Angelica Serpa knew that something bad had happened on Sunday night when her son's location stalled on the GPS after a trip in Uber. José Antonio Parada, a 22-year-old medical student, traveled from Bogotá to Mexico in January to do his internship in the State of Puebla, 100 kilometers east of Mexico City. On Sunday, shortly after ten o'clock at night, he requested a transport service after visiting with two companions, Ximena Quijano, a 25-year-old Colombian and Francisco Tirado, a 22-year-old Mexican, the Huejotzingo Carnival, just outside the state capital. José Antonio sent photos of the event to the family chat on Whatsapp. Shortly after, Angelica did not hear from her son again. The three students and the driver, Joshua Emanuel Vital, 29, were killed. Serpa called a friend of José Antonio from Colombia and, after filing a complaint, the police found the bodies on Monday morning. Multiple homicide has angered the student community of Puebla, which turned to the streets of the city on Tuesday in a mass demonstration that demands efficient measures to curb insecurity. This morning, the students of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, where Francisco Tirado was studying, declared indefinite unemployment and took the powers of the institution.
The Prosecutor's Office of Puebla has captured three suspected suspects, two men, one of 46 years and one of 23, in addition to a woman of 22 years. The authorities, however, are still unclear about the motive for the crime. On Wednesday morning, the Prosecutor in charge, Gilberto Higuera, admitted that he manages two lines of investigation. The first believes that detainees stole cars in the area, although none of the alleged perpetrators have a criminal record. The second indicates that student Ximena Quijano and the arrested woman quarreled during the carnival for a hat worn by Quijano. The prosecutor says that this theory cannot be ruled out because the Colombian student was the victim who received the most shots and because the hat was in one of the houses requisitioned in the Santa Ana Xalmimilulco area.
Son of a zootechnist and a doctor, José Antonio wanted to finish his internship in May. From Mexico he shared his learning and experiences with his family. On Sunday, shortly before his tragic death, he had sent pictures of the carnival to the family chat. “I was having a good time. I was happy. It was normal to see it that way, ”says Walter Serpa, uncle of the student, from Bogotá.
Versions of the savage homicide have exceeded Mexican borders. "We have already heard horrible things on networks saying that it was an adjustment of gangs," says Serpa, who asks the Mexican authorities not to process the crime as is usually done in countries affected by the violence of organized crime. "We do not want to be presented as a false positive [a supposed drug trafficker], Mexican society has to know that they killed a good boy, family and a student," he says.
Ximena's father, Jorge Quijano, has also expressed his pain in front of the Colombian media. “They were children who had a huge dream of being the best doctors in the world, that was their dream, that dream they were building since the first semester in which José Antonio and Ximena met,” he said. The family of both foreign students is in Mexico to repatriate the bodies to Bogotá.
Puebla, like many other regions of Mexico, is experiencing a crisis of violence. The State was the second, behind Nuevo León, with more femicides registered in January 2020. The region is also the second with more complaints for the clandestine theft of fuel, popularly called huachicoleo , with 1,850 perforations registered in 2019 against the 4,051 of Hidalgo. The homicide of this weekend ignites again a rage lived in the entity in 2017, when Mara Castilla, a 19-year-old student, was assaulted and killed by a Cabify driver in the municipality of Cholula.
The students were still mobilized this Wednesday in Puebla, a city with a million and a half inhabitants. “We are tired of being easy targets and that the authorities give us finger grips with superficial measures that last less than a week,” says Diana López, a 20-year-old medical student. The feeling is widespread in its faculty of the Benemérita Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP). It is the center that Tirado had come to study from Veracruz to become a doctor. His colleagues have taken the facilities until they are promised a change in the city's security policies.
The students of the Popular Autonomous University of the State (UPAEP), where Colombians Parada and Quijano carried out internships, have also joined the strike that affects the south of the city, where both universities have the faculties of Medicine. The Unisánitas University of Bogotá has also declared three days of mourning for the homicides. Uber drivers and taxi drivers from Puebla have also demonstrated in memory of the murdered driver, Josué Manuel Vital, who had a seven-year-old son.