“Sol Prendido” for Borderland Beat
Twelve years after one of the worst massacres in the country’s history, the survivors have received no support whatsoever.
Twelve years after the bestial attack by Los Zetas in the community of Allende, Coahuila, the federal and state governments “throw their hands in the air” and do not assume responsibility for compensating those affected, who accuse the Executive Commission for Attention to Victims (CEAV) of not fulfilling its promise to repair the damages. There have been many apologies, but compensation has not been forthcoming.
It was on June 27, 2019 when the then Secretary of the Interior, Olga Sanchez Cordero, arrived at the center of Allende, in Coahuila, an austere square of dry trees, where officials in suits paraded around with faces of grief.
They were there, they said, to offer apologies to the survivors of one of the worst massacres in the country’s history, who had hoped to receive psychological support or financial compensation after their homes and ranches were destroyed at the whim of Los Zetas.
The dangerous criminal organization born in 1997 from the Gulf Cartel, in 2011 decided to torture, murder and dispossess hundreds of inhabitants of this small municipality framed in a desert land that reaches 50 degrees Celsius in summer and -15 in winter.
“This is not a protocol event, but a personal and institutional conviction,” said Sánchez Cordero on that occasion. At her side was Alejandro Encinas, the then Undersecretary of Human Rights, crestfallen and with a face of sorrow. There was also the governor of Coahuila, Miguel Riquelme, who, with a frown, shook his head as he spoke words of indignation.
Apologies followed. No to repetition, they said. There were ringing phrases, such as: “the President instructed us to look the victims in the eyes” but something more tangible stuck with the relatives. In her speech, the Minister of the Interior assured that they would support with whatever was necessary to guarantee the right of reparation for the victims.
MILENIO had access to court documents and e-mails that reveal that the Federal Government’s Executive Commission for Attention to Victims (CEAV) has refused to repair such damage, despite the promises broadcast on television. What is the justification for not fulfilling the promise? That it is simply not the commission’s job to do so.
Now that there are no flashes or cameras, other arguments arise. Through an appeal for review filed on September 7, 2023 before a court, the CEAV argues that the tragic events occurred due to the fault of common law authorities, it is the latter who must repair the damage caused.
“The CEAV was created specifically to guarantee, promote and protect the rights of the victim at the federal level, for the attention of the victims of common law crimes or human rights violations committed by public servants of the state or municipal order, the State Commissions were created,” they say in the legal document that is part of the amparo lawsuit 440/2023.
This argument is in contrast to the 2017 agreement, through which the federal Commission for Attention to Victims exercised the power to provide aid and cover with compensation to the victims of the massacre.
The state government did the same: through an agreement on the dismissal determinations, the Coahuila State Commission for Victims pointed out that, indeed, in 2017 the CEAV acknowledged that it was indeed its turn to compensate those affected. They also added that the state agency does not have the money to do so.
One of the survivors of Allende, whose husband was murdered and who today cannot demand justice in front of her for fear of being murdered, claims that what happened “is something that you never really get over, it is insurmountable, of course, but added to that they want to drive you crazy, that is, they [the CEAV] are also an executioner. They bring you to a breaking point and I think it’s to make you give up everything”.
Los Zetas’ are still there
Twelve long years have passed since that day when ‘Ella’, as she will be called because contrary to what many think, Los Zetas still control the region, received a phone call. Remembering the moment, she pauses for a long time during her story until her sweet, northern tone cracks. She says she doesn’t know where to begin and that it gives her tremendous anxiety to relive the event.
She was 25 years old when the massacre occurred in Allende, a very small town with barely more than 20,000 inhabitants. She had left her last semester of college in Saltillo, the state capital, to go live with her husband, a young man named Garza. During the four years she lived there, life was spent among long dirt roads and ranches from which they rented heavy machinery.
Everything was on course until March 18, 2011, the day of the phone call that would end what ‘Ella’ knew as life. They were at home, in the area known as ‘Los Garza’ ranch, and were about to go to bed. The phone rang, it was her mother-in-law who was screaming and crying, and from her property she said they were being shot at, while her husband, an elderly man, tried to defend them.
“Then he (Ella’s husband) was like that, that is, in total shock, ‘no, how, get out’, and then the call was cut off and he stayed in bed, paralyzed,” she recalls. The woman was the one who reacted and thought in seconds: “If my in-laws live three blocks away, we are the ones who are next”.
She became active. “No, we can’t stay in the house. I don’t know what’s going on, if there’s some kind of revenge, something personal or whatever,” she recalls as her first thoughts. Her husband immediately wanted to go to help his mother. “So I told him: “And how are you going to go for your mother, didn’t you hear that they were shooting?
In the meantime, she managed to convince her husband to leave Allende. On the way, her husband called her brother, who was at his parents’ house, but he didn’t answer. Then her sister, who a few minutes before the shooting had left the house for a barbecue, but they were able to pick her up. After a few minutes the three of them were running away from Allende.
“But he said he couldn’t handle it and wanted to go back, and I told him ‘but how are you going to go if you don’t even have a gun’, I mean, oh no, I saw it as going to the slaughterhouse, even though it sounds ugly, because what are you going to do alone… totally nothing. I don’t know, it was very, very sad because I feel that he could be alive, but he loved his parents and he left”.
She never saw him again, nor did she return to see the pieces that were left of her house in Allende. From people close to him and from the news he learned what had happened: Los Zetas destroyed the town and took everything and everyone.
“I remember that day I was wearing my shorts, my blouse and some flip-flops because we were about to go to bed. I say that it is very easy for people to say ‘we just want the money’, but they are so crazy, what are they thinking? It is not fair that they have taken away my life, the family I had decided to form, the person I loved, and that they have condemned me to exile”, says the widow with a hint of anger.
A ‘Zeta’ relative
With time, however, she has found some answers. Her husband’s grandfather had a very large property, the ‘Los Garza’ ranch, where they had been farming for more than 100 years. The land had been divided among siblings, grandchildren and nephews, but the Garzas had a relative they knew little about: the son of Uncle Luis, brother of her husband’s grandfather.
He was Luis La Güiche Garza, who the authorities would later reveal was working with Los Zetas. A rumor that no one confirms and few dare to talk about.
“There was a carnita asada and we would get together, but I never saw Luis in particular, not even at my in-laws’ house, and the age difference was not so great, but then I made an analysis and said ‘maybe that’s why they had a certain distance'”.
Today it is known that the story went like this: the brothers Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, Z40, and Omar Treviño Morales, Z42, leaders of Los Zetas, claimed that there were traitors in their organization. One of them would have been La Güiche Garza, who allegedly handed over information to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) along with his sidekick, a minor narco named Héctor Moreno.
For days, the Zetas wiped out anyone with the surnames Garza and Moreno. They destroyed the ranches with heavy machinery, ransacked them, took all their belongings and killed whoever they found. The official number of missing persons is 26, but survivors claim there are more than 300.
“And it has been very very very difficult and it bothers me that the authorities treat us as if we were not human, by what right? By what right did they deprive us and make us suffer so much? And all the time that had to pass for us to find the necessary strength to demand, because they don’t even let you do that, they leave your head like nothing, you have no capacity to think”.
Ella’s pilgrimage has been long: she went to the United States where she worked in everything, then she returned to Mexico and tried to rebuild her life, but when they found out at work that she was a survivor of the massacre, they did not hesitate to fire her.
Today she has decided to speak out because she finds it inhumane that the CEAV and the government of Coahuila refuse to repair the damages they caused with their inaction and collusion with Los Zetas.
Silvia, the survivor
Silvia Garza speaks quickly and without passing saliva. Twelve years after that day, she has become an expert in judicial technicalities. She has the agility to respond and the clarity of a lawyer for technical explanations.
“We have 17 missing persons in our extended family. I have my father, my brother and a half-brother, all disappeared. My dad’s wife also – the second one -, I have uncles, cousins, my uncle’s mother-in-law, my aunt-in-law’s brother-in-law, my brother, my aunt-in-law, and so on and so forth, 17.” The count of terror contrasts with her sweet voice.
Silvia learned to speak without hesitation, even though what she tells is the story of how she lost her entire family, including a 10-year-old brother. In Allende she kept the memories of a life she will not be able to recover, the photographs of when they were children. Not a single memory of her Garza’s remains. Even that was taken by the Zetas.
“You know, my cousin, I don’t know what they did and what information Hector sold. Hector Moreno sold some information to the DEA, they leaked the information, they told Los Zetas, they got angry and started looking for them. But they [her cousin and her friend] were already in the United States.
Silvia says that first they came to the ranch of her uncle Luis, Güicho’s father. First they killed her uncle with his friend Everardo. Then they moved on to her uncle Rodolfo’s ranch, which is where they abducted her cousin, the children, her mother-in-law, an old lady, her uncle and her aunt.
Silvia thought it was a misunderstanding and that in the end they would be released. But today she realizes that this was naive: she must have imagined it when, from her house, she saw how the murderers arrived at the home of another uncle, Victor Garza. She heard the screams, the roar of bullets. She saw from across the street how her uncle defended himself with dignity and gunfire against Los Zetas.
Silvia describes how she and her family managed to escape from the ranch. But the days that followed were more terrifying: there was talk that there was a list and that Los Zetas were going to kill anyone with the last name Garza.
“In fact, the police were at the entrance and exits of the town stopping cars and making them take out their identification to make sure they were not Garza or a relative of Güicho, because if they were, they were going to abduct them.
Tragically, the members of her family only lasted nine months alive after the massacre. Although they went to live in Monterrey, the criminals found them. In March 2012, her father told her that one of the houses destroyed by the Zetas had insurance that he could collect on. He set up a meeting with an insurance adjuster in Allende and took a roadtrip with his wife and two children. They were never seen again.
It is known that they were taken and Silvia knows they were murdered. The only one whose life was “spared” was her one-year-old brother, who was abandoned by the Zetas in an orphanage. Two years later they would find him.
Six months after her father’s kidnapping, tragedy returned to Silvia Garza. Her brother Checo, who was in a rehabilitation center and suffered from schizophrenia, was also captured by Los Zetas.
“On Sunday we found out that my brother Sergio had been at my mom’s house, there in Allende. But the house was already ransacked and burned, without windows, without anything, it was a shell. They say that my brother was there screaming and crying, that he loved his father and his mother. He was crying, I imagine like a heartbroken child who didn’t have his parents”.
Now she knows that it was some municipal policemen who went after him and took him out of Allende’s house. The last he heard, they kidnapped him and handed him over to the cartel.
Silvia lives in exile and yet she is one of the survivors who have not stopped fighting for more than 12 years. One of her demands has been to get rid of the mortgage on the house that the Zetas destroyed and where they evidently cannot return. Unfortunately, she has not succeeded and the debt continues to grow.
-What about the Victims’ Commission?
The fact that the main executioner of this suffering is the CEAV has been very victimizing, they are the ones who have oppressed us the most, even though we can file an injunction they refuse it and then they file a review. Afterwards they exhaust the proceedings beyond our means, they delay the whole process, they should already have a ruling but they don’t,” laments Silvia Garza.
She says that in Allende there were not only disappeared people, but also the locals were looted and everything was taken from them. They were wiped out, they were left without a source of income. “We want something to happen, that they really pay attention to us and that they take the victim’s side, that they don’t criminalize us,” she says.
She considers that if the federal and state governments allowed their lives to be destroyed, they have to pay for it. She says that if they stole millions of pesos, how are they going to be able to compensate those affected. It is the least they deserve because their dead are not going to return.
Attorney Jesus Gonzalez Schmal, who represents Silvia and two other survivors of the Allende massacre, says it straight: even Alejandro Encinas, in the town of Arteaga, told them that they would receive psychological protection in accordance with the law and that he would attend to the State’s obligation to pay the corresponding indemnifications in such a serious case.
He explains that the survivors have been in a situation of hardship during all these years. She recalls that since 2017 the CEAV took over the case, for which the federation took responsibility, but “they wanted to wash their hands,” says Silvia. Coahuila is where they have to attend to them, they shield themselves by saying those from the Commission.
Not only that: in spite of the fact that Gonzalez Schmal obtained an injunction that obliges the CEAV to give explanations, this agency filed an appeal for review, which for the lawyer “is a mockery” because they allege that they fulfilled their obligation to pass the case to the state of Coahuila. “They have no shame,” he says indignantly.
Although it is difficult to measure how much money they would have to compensate the victims with, Silvia Garza offers an overview: they destroyed the ranches, killed the animals, demolished the houses, stole millions of pesos in heavy machinery, the active contracts were lost, and therefore the pending projects no longer exist.
“I don’t have the frame of mind to say a number. Everything counts, future plans, my life project destroyed. They know that the damage is great, that’s why they make fools of themselves. I don’t think there is a comprehensive reparation as big as what they took from us,” she tells MILENIO.
Jesús González Schmal and lawyer Gerardo Ballesteros learned about this story when the former worked at the CNDH and realized that they were not really doing anything with this issue. “These people were abandoned. We are fellow countrymen, I am from Coahuila and since then I have been working as an ombudsman and we are trying to help them get through this difficult time,” he says.
As a Coahuilense and knowledgeable of the reality in the state, he explains that the territory comprising Allende, Piedras Negras and the neighboring municipalities became the property of Los Zetas. The municipal presidents were worthless and the cartel came to infiltrate in such a way that, at least in Allende, they controlled absolutely everything, from the government palace to the police.
