In Mexico, fear as victims vanish at hands of police

TELOLOAPAN, Mexico — Carlos Sanchez lay in the backseat of a Honda sedan with his head in his wife’s lap, an oxygen tube in his nose, IV in his arm and three bullets in his body.

Armando de la Cruz Salinas was blinded by the spotlight trained on them from a Guerrero state police truck on the shoulder of the road.

A stocky man wearing a dark state police uniform with black steel-toed boots opened the front passenger door and pulled Carlos’ sister out of the car.

The four family members were from Guerrero state’s Tierra Caliente, a blistering region of marijuana crops and opium poppies, where drug cartels decapitate their enemies and even priests are not spared a violent death.

In the spring of 2013, it was common knowledge that police were errand runners for gangsters, but it was not widely acknowledged that local and state police were disappearing people, too.

Amid national outrage over the students’ abduction, hundreds of families came forward at an Iguala church to report their missing relatives, many of the cases involving the complicity of police.

Mexico’s deputy attorney general for human rights, Eber Betanzos, said municipal police had participated in scores of abductions around Iguala during the term of Mayor Jose Luis Abarca, who faces charges in the case of the 43 students.

A government investigation into the students’ disappearance stated that a top commander of Iguala’s police managed the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel’s police payroll, distributing about $45,000 from the mafia to members of the force.

Francisco Salgado Valladares also oversaw police roadblocks at all of the highway entrances to Iguala — roadblocks that ensured drug loads moved through, that suspected enemies of the cartel were intercepted, and that kidnappers were free to bag their prey.



[...] they speak quietly, behind closed doors, knowing that telling the truth could be fatal.

The attackers tried to take Carlos in their car, but he resisted and so they shot the father of three once in the chest, once in the arm and again in the leg.

To get there, the family knew, they would have to traverse a winding, two-lane highway that connects Arcelia and Ciudad Altamirano and other towns that are notorious in the drug trade.

On the outskirts of Iguala, Carlos’ wife, sister and cousin were transferred from the state police truck to the back seat of a beige SUV.

In the next days, Carlos’ wife and sister were guarded by a rotating group of police and civilians who spent much of the time smoking marijuana and watching videos on their phones.