The two bills on forced disappearances that were introduced in the Guerrero Congress have disappeared, Araceli Ocampo Manzanares, a two-time federal deputy and now a local deputy for Morena, informed groups of victims’ families.
Socorro Gil Guzmán, leader of the Memory, Truth, and Justice collective, took the floor of the Guerrero Congress to demand that the deputies approve the bills they introduced in 2019 and 2021, but which Morena’s legislative leaders had put on ice.
On Wednesday, March 12, groups of families of missing persons from the state met with the Human Rights Commission of the local Congress, headed by Morena member Araceli Ocampo Manzanares.
At the meeting, the representative warned the victims’ families that the initiative will start from scratch, as the two initiatives drafted by organizations and experts in 2019 (2018-2021 legislative session) and 2021 (2021-2024 term) “are lost.”
The latest initiative, according to representatives of collectives, proposes autonomy and a larger budget for the state commissions for the search and assistance of missing persons, as well as the creation of a forensic identification center.
Upon leaving the meeting, Socorro Gil Guzmán of the collective took the floor at the highest podium minutes before the session began.
She was heard by the majority of the plenary, who did not flinch.
“I have been searching for my son (Jhonatan Guadalupe Gil) for six years and three months. And not just for my son, searching for justice, we have also lost that, we have no security on the streets, our children are being taken away with their hands on their waists,” she expressed.
Holding a pennant bearing her son’s image in her hands, she recalled that he was disappeared by municipal police in Acapulco, Guerrero, on December 5, 2018.
That year, the municipality of Acapulco was governed by Magistrate Adela Román Ocampo, a candidate for the Morena party.
“He finished his law degree; he had so many dreams, hopes, and projects, to get ahead, to change the future, perhaps for his mother, who lived in a four-by-four room paying rent.
“One day, for defending his friend who was being forced to sell drugs, they took them both. They tortured and murdered my son’s friend. It’s time I don’t know anything about my son. I haven’t been able to find him.”
She claimed that Jhonatan was put in a municipal police patrol car and was never heard from again.
During the Guerrero Prosecutor’s investigation, the mother accused, all evidence disappeared.
She also revealed that she was threatened and forced to leave Acapulco for four years out of fear that other members of her family would be taken, as she had been warned.
“I’ve gone to the hills to unearth more victims. I’ve seen the pain and terror of digging up bodies from under the ground, hoping to find my son there in a handful of bones.”
She considered what the mothers are experiencing to be inhumane, and that, in addition, the state government is denying them the “2,000 measly pesos” they should be giving them each month for food. “A curse lasts longer than those 2,000 pesos they give the families.”
She explained that the collectives, whose members are mostly women, raise funds to cover the costs of the searches.
The perpetrators put their lives on hold the day they took them, she stated.
Socorro Gil questioned the representatives present: “What have you done for the victims’ families? You haven’t approved the General Law on Forced Displacement; you deny us resources and you deny us the searches.”
It’s a shame that the security of the entire state has gotten out of your hands, she lamented.
“We have to borrow rods, shovels, and picks to go search because we don’t have the money we need. I’m not here for fun; the State forced me to search for my son, to do the work that the authorities are supposed to do.” She stated that the State is negligent, incompetent, and inattentive in the face of the serious situation in the state.
“Neither the governor (Evelyn Salgado) nor the president (Claudia Sheinbaum) spoke about the issue of forced disappearances when they appeared in Acapulco in December.”
She added that, at the time, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador referred to the searching mothers as impostors and denied that there were so many missing people in Mexico.
“Even though there is a national registry with more than 100,000 missing persons, my son was one of them, whom the president disappeared again.
The first time, the police disappeared him, then the prosecutor’s office, and then the president,” she concluded.
At the conclusion of the mother’s statement, the president of the Political Coordination Board (Jucopo), Morena representative Jesús Urióstegui García, and the president of the Board of Directors, PRI legislator Jesús Parra García, entered the room to begin the session as if nothing had happened.
David Molina Rodríguez, representative of the Lupita Rodríguez Narciso collective, reported that since 2018, state collectives and experts on the subject drafted the enforced disappearance law for the state of Guerrero, and the following year it began its mandate in the local Congress.
However, since that legislature, headed by Representative Alfredo Sánchez Esquivel and, at another time, by current Federal Representative Yoloczin Domínguez Serna, as well as the current one chaired by Jesús Uriostegui, all from Morena (the latter two from the group of Senator Félix Salgado and his daughter, Governor Evelyn Salgado), they have been mocked, ignored, and deceived.
The representatives of the current legislature, mostly from Morena, have met with the collectives twice, but only to be given the runaround.
It wasn’t until Wednesday that they were told there was no enforced disappearance law in their possession, without providing any explanation other than the disappearance.
There are 2,500 missing persons on record in the state.
Yesterday, the chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission of the state Congress, Morena member Araceli Ocampo Manzanares, boasted that she had presented an initiative to encourage teachers to reduce their students’ homework so they don’t become stressed.
Source: proceso
