“My son has no accounts with anyone, of any kind, he is not one more dead person in the Peñarol neighborhood,” Miguel Palazuelos’ mother vehemently claims.
He, then 30 years old, left his house on Wednesday, May 11, to withdraw money from an ATM. On the way, at the height of Soria and Oliveras, they shot him dead. It was the fifth homicide recorded in a few hours in the Peñarol neighborhood and most of these and those that followed were attributed by the authorities to settling scores in the neighborhood. “We want to clear Miguel’s name, justice, so that there are no more Migueles in the neighborhood,” his mother asked in conversation with The Observer.
An hour after her son was murdered, they sat her down in an office in Operational Zone IV and told her that the murder had been a settling of accounts – the woman recounted – and they insistently asked her about names that, she believes, were from narcos, but that she had never felt named.
This Friday the 20th she was received by a delegation from the Ministry of the Interior in which they clarified that this was a conjecture of the press and that her son’s case was separate from the settling of accounts investigated in the neighborhood.
“I’m not saying he was perfect, but he didn’t deserve the death he was given (…) My son will never come back, but he will not be a number,” he said.
The case is being investigated by prosecutor Mirta Morales, who told The Observer that he still does not have the elements to rule on the subject, but he assured: “The family and everyone can rest assured that in this prosecution there are no first-class and second-class homicides. Whether it was like that or not, no one deserves to die like that.”
Neighborhood, solidarity and activism against alcohol
Michael Palazuelos
He worked as a cleaner and in his spare time he helped in the Wanderers baby soccer team – which is why in the first game played after his murder they displayed a poster asking for justice for him – or to neighbors in the neighbourhood. In the time he had left, he visited his nephews. The friends consulted by The Observer they repeat that he was “all solidarity” and lived fantasizing about how he would distribute the 5 de Oro jackpot if one day he won it.
His passion for Wanderers came by contagion. It was one of his best friends who had been a fan since he was a child and passed it on to the rest of the group of friends during his childhood, who ended up becoming fans of the bohemian. “He made himself loved, one approached him, but he was always there. Whenever he had to lend a hand, he gave it,” said one of them.
A life full of solidarity had an opaque chapter. Palazuelos, long ago, suffered from alcoholism problems, but participated in an Alcoholics Anonymous group and recovered.
“What he had was that he drank a lot of alcohol, but he got into a group to get out of that. ‘I don’t want my mother to see me like that, I want to enjoy my nephew,’ he said. A year ago and a little more than him I talked to all the gurises here on the corner telling them ‘the neighborhood is rough, you saw, but also drugs, alcohol, those things kill you’. I talked to them so that they try to leave that. It was even heavy, because the gurises saw it coming and they said ‘Miguel is coming, bo, to atomize’, but he started and that was unnecessary”, recalled one of his best friends.
Without being asked, he would cut the grass or throw the garbage to the neighbors or the people of Wanderers. “In the neighborhood there are more working people than the other, but when these things happen on this side it’s like that, it’s easy, to say ‘settlement of accounts’, because it happens so many times that then it’s normal,” said his friend.
“The only bad thing he did was cross over to that side”
His family and friends say they are far from the fights in the neighborhood that left a mass of dead, but one of them stated that there are “gangs for blocks, not only linked to drug trafficking.” “Miguel, who had no problem with anyone, crossed to the other area but without any fear because he had nothing to do with it. It looks like someone confused him or didn’t know and shot him. The only bad thing he did was cross for that side,” he said.
