Security personnel search one of the properties where clandestine graves were found, in La Concordia, Chiapas, on December 28. Photo courtesy of Cuarto Oscuro.
The state prosecutor, Jorge Luis Llaven, confirms the discovery, and attacks the previous administration, led by Rutilio Escandón, who the Sheinbaum Government has sent as consul to Miami
The prosecutor of Chiapas, Jorge Luis Llaven, confirmed the discovery this Sunday of 13 clandestine graves in the municipalities of La Concordia and Palenque, with the abandoned remains –some mutilated– of 17 people. The bodies appeared in different ejidos of both municipalities, although the majority, 15, did so in graves in communities of La Concordia, a town that has been the focus of much of the criminal news in recent years in the State, due to the confrontations between criminal groups. In July, criminals massacred 19 people in the municipality. In May, another attack left six dead there.
“We had reports, complaints, of 17 investigation files of missing persons in the last year,” explained prosecutor Llaven, in a press conference. “This led us to carry out an intelligence operation to determine where we could find the people who were still missing. That is why we found some common lands, such as Zaragoza, in La Concordia, where three bodies of adult men were found in a building, several days after they had been killed. The second search was in the Costa Azul neighbourhood, in the same municipality, where we found eight graves with 12 bodies, all men. Two of them were complete, the rest were mutilated. They were tortured before being killed,” the official added.
Llaven pointed out that the findings presented were the result of 72 hours of searches in the municipality and in Palenque, hundreds of kilometers to the north. In this second case, the authorities located the graves “as a result of the arrest of a commander of the investigative police” days ago. The prosecutor has reported that it is likely that the number of graves and bodies will increase in the coming days. “Today [Sunday] we had the discovery of more properties, where it is presumed that there are more bodies. But because of the weather and because it is already night, the search was suspended, but tomorrow we will restart and we will inform you.”
Asked by reporters, the prosecutor harshly criticized his predecessors, although without giving names. “There was abandonment by the authorities in charge of security and justice. There was even denial of the problem, they always said that nothing was happening, that everything was fine. And today what we found, those graves, with the bodies, shows that the problem did exist and that the people are not wrong. The people said ‘we are insecure, we are afraid’. And they were not wrong,” he said.
The words of the official, a former local deputy of the Green Party and secretary of security between 2012 and 2018, were a clear message to the former governor, Rutilio Escandón, of Morena, whom the Government of Claudia Sheinbaum has sent as consul to Miami. Indirectly, the prosecutor also criticized the position of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who always defended that all the complaints of insecurity in the regions of the mountains, Frailesca and Frontera, were little less than an exaggeration.
The prosecutor has pointed out that a good part of the violence in La Concordia and in the Frailesca region in general, which connects the center of the State with the border and the Sierra Mariscal, is due to “a group that has been advancing, from the mountains. It is not a large group,” he said, “but due to the inaction of the authorities, they were gaining ground, committing misdeeds, and no one was confronting them. Today we are determined to guarantee peace.” Llaven has not explained what group this is. Organizations related in some way to the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel have been fighting for years in these regions, with name changes included, which makes it difficult to understand their dynamics and inertia.
“Today,” said the prosecutor, “free transit is guaranteed in Chiapas. In the mountains and the border, there had been no free transit for many months.” During a visit to the border area at the beginning of the year, EL PAÍS confirmed that roadblocks and the presence of irregular checkpoints were a constant. In communities and on roads between the border and the mountains, criminals had subjugated localities. “Public transport had been suspended,” said the prosecutor, “and even classes had been suspended. But now all the communication routes in the mountains, the border and the Frailesca region have been cleared.”
On another note, the prosecutor confirmed that of the 92 police officers arrested in Comitán two weeks ago for obstructing anti-drug operations in the municipality, 46 were prosecuted, although he did not specify for what crime. In addition to the 46, the authorities have arrested nine municipal agents from Tuxtla, the capital, and five from the Attorney General’s Office.
Original article by Pablo Ferri, El País, December 30th, 2024.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.