We begged him to look for our missing people and he did not do it; now we understand
: relatives
Jessica Xanthomila
La Jornada Newspaper
Friday, October 18, 2024, p. 4
The trail of violence left by the so-called war against drug trafficking during the six-year term of Felipe Calderón and Genaro García Luna, former head of the Ministry of Public Security (SSP) imprisoned in the United States, continues to this day with at least 16,800 people. disappeared between 2006 and 2012 and remain in that condition, according to the national registry of missing and unaccounted for persons.
One of them is Luis Ángel León, former federal police officer, who disappeared along with six colleagues and a civilian on November 16, 2009 in Michoacán. His mother, Araceli Rodríguez, recalled how she implored García Luna to look for her son, but only received threats.
For this reason, the sentence of 38 years in prison for the former secretary for his relationship with criminal groups “moves our hearts (the families), to say: ‘damn…! They did nothing to find the boys because there were links between García Luna and the narco‘”, he expressed.
In an interview, he related that he had a meeting with the then head of the SSP one year and six months after the disappearance of Luis Ángel and the six federal police officers: “He stood in front of me, looked me in the eyes, leaned on his desk and told me: ‘Araceli, stop looking for culprits where there are none. It was organized crime that took away our comrades, I think it is very nice that you reflect, feel calm, think, show a movie of your life… Relax and think for 10 minutes how you would like to die.’”
Rodríguez explained that before that meeting, the families sent letters to García Luna asking him to look for their loved ones. For this reason, he explained, when he sent his letter to the American judge Cogan, I said: damn! We sent you many so that you would listen to us, with tears in our eyes we begged you to look for ours.
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He stressed that 15 years after the disappearance of Luis Ángel and his companions there are detainees, but no indications of their whereabouts.
Grace Fernández, who is looking for her brother Dan Jeremeel, absent since December 19, 2008 in Coahuila, highlighted that for families with a loved one who disappeared during the Calderón administration, García Luna’s trial made so much sense, because we were saying that there is a great involvement of federal authorities with criminal groups, and they did not believe us
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He regretted that there are less than 40 sentences for forced disappearance, when many of them began and were committed during the Felipe Calderón period and we never had a response. Today we continue to suffer from the lack of justice administration and investigation in those years
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Juan Carlos Gutiérrez, legal coordinator of Idheas, also highlighted the torture and even montages perpetrated during García Luna’s administration, such as the arrest of Florence Cassez in 2005. He indicated that the former official’s case is not an isolated incident, as there are others linked to these groups. An example, he said, is Édgar Veytia, former prosecutor of Nayarit.
