translated from Spanish: Cops threaten young man to disappear from protesting in Jalisco

Violet is 23 years old, but it’s not called Violet. She says she is afraid to give her real name, or any other data that identifies her, after a group of unidentified ministerial policemen “kidnapped” on Friday 5th in Guadalajara, Jalisco, as she was addressing three other comrades to a demonstration to demand justice in the case of Giovanni Lopez, a young man allegedly killed at the hands of Ixtlahuacán police officers. 
“The cops told me I’d been lucky this time. But that, for the next time they saw me on the street, then they were going to disappear.”
That’s why she’s afraid, the young woman insists in a tremulous voice through a call of Zoom. That is why, and because the same police officers who kidnapped her are the same ones who, hours later, received the instruction from the Jalisciense Prosecutor’s Office to check, house by house, that the protesters that civil organizations reported on social networks that were missing after illegal arrests on Friday, were already located and safe.
Read: “Giovanni did not die, the state killed him”: For the third day they march in Jalisco to demand justice
“It’s kind of absurd,” Violet laments. “Those who kidnapped me and threatened me with disappearing are the same ones who will come to my house to see if I’m okay!” exclaims the young woman who, since she was released on Friday night, says she has not been able to sleep, nor be left alone in her home, for fear of someone knocking on her door and behind her a uniform with her face covered , however much the state’s attorney offered apologies on Saturday and announced the arrest of two elements for arbitrary detentions. 
In fact, her fear is such, she says that, despite her activism as a feminist and for human rights, she has made the decision to be locked up at her house, at least for a while. 
“They did it: now I’m afraid to take to the streets to demand that my rights be respected and to ask for justice,” he says. “I know there are more protests (for Giovanni’s case), but I’ll be supporting them through social media so I don’t go out on the street for a while. I’m taking the threat from the cops very seriously. They scared me a lot.”
“I thought it would be one more missing””
According to the Jalisco State Commission on Human Rights, on the afternoon of Friday, June 5, ministerial agents made “illegal and arbitrary arrests” of multiple demonstrators heading to the vicinity of the headquarters of the State Prosecutor’s Office, in the Guadalajara industrial area, to protest the murder of Giovanni Lopez and the arrest of 26 people in the protests on Thursday, June 4.
Even since the arrests occurred without the agents identifying themselves as public servants, and without reporting the reason, and most importantly, without informing the place where the detainees would be transferred, the Commission publicly denounced that it was “enforced disappearances” of citizens. While the governor of Jalisco, Enrique Alfaro, came to insinuate last Saturday that elements of the Prosecutor’s Office may have acted “on instructions from another source”. 
After being arrested at 6pm on 8th Street July, Violeta says that she initially thought that people who forced her to climb a van could be criminals of organized crime, who were taking her kidnapped in a van without logos, no greater signs. 
“Guys were carrying sticks, bats, tubes, and guns,” recalls the activist, who still says he tried to resist. 
“I shouted with all my might. But even though I asked for help, and although there were people watching what was going on, no one did anything. No one pulled out his cell phone to record, and no one came over to ask for my name. Nothing.” 
Once in the punt, Violet was on the verge of emotional collapse, of fainting. Like the rest of the young men the agents were taking meds so they wouldn’t look up, he says that as the vehicle speeded through the streets of the Jalisciense capital, all sorts of grim thoughts began to pass through his mind. 
“I thought they were going to disappear and my parents would never hear from me again,” says the young woman, who even wanted to run out of the running van. 
But in those came a dry blow to the back of one of the captors, who pulled her by the neck and sank his head into the punt so that he would not move.
“They messed with one of our own.”
The journey was short, “at most about 5 minutes”. Although no one knew where they had been taken. All they saw was cells with bars that had a bathroom. 
In the cells, the uniforms rechecked the belongings of detainees. Most were asked to unlock their cell phones. Apparently, they were looking for information from an alleged Whatsapp group from which, also supposedly, some kind of violent protest would be organized against the state prosecutor’s property.
Read: Families of detainees in protest #JusticiaParaGiovanni report police abuse
“They wanted to know if we belonged to any association, to some group or movement, and if we were in coordination with anyone to attack them. And that’s why they were checking to see if we had any pointy objects, some weapons, or alcohol to generate fire,” Explains Violeta. 
This testimony coincides with that of Luis Antonio Maldonado, a 32-year-old freelance journalist who was also illegally arrested last Friday near the office of the Prosecutor’s Office, who narrates that police officers told them they were investigating an alleged group that had organized to cause damage in the city.
In fact, Violeta claims that several of the policemen tried to justify the illegal arrests by accusing them of what happened a day earlier, at thursday 4 protests in front of Casa Jalisco, when some demonstrators attacked the police, even going so far as to set a policeman on fire using a bottle of ethyl alcohol. 
“They said to us, ‘You looked for him. They messed with one of our own, now they hang on.'” 
Finally, at eight o’clock at night, Violet says she was put up with other women in another van, this one with the prosecutor’s office. They circulated for about 25 minutes and left it in the middle of the night in a fraction, about 10 kilometers already from neighboring Zapopan. 
Luckily, she wasn’t taken off her cell phone because she was able to hide it between her underwear. And before their parents saw on social media that multiple users, friends, and civil organizations, were spreading their name among that of the missing youth in the vicinity of the Prosecutor’s Office, he marked them to warn them in a loud voice that was fine. 
She explained as calmly as she might that the cops had left her lying in the middle of nowhere, but that at least her backpack had been returned. 
Apparently, the uniforms were not interested in the only thing they found inside: a cardboard that, with large black letters, asked for ‘Justice for Giovanni’.
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Original source in Spanish

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