Blood on blood in Taxco: the Holy Thursday that shocked Mexico

During Holy Week all the demons were unleashed in Taxco, one of the most beautiful towns in Mexico, with a white hamlet perched on a hill, with steep stone streets, ornate churches and stepped alleys that exhaust the youngest. That Wednesday, on vacation, the eight-year-old girl Camila walked through one of them to her friend's house to play with her in the inflatable pool. It was not the first time that she went, but it was the last time that she was seen alive, in an image recorded on the camera that a neighbor installed after they tried to assault him some time ago. Before the body was found a few kilometers from the town, dozens of Taxqueños gathered in front of the house for hours, waiting for the police to remove the alleged culprits, a woman and two of her children. The mob ended up attacking the house and dragging the detainees down the alley. The woman, Ana Rosa, had her body beaten to death and the two boys were left badly injured due to a strange inaction on the part of the agents. Death and revenge served live by dozens of journalists who had come to cover the town's famous Holy Week, where the flagellants splashed their blood on Thursday night. Blood on blood.

There was no swimming pool in that house where the girl died from asphyxiation, the autopsy indicated. And to say home is to say a lot. At the top of the narrow alley, which ends after climbing more than 50 steps and several ramps, a plastic police tape attempts to close the way to the patio where some plants are lined up in jars of anything and the open door reveals a space of about 20 square meters that is a kitchen, dining room and bedroom. In the left corner, a bare mattress; a meter away, the table strewn with sleeping pills, more pills on the uncomfortable two-seater sofa; To the right, the humble kitchen with pots and pans hanging on the wall. Everything is in motionless disorder in the hut with its earthen floor and tin roof. A washing machine in the patio, the same as the open room where there is only one toilet bowl. “How could there be a pool to bathe in, if the floor is uneven,” says the neighbor across the street, who by just moving two meters from her door can touch the rocky hallway of the lynched woman. The same one where before her grandson also played with the dead girl and with the daughter of Ana Rosa, the woman who called her to bathe that afternoon.

The scant police information gives way to statements from neighbors and relatives of the victim. It is known that shortly after the girl disappeared, a ransom request for 250,000 pesos (about 15,000 dollars, or euros) arrived on her mother's cell phone. Already then they were looking for the calf, who did not make it home. “The murderer,” as the neighbors now call Ana Rosa, she replied that she had never responded to her invitation. But it is clear that she did not have the private cameras in the alley, which showed Camila's image. Nor with those in the building down the road, where the alleged culprit and a taxi driver known in town by José are seen putting a package wrapped in a black bag and some clothes in the trunk of the car. This José is detained, they say he was the woman's boyfriend. “What's up, she was with a guy, the taxi driver was not her partner,” says the neighbor. The combieros are those who drive the combis, small public transport vans.

This is a story of taxi drivers, one of the groups most linked to organized crime in Guerrero, the turbulent and violent Mexican State to which Taxco belongs. “You hear shootings here many nights,” says another neighbor, who appears calm for a few days with the presence at the door of the dead girl of a couple of state police protecting Camila's mother, Margarita. Wizard, they call him. Down on the road, another couple of uniformed men guard the area, day and night. Why so much protection for the victims? The matter looks dark. The husband of the lynched woman, a taxi driver, was killed some time ago. The two sons now beaten and detained are also taxi drivers. And the man who came to pick up the little girl's body is the same. The residents of the Jardines alley pronounce the classic words of those who do not want to say more and that are heard so much throughout Mexico: “They were on the wrong path.” From time to time, Guerrero's capital, Chilpancigo, is torn apart by burning taxis and local buses as armed groups scramble for their share of the pie. Taxi drivers are easy prey for organized crime. They extort them into their service. In taxis you can transport illegal merchandise, they go everywhere, they know the roads, they look and count. And woe to the one who doesn't. Recent images shocked Mexico when hitmen beat taxi drivers in Acapulco because they had not given them the information they required. Ana Rosa, the lynched woman, asked a lot: So you have a child in the United States? Will you send him money then? “And I answered everything, without knowing…” says the shopkeeper. Camila's mother also has a husband in the United States, who according to some versions is already an ex-husband. No one knows if he has come to the girl's funeral. Acapulco, like Taxco, are very tourist cities and crime is no longer just narcocrime, it is involved in any business that makes money. Tourism is another goose that lays golden eggs.

Between the night of Wednesday and the afternoon of Holy Thursday, in full sun, hours before the processions made their journey, the tension breaks in front of Ana Rosa's house and a question flies among the curious and half the country watching in I watch the outcome of the crime, which is protocolically investigated as a feminicide. Why don't the police remove the suspects from the house? Long hours pass with the concentrated population until pandemonium breaks out. They beat down the doors and take out the woman and her two children who, supposedly, had arrived in their taxis knowing what was happening. No one knows if the little girl and the older girl, about 14 years old, were in the house at the time, but they are not seen. See you later. “The oldest came out and hugged her boyfriend crying: my mom, my mom,” says the neighbor, who more than a week later still has the fear in her body. At that time, the police did not let them leave and they barricaded themselves behind the curtains.

Down the alley they take the woman to the road where dozens of people are crowding around shouting. Journalists record the bloody afternoon from drones. Surely never before has there been such a complete report of a criminal lynching. The case is resolved without even knowing whether or not the woman is guilty or of what. Her body looks like a battered puppet, a fury that dwarfs the dark Holy Week processions where Taxco's crossers carry bundles of thorns as penance. Ana Rosa is in the hands of men and women who vent her rage: “Kill her, bitch, break her ribs, in her face, in her face,” they incite those who kick. “It's less than you deserve, damn.” “Girls don't touch each other” voices are heard in chorus, as if it were an ordinary demonstration, while they end the life of a woman without the right to reply. It is of no use to the unfortunate woman to cling to the legs of a police officer who remains hieratic. Injured to her, the agents manage to lift her onto the open tray of the patrol car, as well as one of her children, with his face bloodied like a Nazarene. Nobody settles. They beat her, they pull her black hair, they tear off her shirt, they kick her head and they manage to get them out of the van to continue the beating. The journalists report live with heavy breathing without believing what they are seeing. They don't understand why the patrol doesn't start the engine and take off with the wounded instead of letting them take them away. A new group of national guards manages to remove the children from the tumult, one already imprisoned and another, 17 years old, confined in a juvenile center awaiting the judicial process. The mother suffers a different fate. Practically dead, she is put back into the police van which, instead of rushing her to the hospital, deposits her in the Prosecutor's Office, transported hand and foot with her head lifeless and her hair facing the ground. The via crucis does not seem to have an end.

The statements of the mayor of Taxco, Mario Figueroa Mundo, and the Secretary of Security of this town of just over 105,000 inhabitants, Doroteo Eugenio Vázquez, have just put the icing on the cake of stupefaction. Why didn't they take the woman to the hospital? “We did not know the seriousness, the police do not have the knowledge of a doctor; What we intended was to keep it in the Public Ministry so that [there] they would say what should be done. If we took her to the hospital, the mob was going to go there and we would have no way to protect her,” declared the mayor. They all hid behind the town's poor police capacity, which was not supported by higher powers, they said. Hence the delay in removing the suspects and putting them in custody, they argued, and the inaction of the agents before the crazed mob, who did not fire a single shot in the air, when the police in Mexico are easy shots. If the suspect could have declared who or who was behind the kidnapping and death of the girl, her mouth is sealed forever.

To complete the nonsense, the chief of police, Doroteo Eugenio Vázquez, was missing, who was dispatched, in the midst of the family's pain, blaming the dead girl's mother for not having adequately protected her. “There was a maternal responsibility and there is an omission, because if as a father I have a child, I must monitor him, guide him, orient him. Here the lady supposedly let the girl out of her without the pertinent security measures,” he declared to the news with improvable eloquence. Six long days later, he resigned from his position.

Mexico is a country accustomed to lynchings, which years ago were limited to rural areas and were attributed to ancestral rites that time has not been able to handle, as well as to the population's fatigue with justice that never arrives. Groundless gossip that turns into revenge against strangers in which anger at misery and institutional abandonment is purged. It's not just that anymore. Experts maintain that organized crime has also brought lynchings to urban areas, similarly affected by enormous pockets of hardship and hardship.

“Now we have evidence that many cases have been orchestrated or promoted by organized crime. They are not isolated, there is direct responsibility of these criminals,” Tadeo Luna, criminologist and student of this social phenomenon, answered in an interview with this newspaper a year ago. at the Iberoamerican University of Puebla. In the case of Camila, both circumstances could have occurred: the fury of the inhabitants for the dead girl who ask for justice while taking her by the hand and perhaps dark handling of the crime in a city that in recent months has experienced a string of paralyzing violence. transportation and they closed schools and businesses, or they shot up the mayor's car. The city of silver, the chronicles said, was losing its shine because of the armed groups.

The criminologist from the Puebla university says today that perhaps the police show this inaction out of fear of the angry crowd. He also suggests that “in many cases they do not know how to do it, because there are very few States that have an action protocol for cases of lynching,” he says. But his underlying idea is that “lynching is functional for the State in the sense that it keeps violence in a different direction, that is, for people to take justice into their own hands is more comfortable for the authorities than the fact "that they organize to demand security, justice and speed in investigations." With this logic, he continues, “if the authority acts, it would place them at the center of violence and it is not convenient for them.” Case closed. Perhaps crime also prefers the alleged culprits to be dead rather than making statements to the police. In any case, the authorities have promised the usual investigation and fight against impunity.

Between the Flores alley and the Gardens alley there are barely 100 meters, which the girl Camila traveled that afternoon never to return. Her body is already underground and the neighbors added another to the recurring pantheon of those lynched, to the dismay of the girl's mother, not only because she was a friend and neighbor of Ana Rosa: “I wanted her alive, so that she could suffer the same.” "I'm going to suffer for a long time, but she's rotting in prison for what she did."