Three days have passed since the body of Íñigo Arenas Saiz was found in a nightclub restaurant north of Mexico City, and questions, like drops intended to fill a glass of water, are mounting at the same pace as speculation about what’s inside night happened. What did he die of? How did he get there from Polanco? Why does his cell phone location seem to show a different route? Did he get there on his own? Who was Inigo Arenas Saiz? The silence of the Mexico State Attorney’s Office and the victim’s family and friends makes it difficult to find answers to all of these questions in a case like this.
Video published by the Bar Association of the Republic
First it was a video. In it, Arenas appears in front of the República nightclub on Avenida Presidente Masaryk in the Polanco neighborhood, one of Mexico City’s wealthiest neighborhoods, waiting for something while trying to get up. It’s about 2:46 am Sunday morning. Apparently drunk, he sways back and forth until he’s leaning against a pillar. The video stops there. It doesn’t show what happened next: Did you get in a cab or a friend’s car, or did you use an app like Uber to get around? It’s impossible to know. Authorities from the Mayor’s Office of Miguel Hidalgo managed to collect videos showing the victim eating tacos at a stand nearby between Lafontaine and Emilio Castelar streets.
The existence of a network of hijacking taxi drivers in the area is “known,” activist Saskia Niño de Rivera said on her social media. However, amid the silence from authorities, the bar owner reassured that the man was escorted by a security guard from the bar when he was apparently intoxicated and struggling to keep his balance. No one has spoken of the legal profession’s responsibility in leaving a person alone on the street in these conditions. Niño de Rivera, who informed about the case from the beginning, regretted exactly that: “The worst thing is that next weekend is coming.” [de semana] The republic will carry on as if nothing had happened because we as a society do not provide support either. Until it happens to us, moms are worth it.
The only statement by the Attorney General of the State of Mexico that did not answer this newspaper’s questions was released on Monday following pressure from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. This morning, the President was questioned in his morning conference on the case, which had already begun to dominate the media. The President said only that the man was dead (he was previously listed as missing) and that prosecutors would provide more information later in the day. Niño de Rivera, who has contacts with the authorities through his work, reported shortly afterwards that his body was found at the Black Royce, a disco-restaurant for wealthy people 6.5 kilometers north of the republic, in Naucalpan, state of Mexico.
On Monday afternoon, prosecutors released a statement: they reported that an investigation had been opened and little else. He confirmed the businessman’s death in a bar in Naucalpan, Mexico, and that the body was returned to the family after the autopsy and determination of the cause of death. Since then, the public prosecutor’s office has made no further comments. The next day, Tuesday, authorities arrested six employees at the bar where Arenas died. Three dancers who kept the victim company for part of the night, a security guard and two managers of the premises were arrested and made available to the judge, Milenio said.
Statements by Black Royce’s attorney
Second most important to the arrests of these individuals were the testimonies of the employees and owners of the Black Royce, who defended their actions against allegations that the man died due to a lack of attention from his employees. Francisco Marco Pinzón, legal representative of the nightclub restaurant, told a media outlet his version of the story. Pinzón says the man arrived in a taxi around 3:00 a.m., that he was a regular visitor and asked for a private place where he could be quiet, and that he was there with the girls, drinking only water. At five o’clock the businessman says that he is “a bit tired” and that he should be allowed to sleep, please.
“We let him rest and around 7 a.m. the staff realize he’s not moving. They try to revive him, but they can’t. The man didn’t respond. “Then they called for an ambulance,” says the lawyer for the bar association, who is defending the innocence of his employees. It was the authorities who certified his death by bronchial puncture, when he drowned in the alcohol he had been drinking throughout the night and, according to the attorney, for the past few days. “He said he was partying for several days,” says Pinzón. Relatives have not spoken out for three days, and no statements are known from his colleagues at the company where he worked or from the prosecutor’s office to deny or confirm the information provided by the owners of the two bars.
Íñigo Arenas Saiz was a 41-year-old businessman who, according to his LinkedIn profile, worked as an operations manager for Feher Consulting, a corporate and franchise consulting firm founded in 2002 and based in the Mayor’s Office of Miguel Hidalgo. The company has issued a statement regretting the death of its partner and joining in the “deep sorrow that overwhelms his family.” He defined himself as an international management consultant and studied at the business school of the Universidad Panamericana. According to the company, Arenas was a family man and husband, but it hasn’t disclosed how many children he had or who his wife is.
Subscribe here Subscribe to the EL PAÍS México newsletter and receive all the important information about current events in this country