It was a march called by a group called “Culiacán Valiente”, which was presumed to be a non-partisan project, although one of its main organizers is Esteban García, former local deputy for National Action (PAN) and husband of the current president of that party in Sinaloa.
The call was attended by businessmen such as Enrique Riveros Echavarría, from the Culiacán River Farmers Association (AARC); Martha Reyes Zazueta from Coparmex, and Manuel Clouthier Carrillo, real estate businessman and former independent federal deputy. Groups from the LGBT population such as Sinaloa Inclusive also attended, as well as search mothers from different groups, who were invited by the organization.
Minutes before the march began, García called María Isabel Cruz Bernal, a searcher mother and founder of the Sabuesos Guerreras collective, and asked her to move aside three screens with files of missing persons, since an altar had been placed in the place. name of Juan Carlos Sánchez Palacios, a man murdered a week before this march in the Tres Ríos subdivision.
Cruz Bernal told him that he did not agree, but that he respected his departure. As soon as he hung up, he mentioned that he could not leave out the 135 disappearances recorded in the last 20 days due to the confrontation between two groups of the Sinaloa Cartel, which is why the march was called. The contingent was joined for a few minutes by a group of 500 motorcyclists, who left before the walk. The searcher mothers stood in front and shouted slogans demanding justice. “Where are they, where are they, where are our children?” they expressed. The organizers also raised their voices, but with another slogan: “Culichi who respects himself, seeks complete peace!” They walked 200 meters and the contingent stopped in front of the building of the Sinaloa Attorney General’s Office, where the altar to Juan Carlos Sánchez Palacios was placed and where the three screens with search cards were also placed, but already on another side. “They asked us to remove the tokens,” denounced Cruz Bernal, “but we are not going to remove them because this is the reality we live in. We ask for empathy and that just as they come out now, they also come out every May 10 and every day of the missing “. He had barely finished asking for empathy when he already announced a roll call of the missing people. An organizer used a loudspeaker to say, “Let the march continue.” That’s how it happened and the searching mothers were left alone. “He told me that he wanted the altar to look nice, I don’t know why, that he wanted to put a screen behind, so that the missing people below wouldn’t be seen. So, I don’t know what the intention was and I resisted, I told him No, and I wanted to remove them, but what I did was go through them,” commented Cruz Bernal. The march continued towards the Flagpole, where a position was made in which economic effects due to the violence in Sinaloa were mentioned. In response to publications about the complaint by the Sabuesos Guerreras collective, García said – shouting over the phone to one of the people – that this did not happen.
#march #peace #Sinaloa