Exactly eight years ago, Jorge Sánchez entered the morgue in Jalapa, Veracruz to recognize his father. “His torn skin and severed limbs. “Perfect cuts,” said the forensic scientist with admiration. For him it was just another lump and he marveled at the perfection of criminals’ work. I had been looking for him for 22 days without a break. Just days earlier, at a conference, the Veracruz prosecutor said they already knew where he was being held and wanted to bring him back alive, but “something beaten anyway,” the official said. Jorge was unable to identify his father’s body that day, it was decomposed, broken. The murder of Moisés Sánchez – journalist, activist, taxi driver – represents the era of terror of Javier Duarte’s government in Veracruz, his case exemplifies the well-oiled machine between the state and criminal groups to quash uncomfortable voices. Since then, two other governors and a president have died, but impunity for the crime persists. The alleged mastermind behind the death of Sánchez is on the run, nothing is known about the materials. Eight years ago, Jorge left the morgue to demand justice.
Moisés Sánchez was snatched from his home at 6:50 p.m. on January 2, 2015. A convoy of five vehicles – Jorge exactly repeats the colors: two white, one red, one dark and one black van, which they put his father in – parked at the entrance of his home in Medellín de Bravo, a town of 2,500 people that is part of the suburban area of Puerto de Veracruz. Six men entered, another – he does not know how many – stayed outside and watched. They were armed, they asked his wife and their small grandchildren about Moisés. They found him upstairs, asleep, wearing jeans, no shoes or shirt. They took him with his camera, cell phone and computer. He only managed to say, “Don’t hurt my family.”
Sánchez, who was 49 when he was killed, was a reference figure in Medellín. He had made La Unión, the small community newspaper that he distributed free of charge, the scourge of the city council. There he accurately and persistently reported every neighborhood without power, every failure in the water system, every abuse of office. The neighbors recognized him and trusted him. He wrote the information and paid for the printing. To keep up the publication he worked as a taxi driver, previously he was a taquero, bricklayer, vegetable seller, postman and butcher. When the economy was worse, I put out the newspaper every 15 days or once a month, but it always came out. “He had a small loudspeaker that he sometimes set up in front of his house and broadcast the news,” recalls photojournalist Félix Márquez, “he was not trying to raise resources, nor was he linked by political interests, he was interested in the well-being of his community.”
Veracruz journalist Moisés Sánchez, assassinated in January 2015. Article 19
As uncertainty gripped the region, Sánchez also dedicated himself to collaborating with journalists from Puerto de Veracruz and Boca del Río, used to covering economic and political sources. “He was a benchmark, he was one of the few journalists who were there,” says Márquez. In December 2014, Moisés took part in some meetings with the neighbors to create surveillance groups, a kind of self-defence groups, a word banned within the Duarte government. Security forces rushed to the area to dismantle the idea, giving neighbors some emergency numbers to call in case of danger. At that moment, Moisés Sánchez received the threats: the then mayor of Medellín de Bravo, Omar Cruz Reyes, said it was time to scare him. The journalist is kidnapped three days later. The neighbors called all emergency numbers, nobody answered.
Jorge Sánchez asked names that are now part of the darkness of Mexican history to help him find his father: Veracruz prosecutor Luis Ángel Bravo, who is accused of enforced disappearance, Governor Javier Duarte, who is now charged with the enforced disappearance, and lawyer Jesús Murillo Karam – imprisoned today for torture and enforced disappearance. He met everyone, and they all assured him that they would “use the entire state apparatus” to find Moisés Sánchez alive. The coordinator of the defense of Article 19, Luis Knapp, identifies in these first moments the first omission of the authorities: “He was kidnapped by armed people and there was no immediate search, no operation was used to find him. Currently, two city police officers are convicted of failing to do their jobs. But we found reports that more authorities knew what was about to happen and had orders to do nothing.”
In those January days, the police accidentally stopped Clemente Noé, a former police officer who was now part of a criminal ID card, for speeding. In his confession, Noé urged Mayor Cruz Reyes to give the order to kill him, admitted he had been outside the journalist’s home when he was kidnapped, listed five nicknames of other hitmen who took part in the crime , and located where they had thrown their guns. By the time analyzes confirmed that this body was indeed that of Moisés, Cruz Reyes had already fled. To this day he is a fugitive. “We know more or less in which area it is. If they had wanted to stop him, they would have done it long ago,” Jorge Sánchez bursts out. They also arrested one of his bodyguards – who they released months later – and convicted two city officials who were two blocks from Moisé’s home when they picked him up. They ducked for cover, and their case was soon to be solved.
A report was issued on Noé that he had been tortured to obtain the confession. “This further complicates the search for justice because we don’t know if he was telling the truth or if they forced him to read a script. The little that had progressed begins to unravel. He could be released on torture because it’s a very serious illegality,” says a frustrated Knapp, who has been following the case since 2015. Between the Veracruz prosecutor’s office and the Special Prosecutor’s Office there are already 35 investigative volumes, thousands of pages Office for the Investigation of Crimes Against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE) – which they had to enforce through court means to attract the Moisés case – but the majority, says the lawyer , “is straw”. “FEADLE has achieved nothing. They only filled the file with unsuccessful procedures,” says Knapp, who criticizes the fact that the former mayor designated as the mastermind is not even being sought: “That is unfortunate.” Article 19 submitted the murder of Moisés to the Inter-American Human Rights Committee this week, so that it can be analyzed from the perspective of international law.
The publication in honor of Moisés Sánchez, eight years after his assassination, created by his son Jorge. Nayeli Cruz
During these years, Jorge Sánchez and his family have sought justice in all state and federal victim support commissions, they have traveled to the European Parliament in Brussels to present their case, they have clarified the facts to hundreds of agents and prosecutors, they have demonstrated every year before the institutions of Veracruz, but after eight years everything is going on as at the beginning. The current governor of Veracruz, the Morenista Cuitláhuac García, promised the families that they would listen to their cases in order to advance the investigation: “Two years after his departure, he did not receive anyone,” says Sánchez, who points out that he feels the same way as every governor : “Once they come to power, they forget everything.”
This Tuesday, International Journalists’ Day, Sánchez appeared at President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s morning conference with a simple question: “How long do the families of murdered journalists have to wait for justice to be done?” The president avoided giving a concrete answer say: “Justice will always exist, and justice takes time, but it comes when there is a will.” The President has also not accepted a meeting with the families of the murdered journalists, as Jorge asked him live, but instructed him to return to the conference this Thursday, since Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodríguez is also present to explain the situation. Tireless, Sánchez has decided to wait in town to leave tomorrow morning.
Ruben, Victor, Juan, Misael, Miguel Angel
He is now 37 years old, with eight years of relentless struggle behind him, and Jorge Sánchez’s voice only breaks when he speaks of the others who were also killed: Rubén Espinosa, the photojournalist and friend who opened the photo of Moisés for months Inquiry brought justice and his must now bring after he was also murdered in the famous crime of Narvarte in 2015; Yazmín López, who had to clean up the blood of her father Miguel Ángel, her brother Misael, both journalists, and her mother after they were murdered in their own home in 2011; Víctor Báez’s wife, who said goodbye to her husband and saw him again when his body arrived at the morgue, where she worked as a medical examiner; that of Juan Mendoza, who revealed on his website Writing the truth that PRI politicians used Los Zetas safe houses for campaign rallies and who they found lying on a freeway in June 2015, and who police said they had with his hands tied run over and a blindfold. In Javier Duarte’s six years of terror, 18 journalists from Veracruz have been murdered, a total of 31 by 2022 and impunity is total. Mexico has become the deadliest country for the press, with Article 19 documenting 157 murders of journalists since 2000.
Union will continue to be published. More irregular on paper, but on the Internet, Jorge Sánchez updates the newspaper his father created practically every day, which takes some time to reduce the quality of the images so that the servers do not become overloaded so quickly. He gave up his job at a printing company to devote himself to journalism, which he learned from Moisés. Together with 12 other families of journalists, they also founded the Network for the Remembrance and Struggle of Murdered and Disappeared Journalists to support each other and push for more progress. “It’s unbelievable that all this happened and that no authority did anything, that we had to meet and push. No matter how rickety and flawed my father’s investigation is, it’s because we pushed it forward,” says Jorge Sánchez wearily.
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