Photo: PEDRO PARDO / AFP / Getty Images
By: EFE
Thursday, October 3
Three women who investigated murders and disappearances in Mexico were persecuted by the PGR
MEXICO CITY .- Several Mexican NGOs stated this Wednesday that the defunct Attorney General’s Office ( PGR) ordered to investigate an activist, a journalist and an independent expert who raised their voices before the San Fernando massacre perpetrated by the Zetas in 2011.
The three women have spent years investigating cases of the roughly 93, 000 “disappeared” from Mexico, mostly people believed to have been killed by drug cartels, their bodies dumped in shallow graves or burned.
On 2011, authorities found 48 fo clandestine houses that contained the bodies of in the northern border state of Tamaulipas . Most had their skulls smashed with sledgehammers, and many were Central American migrants.
It was later revealed that the victims had been taken from buses in transit by the old Los Zetas cartel and forced to fight each other with hammers or die if they refused to work for the cartel .
In a statement, the NGOs stated that the PGR, today the Attorney General’s Office (FGR), “diverted the investigation to benefit the impunity and unprotect the victims ”, in addition“ he set aside his duty to clarify the facts. ”
Between 2015 and 2016, under the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, the Office of the Attorney General “started the machinery at its disposal, not to find the perpetrators of the massacre of 193 people in San Fernando, Tamaulipas (2011) ”s ino “to persecute the victims, who represented them, an independent expert and a journalist,” they denounced.
Specifically, they persecuted family members who denounced “irregularities” in the PGR investigations, as well as Ana Lorena Delgadillo , director of the Foundation for Justice; a Marcela Turati , journalist who investigated the events , already Mercedes Doretti , director of the Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropology (EAAF) for Central and North America.
Citing an investigation for organized crime, the PGR requested, without judicial authorization, the companies telephone calls “to access all the telephone records, the messages that originated and received on their telephones, as well as for their geolocation.”
The Ministry The public “equated the work of Delgadillo, Turati and Doretti with organized crime, and placed them in a condition of risk and in a state of defenselessness,” they denounced.
This is revealed by copies of the file that the Foundation for Justice obtained last May after a judgment of the Supreme Court of Justice, although they still do not have the entire file.
“A 10 years after the massacre occurred corresponding to the 48 graves of San Fernando, not counted with a single sentenced person. Bodies have been improperly cremated, they have been sent to the common grave despite being identifiable, the wrong bodies have been handed over to the relatives ”, they reproached.
By contrast, “the apparatus and machinery of the Prosecutor’s Office was used to prosecute and criminalize those who demanded truth and justice,” they stated.
The NGOs, among which are the Foundation for Justice, Amnesty International or Fifth Element, asked the current government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador “to cease any additional investigation” against the victims and against Delgadillo, Turati and Doretti.
They also asked to “investigate all the structures that make up” the current Prosecutor’s Office and install a commission with the support of the UN to “investigate what happened in San Fernando ”.
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