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The 3,000 days without justice for Moisés Sánchez

2023-01-26T11:24:02.855Z


Jorge Sánchez, son of the journalist kidnapped and murdered in Veracruz in 2015, continues to fight for the guilty to be brought to justice. He now transfers the question to President López Obrador: “How much longer must we wait?”


Exactly eight years ago Jorge Sánchez entered the morgue in Jalapa, Veracruz, to recognize his father.

“His skin lacerated and limbs severed from him.

'Perfect cuts' expressed the forensic expert with admiration.

For him he was just another lump and he marveled at the perfection of the criminals' work.

He had been looking for it without rest for 22 days.

In a conference just a few days before, the Veracruz prosecutor had said that they already knew where they were keeping him, that they were going to return him alive, but "somewhat beaten anyway," said the official.

Jorge was unable to identify the body of his father that day, it was decomposed, broken.

The murder of Moisés Sánchez —journalist, activist, taxi driver— represents the era of terror of the Government of Javier Duarte in Veracruz,

his case illustrates the well-oiled machinery between the state and criminal groups to crush uncomfortable voices.

Since then, two other governors and a president have passed, but impunity for the crime continues.

The alleged mastermind behind Sánchez's death is on the run and nothing is known about the materials.

Eight years ago Jorge left that morgue to start asking for justice.

Moisés Sánchez was torn from his home at 6:50 p.m. on January 2, 2015. A convoy of five vehicles —Jorge accurately repeats the colors: two white, one red, one dark, and a black van, into which they put his father—parked at the entrance to his home in Medellín de Bravo, a town of 2,500 inhabitants that is part of the suburban area of ​​Puerto de Veracruz.

Six men entered, another as many—he doesn't know how many—stayed outside watching.

They were armed, they asked his wife and his little grandchildren for Moses.

They found him at the top of the house: he was asleep, wearing jean pants, without shoes or a shirt.

They took him along with his camera, his mobile phone and his computer.

He only managed to say: "Don't hurt my family."

Sánchez, who was 49 years old when he was killed, was a reference figure in Medellín.

He had turned

La Union

, the small community newspaper that he distributed for free, under the scourge of the municipal government.

There he accurately and stubbornly reported every neighborhood that was left without electricity, every failure in the water system, every abuse of authority.

The neighbors recognized him and trusted him.

He wrote the information and paid the price of printing it.

To maintain the publication he worked as a taxi driver, before he had been a taquero, bricklayer, vegetable vendor, postman and butcher.

When the economy was worse, he published the newspaper every 15 days or once a month, but he always went out.

"He had a small loudspeaker that he sometimes placed outside his house and broadcast the news," recalls photojournalist Félix Márquez, "he was not trying to obtain resources, nor was he linked by political interests, he was interested in the well-being of his community." .

Veracruz journalist Moisés Sánchez, murdered in January 2015. Article 19

When insecurity covered the area, Sánchez also dedicated himself to liaising with journalists from Puerto de Veracruz and Boca del Río, accustomed to covering economic and political sources.

"He was a reference, he was one of the few journalists who was there," says Márquez.

In December 2014, Moisés was part of some meetings with the neighbors to create surveillance groups, a kind of self-defense groups, a word that is prohibited within the Duarte government.

The security forces rushed to the area to dismantle the idea, they gave the neighbors some emergency numbers to call in case of risk.

At that moment, Moisés Sánchez received the threats: the then mayor of Medellín de Bravo, Omar Cruz Reyes, had said that it was time to scare him.

Three days later, the journalist is kidnapped.

Jorge Sánchez asked names that today are part of the darkness of Mexican history to help him find his father: Veracruz prosecutor Luis Ángel Bravo —accused of forced disappearance—, Governor Javier Duarte —now imprisoned for forced disappearance—, to the attorney Jesús Murillo Karam – today imprisoned for torture and forced disappearance.

He met with all of them and they all assured him that they were going to "use the entire State apparatus" to locate Moisés Sánchez alive.

The coordinator of the Defense of Article 19, Luis Knapp, identifies in those initial moments the first omission of the authorities: “he was taken by armed individuals and there was no immediate search, no operation was deployed to find him.

There are currently two municipal police officers sentenced for omitting his work.

In those January days, the police accidentally stopped Clemente Noé, a former police officer who was now part of a criminal ID, for speeding.

In his confession, Noé told Mayor Cruz Reyes to give the order to kill him, acknowledged that he had been outside the journalist's house when he was kidnapped, listed five nicknames of other hit men who had participated in the crime, and located where they had thrown their weapons. remains.

When the analyzes verified that this body was indeed that of Moisés, Cruz Reyes had already fled.

To this day he is still a fugitive.

“We know more or less what area it is in.

If they had wanted to stop him, they would have already done so”, Jorge Sánchez blurts out.

An opinion was issued about Noé that he had been tortured to obtain the confession.

“That further complicates the search for justice, because we don't know if he told the truth or if they made him read a script.

The little that he had advanced, he begins to break down.

He could be released due to torture, because it is a very serious illegality," says a frustrated Knapp, who has followed the case since 2015. There are already 35 investigative volumes, thousands of pages, between the Veracruz Prosecutor's Office and the Special Prosecutor's Office for Attention of Crimes committed against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE) —which they had to compel by judicial means to attract the case of Moisés—, but the majority, says the lawyer, "are straw."

“FEADLE has not achieved anything.

They have only filled the file with unsuccessful efforts," says Knapp,

who criticizes that they are not even looking for the former mayor designated as the mastermind: "It is unfortunate."

This week, Article 19 has presented the murder of Moisés to the Inter-American Human Rights Committee so that it can be analyzed from the perspective of international law.

The publication in tribute to Moisés Sánchez, eight years after his murder, created by his son Jorge.

Nayeli Cruz

During these years, Jorge Sánchez and his family have sought justice in all state and federal victim aid commissions, they have traveled to the European Parliament in Brussels to present their case, they have narrated the facts to hundreds of agents and prosecutors, they have manifested every year before the Veracruz institutions, but after eight years, everything continues as at the beginning.

The current governor of Veracruz, the Morenista Cuitláhuac García, promised the families to listen to their cases to advance the investigations: "Two years after he left, he has not received anyone," says Sánchez, who points out that it is the same with each governor: "Once they come to power they forget everything."

This Tuesday, International Journalist's Day, Sánchez appeared at the morning conference of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador with a simple question: “How much longer do the families of murdered journalists have to wait for justice to be done?”

The president has avoided giving a concrete answer: "There will be justice, always, and justice may take time but it comes when there is a will."

The president has not accepted a meeting with the families of the murdered journalists either, as Jorge has asked him live, but has ordered him to return to the conference this Thursday because the Secretary of Security, Rosa Icela Rodríguez, is also there to state the situation.

Tireless, Sánchez has decided to wait in the city to go again in the morning.

Rubén, Víctor, Juan, Misael, Miguel Ángel

He is now 37 years old, eight years of unwavering struggle behind him, and Jorge Sánchez's voice only breaks when he talks about the others who were also killed: Rubén Espinosa, the photojournalist and friend who carried the photo of Moisés for months for ask for justice and who has to bring his now, after he was also murdered in 2015 in the famous crime of Narvarte;

Yazmín López, who had to clean up the blood of his father Miguel Ángel, his brother Misael, both journalists, and his mother after they were murdered in 2011 in his own house;

that of Víctor Báez's wife, who said goodbye to her husband and saw him again when her body arrived at the morgue where she worked as an expert witness;

that of Juan Mendoza who revealed from his portal

Of him Writing the truth

that PRI politicians used Los Zetas safe houses for campaign events and who they found in June 2015 lying on a highway and about whom the police said they had run over him, with his hands tied and a blindfold.

In Javier Duarte's six-year term of terror, 18 journalists from Veracruz were murdered, a total of 31 by 2022 and impunity is total.

Mexico has become the deadliest country for the press, Article 19 has documented 157 murders of journalists since the year 2000.

The Union

continues to be published.

On paper in a more irregular way, but on the web, Jorge Sánchez updates the newspaper that his father created practically every day, which takes time to lower the quality of the images so that the servers are not saturated so quickly.

He left his job at a printing press to dedicate himself to journalism that he learned from Moisés.

Together with 12 other families of journalists, he has also created the Network for the Memory and Struggle of Murdered and Disappeared Journalists, to support each other and push for more progress.

“It is incredible that all this has happened and that no authority has done anything, that we have had to meet and pressure.

No matter how rickety and deficient my father's investigation is, it is because we were pushing it”, says Jorge Sánchez, tired.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-01-26

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