Agents of the Prosecutor's Office on May 29 in front of the evidence warehouse of the dependency in Guadalajara (State of Jalisco). FiscaliaJal (Twitter)
Possible traces of blood, marijuana and slates with the names of foreign people and profit targets. That is part of what the Jalisco Prosecutor's Office has found in two searches that have been carried out this weekend in two different establishments: the call center of Zapopan, Jalisco, in which the seven young people disappeared last Monday, and another property to which they arrived after the investigations carried out by the agency. The first complaint came on Saturday, May 20: Carlos Benjamín García Cuevas had disappeared. A few days later, the brothers Iztel Abigail and Carlos David Valladolid were declared missing. Later, the tragedy expanded at the same time as the questions: Arturo Robles, Jesús Alfredo Salazar, Mayra Karina and Jorge Velázquez have also disappeared. All were around 30 years old and all work in the call center that is at the center of suspicion. The authorities point out that it is a network cover linked to organized crime that carried out telephone fraud to foreigners.
This weekend, agents of the Prosecutor's Office searched the establishment located on Victor Hugo Street, in the Jardines Vallarta neighborhood, in Zapopan, where several of these young people were last seen. The call center was empty, but inside they found some marijuana leaves, a piece of cloth and a mop with reddish stains (probably blood). They also found blackboards with names of foreigners, membership notes and economic goals. The place did not have any license to operate. According to the Prosecutor's Office, any activity that was being carried out inside was "outside the framework of legality."
The owner of the space is Francisco Javier, who rented the property in November 2022, around the time some of the young people started working. The operation was carried out through lawyer César Javier, who is related to two other fraud investigations that took place in 2014 and 2015. Authorities have also found the car of one of the victims in the vicinity of the alleged company, and have the testimony of several people who appear to have seen several armed men who made a deployment "with all the characteristics of organized crime," Jalisco prosecutor Luis Joaquín Mendez said.
The investigations led the agents to another place, on Johannes Brahm Street, also in Zapopan. The search they did there on the afternoon of Saturday, May 27, revealed several documents: lists of names and contact information, more blackboards with foreign names, a bag with marijuana, hard drives, computers without the CPU and cables cut everywhere. The Prosecutor's Office hopes to come up with more leads using the information they have so far, but so far they have not found the missing in any of the places, a week after their disappearance. Over the weekend, to support the search efforts, more than 100 agents participated in tracking efforts in other important points of the state: Guadalajara, Zapopan, Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, El Salto and Huaxtla.
The line of investigation in which the Prosecutor's Office is working is also supported, according to Milenio, by a publication of the US Treasury Department. On April 27, they issued a statement establishing a link between a network of fraudulent businesses through call centers and the Jalisco Cartel – New Generation (Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación – CJNG), which allegedly used this cover to cover up fraud schemes by scamming elderly people north of the border. The relatives of the victims have reported that their disappeared worked in a company that sells vacation packages by telephone.
"Vacation campaign fraud in the Puerto Vallarta area, often targeting elderly U.S. citizens, is an important source of income that supports the CJNG's criminal enterprise," the statement said. The goal is to defraud victims and take away all their savings. The United States wants to curb these practices and has singled out and sanctioned 19 companies that are allegedly part of the cartel's network. Several individuals were also sanctioned. The most important of them all is Eduardo Pardo Espino, a fugitive from US justice and financial operator, according to the Treasury Department, of the CNJG based in Puerto Vallarta, one of the tourist enclaves par excellence in Mexico.
The disappearances of the seven young people has unleashed the specter of a problem that grips Jalisco. It is the state with the most disappearances and unlocated people in Mexico, and that slab weighs in cases like these. The desperation of the families led them to demonstrate last Friday. They claimed that the Prosecutor's Office, after a week since the disappearance of the young men, nobody gave them information. In an attempt to show commitment to a case that has already exceeded the limits of the State, its governor, Enrique Alfaro, held a meeting on Sunday with the attorney general and the interior secretary. After knowing the progress of the investigations, he paid to the theory that has gained strength in recent days: the call center were nothing more than covers where "operations of another nature" were carried out.
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