“I’m as a hitman”
Verónica Cruz, 42, tried to move Robert away from the dangers of the neighborhood: gangs and drugs, but never anticipated the threat that took it away.
After leaving high school, Robert traveled in March 2024 from a populous neighboring suburb of Mexico City to Jalisco, attracted by a labor offer as a painter.
Although poverty squeezed, the family of divorced parents subsist a small store. But Robert, then 16, wanted a motorcycle and left disobeying Veronica.
In June he telephoned his sister crying. “I am as a hitman, they just kill my friend (…) If I don’t get out of here, I’m going to take care of them from heaven,” Robert said, according to his mother’s sunny story.
Then, a man who identified himself as a friend of the boy wrote to his sister on Facebook to inform him that he had died in a confrontation.
A young man’s communication located 50 minutes from Rancho Izaguirre, so his mother believes he was there. “I never thought they were taking them,” says Verónica, while hugging a portrait of Robert smiling during his 15 -year party.
The Government ensures that it has eliminated 69 pages on social networks of recruitment for criminal groups. But in Tiktok jobs are still offered in Jalisco with “meals and lodging”, subscribed by “the SR company of the roosters” or the acronym “NG”, motes of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
“Know where it is”
The Prosecutor’s Office argues that there is still no evidence that in the Izaguirre Rancho, people were created or that it was an extermination field, as warriors denounced seekers.
Despite the deafness of his finding, Rubí Cruz maintains “intact” his hope of finding Fermín alive.
Instead, Verónica’s optimism has diminished.
“Maybe I don’t look for justice, but knowing where my son is, as it is,” he says clinging to a cardboard cash register that Robert manufactured to keep the store’s money.
