After hours of anguish for their families, 10 migrants from Michoacán returning from work in Florida, United States, were released this Tuesday after being deprived of their liberty and robbed of their belongings on the roads of Guanajuato.
The alarm was raised in the early hours of the day when relatives of the compatriots, having lost contact with them, requested assistance from Guanajuato authorities. According to one of the mothers, the group was traveling in a van from Denver, Florida, bound for her native Jacona, Michoacán.
The last contact with the migrants was recorded around 1:00 a.m., when one of them informed his wife that they were crossing into Guanajuato.
“We’ve been in contact with them since they left Denver, Florida. At 11 a.m., they reported from the border in Tamaulipas, then in Monterrey, but at 1 a.m., the last contact was in Guanajuato, and they no longer answer their cell phones,” said the mother of Jesús Aguilar Guillén, one of those affected.
Faced with the uncertainty, agents from the state Secretariat of Security and Peace began an investigation on the San Felipe-Silao highway, the area where the last trace of the migrants was discovered. At the same time, the Guanajuato State Attorney General’s Office (FGE) began a preliminary investigation to clarify the events.
Around noon, Michoacán authorities managed to establish contact with one of the kidnapped migrants, Ismael Hernán Guillén. His testimony revealed that they were intercepted on the highway to Salamanca by individuals dressed in uniforms similar to those of the National Guard. The criminals diverted them to a rural area where they held them for several hours and stole all their belongings.
“In Salamanca, before reaching the last checkpoint on the road to La Piedad, some people in National Guard uniforms stopped us, stripped us of our belongings, threw us onto a dirt road. This happened around three in the morning, and they released us during daylight hours,” explained Ismael Hernán Guillén.
State agents are currently reviewing videos from C5 cameras on the roads in the area to corroborate the victims’ accounts and try to identify those responsible for this crime.
This incident adds to the growing concern for the safety of migrants traveling on various highways in the country. Guanajuato, although a state with significant economic activity, has also recorded incidents of insecurity on its roads.
The use of official uniforms by criminals is a tactic that creates greater alarm and makes it difficult to identify the real security personnel. Authorities from both states are collaborating in the investigation to bring those responsible to justice and ensure the safety of citizens in transit.
Source: milenio
