Tomorrow marks 51 years of the murder of the businessman Eugenio Garza Sada, dead in a attempted kidnapping in Monterrey. There are two types of impunity: the one that simply leaves the crimes without any punishmentand the one that He pretends to do justice by punishing some of those responsible but never touches those who instigated and allowed them.
We have had many crimes of this type in our country. It is clear that Mario Aburto killed Luis Donaldo Colosiobut we have never known for sure who or what led him to commit that crime.
We know that Daniel Treviño killed José Francisco Ruiz Massieu and we know who hired him, but we have never known the motives or the real perpetrators of that death.
One of those cases in which political responsibility has gone unpunished is the murder 51 years ago of Mr. Eugenio Garza Sada. However, we do know who was responsible for that death. We tell it here and we published it in the book Nadie supo nada, la verdadera historia del asesinato de Eugenio Garza Sada, (Grijalbo, 2006) of which we published a greatly expanded and updated edition in 2020.
Years before, while reviewing the documentation of the Federal Security Directorate that had been transferred to the General Archive of the Nation, in the former Lecumberri Palace, in the middle of the Fox government, he had found documents that confirmed that the death of the president of the Cuauhtémoc Brewery and business leader of the so-called Monterrey group, which occurred on September 17, 1973 after a failed kidnapping attempt by a guerrilla cell, had been a consensual action, known in advance and carried out with the approval of the government in power, headed by Luis Echeverría.
In the declassified DFS document marked with file number 11-219-972, in file two, pages 46 and 47, one can read a detailed report sent by the DFS representative in Nuevo León, Ricardo Condelle Gómez, entitled “kidnapping plans for industrialists Eugenio Garza Sada and Alejandro Garza Lagüera.” The document is dated February 22, 1972, a year and a half before the events.
There it says that Manuel Saldaña Quiñonez (alias Leonel) “who was recruited, the document claims, as a professional guerrilla by Héctor Escamilla Lira (alias Víctor) in September 1971,” was an informant for the DFS. The document describes in detail what happened in “house number 18, apartment 5 of Casas Grandes, Narvarte neighborhood” where the leaders of the organization that over time became the September 23 League lived and met.
The document describes the content of the meetings and says that “around December 4 (1971) they held a meeting where (…) they proposed kidnapping a person who would immediately pay a ransom of several million pesos to buy more weapons and a radio station for the clandestine transmission of revolutionary messages…”
Héctor Escamilla Lira was appointed as the person responsible for the operation.
Also a group of between 10 and 12 people to carry out the operation.
They are all identified in that and in later documents. In one of them, from February 1972, it is said that “on December 8, 1971, Leonel returned to Monterrey and learned from Victor (Escamilla Lira) that Mr. Eugenio Garza Sada and Mr. Alejandro Garza Lagüera were the people that the group would try to kidnap.”
Escamilla Lira was arrested much later in Culiacán. In his statement he confirmed and expanded on the confidential report that the DFS had received. He says that he met Leonel again before the kidnapping and that the latter had admitted that he had been arrested and “had been forced to report the exponent (that is, Escamilla) as one of the participants” in the commando and that “he obtained his freedom by agreeing to continue providing information to the police.”
According to the documents, Escamilla was under surveillance by the DFS, but he was not detained to continue with his plan. In Monterrey, according to his testimony, Escamilla stayed at the home of Jesús Piedra Ibarra, the son of Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, who would later disappear.
Escamilla confessed that he was responsible for monitoring Garza Sada’s movements and organizing the kidnapping. He himself decided the place and date of the operation, but that a few days before it he was sent to Tampico because the cell in which he participated considered “that he had already been discovered by the police.”
Although the cell in charge of the kidnapping continued to live in the same houses and the date, time and place of the operation were not modified, they were not arrested. They continued with their plan. Garza Sada and his driver were killed when they confronted the kidnappers.
The story is much broader, but it confirms that the government of Luis Echeverría had participated in and tolerated the attempted kidnapping and murder, and that it even knew in advance in detail what would happen. It did nothing. 51 years have passed, and the case remains unpunished. And it is an example of how, through meanness and violence, a regime and a society can be decomposed, a germ that is still present among us.
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