In the early hours of June 2nd, journalist Roxana Guzmán Ramírez was kidnapped by an armed group that stormed her home. She has not been seen since, but a commander and three members of the municipal police force are currently in custody. Roxana had only returned to Nanchital in January, where she founded Pulso Informativo del Sureste, a news outlet that reports on daily life and documents relevant events in that small part of Veracruz. Some local boss found her work intolerable and ordered her to be punished. Columnist Marcela Vázquez Garza is right: “Hyperlocal journalism is the most invisible and the most exposed.”
The collusion of members of the Veracruz municipal and state police forces with criminals is an old story and spans municipalities in every region of the state. In Roxana’s case, these officers are allegedly colluding with Grupo Sombra, a splinter group of the Gulf Cartel that has a presence in more than fifty municipalities in Veracruz.
Reviewing some events of recent years in Veracruz is to stir up a festering web of collusion between police chiefs and members of law enforcement agencies with organized crime. During Javier Duarte’s administration (2010-2016), numerous disappearances and executions were attributed to security forces and criminal groups operating in the state; the massacre of 35 people in September 2011 stands out, their bodies left in front of the World Trade Center (WTC) in Boca del Río.
There is also the murder of photojournalist Rubén Espinosa, who specialized in covering social protests, in Mexico City (July 2015), which demonstrated that there was no safe haven for those convicted of crimes.
In 2017, a clandestine cemetery, “the largest in Latin America,” was discovered on a property north of the port of Veracruz. From 153 graves, 302 skulls were exhumed, belonging to people who had disappeared “at the hands of criminal groups and government security agencies” (Database of the Permission to Kill Project).
In January 2018, four men’s heads were displayed on the hood of a vehicle on a dirt road in the municipality of Sayula de Alemán. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) claimed responsibility. A few days earlier, five other heads had been left on the hood of a taxi.
In August of last year, the murder of retired teacher and taxi driver Irma Hernández shocked social media. She was forced to release a video warning: “You don’t mess with the Veracruz mafia.”
Just on June 11, journalist Luis Ángel López Valdez was murdered in Poza Rica; as in other cases, the main line of investigation involves members of the police force. In the same neighborhood, reporter Carlos Castro had been murdered a few months earlier.
Like other areas of the country, Veracruz is out of control. Rocío Nahle doesn’t govern; she merely manages what organized crime allows her to.
Source: eluniversal
