There is a live broadcast outside the doors of the Jalisco District Attorney’s Office and an animal cry can be heard in the middle of the recorded night. The families of Roberto Olmeda, Diego Lara, Uriel Galván, Jaime Martínez and Dante Cedillo have received a photo and video of the boys’ kidnapping. The fathers and mothers, brothers and friends who had been waiting for news about the five teenagers since August 11 recognized them on Tuesday in images of a brutal scene in which organized crime had intervened. Behind that cry lies the pain of a land under siege.
A week ago, the guys from Lagos de Moreno met at the San Miguel viewpoint. Between the ages of 19 and 22, Roberto, Diego, Uriel, Jaime and Dante had been childhood friends. Their lives had taken different paths: Roberto was studying engineering, Diego was a blacksmith, Jaime Maurer and Dante had started his own business, but they still spent evenings together in the neighborhood. It was Magalli Lara, Diego’s sister, who sounded the alarm at the disappearance of the boys: “Urgent: since last night our lives have been full of fear,” wrote the young woman. From the beginning, the families organized to protest to the authorities and demand progress in the search.
The case could have remained in the gruesome limbo as more than 110,000 families across Mexico search for their disappeared, digging up the ground and searching graves for clues. In Jalisco alone there are 14,890 missing persons, according to official government figures it is the state with the highest number of missing persons.
Less than 40 kilometers from Lagos, in Encarnación de Díaz, Saucedo Zermeño’s sisters were abducted just three weeks ago. Adriana, Olivia and their partner Beatriz Hernández disappeared while sitting in their car on July 27. The next day, Marisela was taken from her home by armed men. She was the eldest of them all and only 28 years old. There is no trace of the girls. For days no authority was looking for the girls. This newspaper has constantly asked the Jalisco Attorney’s Office about the progress of the search: “Actions are being taken at the office and on the ground,” is the reply.
But in the youth of Lagos de Moreno terror reigned. The dissemination of a picture showing the boys tied up and beaten but alive was evidence that organized crime had abducted them. Drug laws prevail in the Altos de Jalisco and in the northern part of the state, which also borders Zacatecas and Aguascalientes. With no government intervention, the dispute between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Cartel for control of the territory leaves a trail of blood and pain in its wake. Renowned anthropologist Rossana Reguillo calls it the transition of the “necromachine”: “A death machine that doesn’t mind devouring bodies and territories and then regurgitating them in the form of graves and corpses.”
The following evidence obtained by the families marks the line between horror and sanity. A video shows two of the boys lying on the ground covered in blood, while in the background, in an unspeakable scene, one of the boys is being forced to kill a friend of his. It all ends in this vertical shot of just over a minute. “The video is a message of terror. It wasn’t leaked, it was circulated with the intention of sending messages, probably to an opposing group and to the citizens who are still scared,” Reguillo points out. “It’s a testament to something very deep, very broken, and very decomposed. Involving the victims in this gory scenario is chilling and I think it also marks a turning point.”
The video is the focal point that brings together everything a country with more than 15 years of latent war has to deal with: the constant resurgence of violence, the spectacularization of the pain of coming out of anesthesia, and the impact on a generation of young people who know when he will leave his family, but not when he can return. All in front of a petrified state.
“What the Lagos case shows us, which is the tip of the iceberg, is that what we are witnessing goes beyond the number of violence,” says Leonel Fernández, director of advocacy in public policy at the National Observatory, “we have to .” Think beyond cold numbers. The scale is overwhelming: it is no longer about economic kidnapping or a fight between groups. The fact that the Lagos affair is happening so openly, as if nothing had happened, illustrates the defenselessness of the Mexicans, the weakness of the state and the lack of official knowledge. It has shown that there is no capacity to resolve this type of violence, we have an authority that does not know where to begin to act against this absolute violence, a state of nature where the strongest wins.”
A region turned into an extermination camp
It’s not the first time Lagos de Moreno has been in pain. In 2013, the disappearance of seven people – six teenagers and one adult – was reported, and a few days later some of their remains were found in an old grocery store on the outskirts of the community that organized crime had converted into a safe house. . There were no videos or photos, little to identify the bodies. The relatives decided to convert the macabre place into a memorial for their dead.
“The violence is returning, in a different way, to highlight that the entire Jalisco area bordering Guanajuato has been turned into a death camp for years.” There are indications that this barbarism did not begin this year , but that it is a growing process, which I call expressive violence, because it no longer seeks an end, but rather wants to display the traces of its total power,” reflects the anthropologist Rossana Reguillo from Jalisco.
When the focus opened, it was recorded that in April, one of the senior police officers in Encarnación de Díaz, where the sisters disappeared and were based near Lagos, suffered an assault; in May, a mine ambush killed four other prosecutors in Tlajomulco while searching for the remains of the disappeared; In June, some of the remains of eight young people who had been kidnapped from a call center in Zapopan were found. “The search for new methods of violence is worrying, there is an escalation to control and maintain dominance,” says violence researcher Miguel Moctezuma, who also points to changes in the environment such as the continuous discoveries of secret fentanyl laboratories or the confiscation of new weapons used by organized crime.
Given this scenario, what can young people do after knowing that a group of friends can drive out one afternoon and never come back? Leonel Fernández points to the lack of opportunity for the vast majority of young people living in contexts where violence is commonplace and where forced conscription and kidnapping for slave labor are vocal. The researcher stresses the government’s responsibility in devising policies to “save these young people and shut them off from violence.”
Reguillo, who has spent decades studying the impact of violence on youth, is right: “Today, our young people in Mexico face a beleaguered present: besieged by violence and exclusion that cannot be solved by direct grants, hugs, or the like.” with bullets, where the state as a political figure retreats further and further and another force tries to take its place. “In the Urban Kids, which had a very strong turnout from 2011 to 2015, I now see a lack of will to fight, I see a very crippling sadness,” he reminds of the Lagos youth, appealing to everyone else: “No, I understand what we are waiting for to take to the streets to protest.”
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