It had ended like every day and the landscape was the same. Patrols line the streets, requesting documents from vehicles they find suspicious. Rubén Arenzana, a 25-year-old lawyer, is doing what he has been doing since he started his studies. He got out of his car to ask the stopped driver if he needed help, the reasons for his arrest, and to report to the agents if they were “abusing their authority”. “If the citizen does not denounce what is happening, we will become accomplices in this corruption, this injustice that is experienced in Mexico every day,” he says with outrage. On his TikTok channel, RuAbogado amasses more than a million followers who are just as frustrated with the authorities as he is. In his videos, he uses his phone’s camera to record police activity and stop them from blackmailing motorists. “I have videos where I catch them asking for 100 to 3,000 pesos. It’s organized crime,” he says.
On Tuesday, December 6, he prepared to do the usual. “I stopped to help a citizen who was clearly being blackmailed, that was a notorious fact,” she recalls. The agents had stopped a vehicle in front of the La Cúspide shopping center in Naucalpan de Juárez, state of Mexico. As he approached the agents, he heard one of them recognize him. I had recorded him on other occasions. “You won’t do it to me anymore,” he assures that he told him before he started hitting him. Traffic was slow and a woman dared to get out of her vehicle to record everything. “The police hurt him a lot,” says Gabriela Aquino, who admits she’s afraid of the authorities because of the history of corruption and enforced disappearances linked to the agents that the country is amassing. “He had to record everything for his parents because if they disappeared, they would know where it all began,” he adds.
Mexico is the second country in Latin America where people feel least secure and most distrustful of the police, behind Venezuela, according to a 2020 Gallup poll . According to Rubén, I see video of a police officer stealing a man’s cell phone, and even if it’s recorded, there’s no way they’re going to harm him,” says Aquino, a resident of Mexico State. “You’re scared going out at night that a cop will grab you and plant something in your car so you can bite him and let go,” he says, noting that during the month of December in particular he usually sees more checkpoints in his neighborhood . . “I assume he’s taking out odds or his bonus,” he points out.
Aquino’s video of Rubén screaming for help went viral within hours. “The TikTok tool is impressive,” says Rubén Arenzana. In just a year and a half, he has accumulated more than 80 videos in which the labels “help for the citizen” or “the camera, your best weapon” are repeated. The format is the same in almost all of them: policemen stop drivers and he picks them up and asks them to return their documents. “I know my rights, I know what a state is for and the protocols that must be respected. Today we have resources, mechanisms and our best weapon is the phone. I want to empower the citizen,” he repeats.
In this case, far from intimidating the agents with his phone as on other occasions, Arezana was arrested. “One of the police officers said I attacked him, but it had been days since he was injured,” he says. He has now been charged with physical harm, which he answered in addition to the beatings with another one for abuse of office and excessive use of force. “They managed to dislocate my shoulder and step on the floor on my handcuffs,” he says, pointing to the wounds that have been on his body for a week. “But I would do it again. I refuse to live in this corrupt system,” he adds.
As of November 2022, the Executive Secretariat’s crime data recorded more than 15,600 crimes committed by officers in Mexico. However, these figures do not reflect the reality of the country, according to Carime Nava Sadallah, the criminal lawyer handling the Rubén Arezana case. “Unfortunately, every citizen is very lazy to go to the prosecutor’s office because it takes them a long time or because the police don’t help them,” he admits.
Arezana and her attorney are working together on a citizen education project to monitor police in all Mexico City neighborhoods. “We want every community to have a RuAbagado,” says Arezana proudly as she prepares to audition. He qualifies that it’s not about “going on a police hunt,” but about giving citizens the tools to prevent them from being blackmailed by the agents. “We have constitutional articles that need to be enforced. Nobody should be disturbed if he doesn’t make mistakes. If not, it’s abuse of power,” he said.
Sadallah, who has experience in the prosecutor’s office, lowered the tone of the speech. “Police officers have the right to stop drivers if they see harassment.” That is, suspicious signs that a crime is being committed, such as tinted windows or speeding. It also points out that the existence of corruption is often encouraged by the victim of blackmail. “The citizen is holding out his hand to solve the matter on the spot with money so that he is not taken into custody. We’re more afraid of the police than of the robbers,” he regrets.
The lawyer points out that the precarious work of public servants is partly at the root of the problem. “We don’t realize that we are accusing those below, the troops, and that they are demanding quotas,” he says. “The salaries are very low, they earn 10,000 pesos a month, they only give them 10 liters of gas for 12-hour shifts, and most of them pay for the ammunition out of their own pockets. If the work of the police, the military, the ministries is not dignified, what will happen then?” she asks resignedly.
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