When José Gutiérrez and Janet Miranda founded the Sembrando Comunidad collective for the victims of homicides in Guanajuato, there were only four families. This was five months ago. Now, in this entity until recently safe and prosperous in Mexico, its association serves more than 150 and most are relatives of disappeared. Gutierrez and Miranda have quickly become the only external support of the victims of an extreme violence that has left more than 400 dead Only in January. And this Tuesday they decided to leave their State for a few days because their life is also at risk.
A phone call suspended the work of an organization that was just born: “If you go out to look for missing people, the fuck is loaded on you and your family.” Gutierrez hung up the phone. They came from a demonstration of about 50 families in León, the largest and most conservative city in the industrial corridor where protests are scarce. And they were heading towards their homes in Irapuato and Salamanca.
When they were entering Irapuato, already at night, Gutierrez received the call while he had the phone in hands free. He realized that a van was following them. He called the State Government and asked for protection. Local police patrols escorted them to the prosecution to file the lawsuit. “An angry ministerial agent arrived because he had to take care of us and we ended up returning alone to our homes,” Gutierrez now says from the other side of the phone.
Many of the cases they have in their organization are from families whose relatives were killed or kidnapped inside their homes. That’s why they knew they wouldn’t even be safe there. That was when they decided to leave Guanajuato for a while. “As the matter cools. But we have to go back, they need us there,” Gutierrez adds. And, although he has no proof of where the death threat could have come, he is aware that the birth of his association has been especially annoying for the prosecution, until recently without a civil supervisor reviewing his work. “We know they are very pressured. We don’t know who it was. But we have our suspicions that it might have something to do with them,” he denounces.
A week ago, in an interview with this newspaper, I recognized that this could happen at any time. “I am not afraid,” he said. But he clarified that fear is already installed in the neighbors of this industrial corridor in Guanajuato – Salamanca, Irapuato, Celaya – since last year he broke the homicide record and became the bloodiest entity in the country. “You can die as an activist, almost as likely as a mother can be taken from her husband while she sleeps and that appears dismembered in a pit“, he pointed out about one of the cases that they advised, that of Juan Carlos Medina, from Irapuato.
Gutierrez, 32, and Miranda, 25, began the association when they realized the amount of irregularities that were committed in a few cases of homicide. The same pattern: criminalize the victim, Miranda said. “The Prosecutor does not follow protocols and, if he investigates, he often does so to find an excuse that justifies his disappearance or his murder,” Gutierrez denounced a week ago from his home in Salamanca, one of the most violent municipalities in the State. The famous “was in bad steps” that served to give a folder to the majority of investigations that they followed closely. And they decided to do something for their State.
The two are criminologists, Gutierrez was a professor of Miranda at the University of Irapuato. And the origin of the association is not so common: they did not seek to a missing person. But they could not stand that crimes were committed in their municipality, not investigated well and left unpunished. They received support from other associations of missing persons and victims of human rights violations in other parts of Mexico, in States as Coahuila (in the north), pioneers in the search of missing in graves. And also of academics and subject matter experts. “In Mexico, unfortunately there is a long history of struggle for human rights and entities that have lived what we live now,” he explained.
The two had left their jobs to devote full time to legal advice and accompany more than a hundred families who denounced the indifference of local authorities. They ran from one municipality to another, from one prosecutor’s office to another, demanding more clues, to search where they had not searched, to give them a file and to take into account families to prepare the Victims Attention Law. Guanajuato is the only State that still does not have legislation that requires to assist, protect and repair the damage.
Until this Tuesday, Guanajuato had all the ingredients of the Mexican tragedy: mass kidnappings, forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, shootings, self-imposed curfew, clandestine graves and militarization of formerly prosperous and safe municipalities. From now on, also with the death threats of those who try to get justice done.
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