation for Justice and the
Democratic Rule of Law, a group that advises relatives of the victims in San
Fernando, had already denounced the alleged participation of authorities in the
crimes.
The group's director, Ana Lorena
Delgadillo, told The Associated Press that the memo confirms "the degree
of participation by the police."
"This is a very important step
toward finding the truth," said Delgadillo, lamenting that the
declassified memo didn't give much more information than that 18 local police
officers were being investigated.
In 2013, the foundation signed an
agreement with the Attorney General's Office, a team of Argentine forensic
scientists and other non-governmental organizations to identify and find the
cause of death of the at least 314 migrants killed in the three massacres.
According to the foundation, as of May
2014, about 200 of the bodies remain unidentified.
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