Juarez City.- The dismantling of a gang of alleged kidnappers by the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Strategic Operations (FEOE) has revealed a lack of understanding among small groups towards the cartels with the greatest presence in the city, dedicated to the trafficking and kidnapping of migrants.
At the request of anonymity, staff from the Prosecutor’s Office reported that a red van-type truck is what has allowed at least three different investigation folders to be connected so far, since it was in that vehicle that the victims were “lifted” and then distributed to them. different safe houses guarded by young people between 18 and 20 years old, dazzled by promises of money and access to firearms.
The structures of these organized crime groups become increasingly clear for this specialized social representation, since the division of tasks during the commission of a kidnapping allows the floor operators, the security guards, to ignore the “bosses” or those who They receive the money, so the caregivers have become the ones who fall most easily before the law, while those who collect the ransom remain anonymous to their collaborators.
The red van gang
On June 5 of this year, two men from Guatemala, one an adult and his 17-year-old nephew with a disability, arrived at Turismos Doña Aurelia to wait for a truck heading to Torreón, Coahuila. While the truck arrived, they chose to enter the bathrooms, where they did not leave until the authorities arrived for them.
Jesús Arturo VG had allegedly taken them in a red van after holding them captive in a house in the Roma neighborhood. They were kidnapped on May 30 when they arrived in Juárez to try to cross into the United States, and released to be forcibly sent to the south of the country by their kidnappers, after their relatives paid nine thousand dollars in ransom.
After being helped by the authorities and the staff of the place, they reported to the Prosecutor’s Office.
The next day, Thursday, June 6, two different anonymous citizen reports located two safe houses in the Roma neighborhood where Jaziel G., Jeremías M., Alexis Alejandro A. and Edwin Daniel SR were allegedly keeping a total of seven victims. Balumbrosa and Tutuaca streets were the ones that housed these homes.
The victims reported having been “picked up” at the airport, bus stops and in convenience stores by a man and a woman aboard a red van, after contacting human traffickers (“polleros”) with those who had communicated during their journey to this city to help them enter the United States. The deal was not concluded and, on the contrary, they were all kidnapped.
For the FEOE there is a “functional condominium of the fact”, in which there are different participants in a crime, each one with a particular task. Presumably, the four caregivers also carried out the task of making ransom calls to the victims’ relatives. They received between 140 thousand and 300 thousand pesos per victim.
They become independent
The crime of kidnapping with the arrival of migrants from Central and South America, the Caribbean and other states of Mexico to Juárez, became the main activity of the cartels that operate on this border, previously stated César Jáuregui, attorney general.
However, with examples such as the gang that made up those mentioned above, the FEOE confirmed that gangs of kidnappers are being generated that are beginning to separate from the large Mexican cartels such as Sinaloa or Juárez.
They are not entirely improvised operators, according to the Prosecutor’s Office. Jesús Arturo VG is allegedly related to “Fat Flow”, Omar MP, a rapper linked to the kidnapping process for allegedly being a member of “La Empresa”, one of the criminal groups with the greatest presence in the state.
Despite the independence of the criminal groups with the greatest presence, the severity with which they punish their victims is similar. The stories of stabbings to the body, threats with firearms, bleeding eyes and ears after beatings and other attacks were recurrent.
All to get the money from the ransoms that they do not see, since they are collected by other people and received by “the bosses”, characters who only appear when payments are missing, according to the Prosecutor’s Office personnel interviewed.
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