Taxco does not trust its police. The magical town of old colonial houses, cobblestone streets and silver crafts is experiencing unprecedented days in which the Government of Guerrero has taken control of the municipality’s security after ten members of its Secretariat of Citizen Security (SSP) were arrested in a shady case. Last Wednesday, August 28, a joint operation of the Armed Forces arrested the 10 suspects. Four of them were identified from the beginning as active agents, accused of aggravated kidnapping. The Public Ministry has not been able to confirm this with the other six until Monday: “The identity of the active police officers was confirmed by the corresponding municipal authority,” the agency said in a statement, where it specifies that the six are charged with forced disappearance.
The operation on August 28, jointly carried out by agents from the Attorney General’s Office and the state police, the National Guard and the Army, was looking for a woman “of reserved identity”, a victim of forced disappearance who has not yet been found, although the investigation continues. The security forces broke into a government building, the headquarters of Public Security, Civil Protection and Traffic of Taxco, where they expected to find her. She was not there, but instead they found a man who had also been kidnapped and was being held illegally by the detained police officers. They were not expecting him.
The cases are clearly related, but the Attorney General’s Office has not yet given information on how. In principle, the six men identified as police officers on Monday (Luis, David, Carlos, Cristofer, Alexis and Ángel) have been accused of the forced disappearance of the woman, and the four who were already accredited as agents since last Wednesday are accused of the aggravated kidnapping of the man found at the public headquarters. Of the last four, three were arrested at the scene (Florentino, Marino and Yolanda) and another, Eusebio, in Cacalotenango, a nearby municipality.
The suspects have already been placed in the custody of the authorities and a control judge has sent them to preventive detention in a state prison, the Social Reinsertion Center (Cereso) in Iguala, where they will continue their judicial process. The next hearing, in which a judge will decide whether to bind them to trial, will take place next Thursday, September 5.
The authorities are also investigating whether the 10 detained police officers are related to the disappearance of five other young people from Taxco. The Prosecutor’s Office does not rule out the involvement of the 10 agents in this case, prior to the operation last Wednesday, but they have not yet gathered all the necessary evidence to confirm it, according to sources from the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The information is opaque and few details have been revealed, but the agency assures that it continues working to find them.
The operation to arrest the 10 police officers did not include the security forces of Taxco. Not even its political authorities were notified that it was going to happen. The mayor of the municipality, Mario Figueroa, recently re-elected in the elections of last June 2 by Movimiento Ciudadano (previously he was part of Morena), denounced that “at no time was the city council informed and much less notified” about the operation on Wednesday 28, as stated in a statement published that same day.
On August 31, the State of Guerrero assumed control of Taxco’s security due to “the events that occurred in the silver city in recent days, where municipal police officers were arrested and are under investigation for their possible participation in criminal acts,” according to a statement from the state government. The Coordination Board for Peace Building notified Figueroa of the decision, but he has not spoken out since then.
Taxco has been experiencing violent months. The state’s criminal groups have taken over the streets and neighborhoods of the magical town. Their fight for control of the municipality’s transportation routes led to a curfew being declared in January. The Church had to intervene as a mediator between the mafias and the government and, apparently, achieved a truce that did not last long. A month later, Figueroa, who had publicly denied that there was any type of insecurity in Taxco, suffered an attack against him. At first he minimized it and denied that it was an attack against him, but ended up acknowledging the obvious days later.
Police murders, kidnappings, shootings in broad daylight, disappearances, extortion… The usual repertoire of organized crime in Mexico has been deployed in all its elements in Taxco and, as demonstrated by the arrest of the 10 police officers, not even the security forces are free from being involved in illegal business and in the spiral of insecurity that has been unleashed in the municipality. The most dramatic image came on Holy Thursday: the murder of an eight-year-old girl, Camila, provoked a brutal reaction in which dozens of citizens lynched the three alleged culprits. One of them, a woman, was beaten to death in front of the eyes of police officers who did nothing to prevent it. The other two men survived but were beaten. A succession of violence that has led to the state government having to take action in the matter.
Source: elpais
