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The official, town council secretaryEvaristo Rodrguez Chapa, said he called police director Trevio to let him know what was happening, to which he replied: Dont even fart, you asshole. And together with the patrols there were many cars and trucks both inside and outside the ranch, and these people carried long arms from which I deduced that these people were from Los Zetas.- Declaration of Allende firefighter Jess Gerardo De Len Ramos, December 17, 2014, 14:50. Horrifying Allende massacre still haunts Mexico. Of particular importance was the November 2014 testimony of a woman from Piedras Negras whose husband, himself a member of the Zetas, had been kidnapped, detained, and later killed by the group in 2010. 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. [4] The thinking behind the special exception measure is simple: Human rights crimes affect both the immediate victims and society as a whole, and in such cases there is a society-wide interest in full transparency to ensure that such grave abuses do not reoccur. One installment revealedthat officials from the Mexican Army and the top civilian intelligence agency (CISEN) within days knew key details about the massacre, including that Poncho Cuellar had fled to the U.S. with a stash of cartel money and was talking to the DEA. All threereceived lengthy sentences, but with no bodies to build a murder case, they were convicted only of aggravated kidnapping, a charge that seems woefully inadequate given the nature of the crimes. I stopped working for Los Zetas because they disappeared my father who worked as a security guard at a construction site from where they also kidnapped another worker and a woman who I did not know, but she seemed to be a minor At the time of the disappearance of my father I was still with the municipal police and I asked the commander for help And he told me not to involve myself in these matters and that I should go home and go to sleep.-Declaration of former Allende police transit officer, July 31, 2014. The newly released files on Allende, including evidence gathered in the weeks and months immediately following the massacre, show just how inadequate these investigations have been. Juan Ariel Hernndez Ramos, commander of the Allende police, who reported to the police director, is the most senior public official sentenced in the case. He did not take my opinion into consideration, and no one else said anything. The 2020 U.S. arrest of Mexicos former defense secretary, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, for alleged narcotics ties has led Mexicos president, Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador, tofast-track a new lawimposing strict new restrictions on U.S. personnel in Mexico and that threatens to significantly curtail the exchange of intelligence and law enforcement information. LAS CRUCES - On Feb. 10, 1990, two men walked into a Las Cruces bowling alley and shot seven people execution style including four children robbed the bowling alley's safe and set . The Archive pried open the files using a special provision of Mexicos access law requiring the release of information relating to human rights violations. If you experience a barrier that affects your ability to access content on this page, let us know via ourContact form. What is clear is that the failure to do so sealed the fates of an untold number of victims who were murdered at the ranch later that night. What we saw, he said, was something thats not easy to forget.. In 2019, the state had a homicide rate of about 61 . 92110 United States [email protected] +1 619-260-2299. When the Zetas became aware of our presence, and that we were there to put out the fire, they said to us: You guys get the fuck out of here! In written statements, both themayorand thepolice director said they had only limited contemporaneous understanding of the events of March 18-20, 2011, and claimed that they did not receive any reports about the violence as it was happening. Only a handful the Allende massacre victims actually had ties to the Zetasrunning drugs across the border or, according to some witness accounts, laundering drug money. A declassified DEA report from 2015said that the Zetas in late 2015 made a conscious effort to rebrand as the Cartel del Noreste (Cartel of the Northeast). More information on CDN is available here. And when we met with him, he told us that things were going to get hot. Or do you want the same thing to happen to you or to your families?-Declaration of Allende fire chief, December 17, 2014. And I did not know exactly what happened with them.- Declaration of Allende firefighter Jess Gerardo De Len Ramos, December 17, 2014, 14:50, The former fire department volunteer described a similar scene as the victims, including several elderly captives, were led to slaughter. And he was waiting for his brother-in-law [Later,] he told me that they spent the entire night looking for his family; that he had entered the ranch from the back through an opening, and that he realized that he was alone in the ranch house, and that he was there with the expectation that they were holding his sister and his niece and nephews all with the last name Espinoza Garza, who on the day of the acts were seven months, three years, and six years of age.- Complaint of Sarah Angelita Lira, November 11, 2014. Washington, D.C., March 18, 2021 - 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 wave of violence in which the criminal group known as Los Zetas kidnapped, murdered, and later burned the bodies of an estimated 300 . That if any citizens asked us for help that we would not pay attention to avoid getting into trouble. Among the evidence posted today are the first complaints filed by the loved ones of those who went missing, the sworn declarations of Zetas members, Allende police and other city officials, the statements of firefighters and others who witnessed the violence, along with hundreds of pages of forensic reports, crime scene photos and related material. The two had gone to the ranch on March 18 to get medicine for a cockfight that evening. According to testimony, Vasquez did so because he and other Los Zetas wanted the father to suffer. A cartel war has transformed once-tranquil Guanajuato into one of Mexico's deadliest states. The new Netflix series, "Somos.," (We Are), offers a respectful but powerful look at the Allende massacre, one of the most brutal episodes of Mexico's war on organized crime, which sets it apart from other narco-series. Large swaths of northeastern Mexico have been under the de facto control of drug cartels for more than a decade despite the promises of successive governments to rein in the criminal groups and root out the corrupt officials who have made it all possible. She learned that her husbands friend, Hector, had also been called away and picked up by the same white truck that came for Rodolfo. Over three consecutive days in March 2011, a series . And each estaca is made up of four assassins, but there were trucks that brought more people in the trailers. Zcalo, a regional paper in Saltillo, Coahuila, also published portions of the testimony. [3] Some portions of these files have been excerpted elsewhere, including in reports from the CNDH and the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), which cites many of these same records. [5] The Mexican government signaled its intention to soften some of the more severe restrictions imposed by the new law. That was just one week in late January when the government said Guanajuato, which has around 5% of Mexico's population, suffered 20% of its homicides. Later we took these people to the Garza ranch where we put them in the same house where we had the others. There were other people in civilian clothes who carried long arms, and these people were Los Zetas, since I realized that there at the [Garza] ranch were [El Pala,] whose name is [Fernando Ros Bustos]; [El Canelo,] whose name is [Germn Zaragoza Snchez]; [El Cubano], whose name is [Juan Rafael Arredondo Oviedo]; [El Pjaro], whose name is [Jos Alfredo Jimnez Aguilar]; [El Flacaman,] whose name is [Gabriel Zaragoza Snchez,] among other people, some of whom I did not know, but they seemed to be from the south since they wore sandals and carried machetes. 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 . Through the gate, she could see what appeared to be bodies piled up next to a burning building. For years after the massacre, Mexican authorities made only desultory efforts to investigate. She is the goddaughter of Salvador Allende , the first socialist president of Chile who was her father's . By Theodore Bunker | Friday, 06 August 2021 02:11 PM EDT. One former Allende police official interviewed during the investigation described how the payments were made. They massacred 26 people in two days, including women and children . Oct. 9, 2016. He said that this was an injustice, since he was just a little boy. Allende, el infierno: Los testigos de la masacre, Zcalo (Coahuila), July 10, 2017. However, families of the victims in Allende touted the overdue government efforts as a publicity stunt. Jos Alfredo Jimnez was one of the first of the Zetas to arrive at Luis Garzas ranch that night. Prosecutors say they havepresumptively relatedthe Reyes and Garca cases. Alone on a remote mountain road after witnessing the slaughter of nine close relatives, the wounded children who had survived a cartel ambush in . De Len said that he already knew that all of the municipal police of Allende were associated with or worked for the Zetas., When I saw all those police I realized that they were keeping watch or guarding the place, that is to say the [Garza] ranch In addition to the police I already mentioned, I noticed that there were more people wearing civilian clothes, some hooded, some not. "This new law is requiring all foreign agents to report any interaction with Mexico. And there were approximately from seven to ten people that we tied up with rats tails. [F]rom the road you could see smoke coming from inside the ranch. Forensic specialists from the Mexican Federal Police examine one of the primary crime scenes from the 2011 Allende massacre on January 28, 2014. I only saw that they had them bent over with their hands behind their backs, and they put them in the back of the truck. 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. He said the process reduced the corpses to pure butter., [I]n those days they kidnapped many people [Where] they killed them and burned them was a ranch There, they made me burn one body since I saw what was happening Others were burned at the [deleted] ranch, but nothing was left, because they told me that only pure butter remained after cooking them.- Declaration of Germn Zaragoza Snchez (El Canelo), April 8, 2014, 10:00. [7] GAFE stands for Grupo Aeromvil de Fuerzas Especiales (Airmobile Special Forces Group). [I]n fact, he sometimes came and went inside the cells to beat those who were locked up. 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. De Len also remembered the moment, as they were leaving, when he saw the Zetas lead the victims into the bodega. It was the case that among them I recognized several, since I knew them, because we were from the same municipality of Allende, Coahuila, where I live.- Declaration of Zetas member Jos Alfredo Jimnez Aguilar (El Pjaro), June 13, 2014. [T]he director, who almost never left his office, knew all about this.