President Andrés Manuel López Obrador dedicated his morning lecture on Wednesday to the case of Florence Cassez and Televisa’s montage of the detention of the French citizen and the Mexican Israel Vallarta (who is still in jail), which occurred 15 years ago in Mexico City.
“The audience was made to believe that they saw a live operative to release abducted, when in fact it was a telemontage,” said Jenaro Villamil, president of the Mexican State’s Public Broadcasting System, presenting excerpts of what Televisa and communicator Carlos Loret de Mola broadcast.
Read: “I didn’t realize it was a montage”: Loret de Mola appeared on a case-by-case basis Cassez
López Obrador assured that during the neoliberal period these assembly cases were presented because there was a “close and even criminal association” between political power and the media.
During the conference, the cases of the girl Frida Sofia, allegedly caught among the rubble at Rébsamen College in the 2017 isismo, and the death of the girl Paulette Gebara Farah in the Edomex, were also mentioned.
.@jenarovillamil summarizes what happened 15 years ago and accuses Carlos Loret of putting the montage together, even though his collaborators told him that he violated human rights; presents fragments of what was transmitted at the time. https://t.co/wFEbAP1535
— Political Animal (@Pajaropolitico) April 7, 2021
In 2005, Frenchwoman Florence Cassez and Mexican Israel Vallarta Cisneros were accused of operating a kidnapping network called Los Zodiaco. Televisa broadcast live his alleged detention through a police operation, which was later known, was a montage organized by Genaro García Luna, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, currently detained in the United States.
Cassez was sentenced in Mexico to 60 years in prison for kidnapping in 2005 and was released in January 2014 after the Supreme Court granted her protection for “irregularities that occurred during her trial.”
Regarding the situation in Israel Vallarta, charged with two other kidnapping offences and who has not had a sentence since 2005, the Secretary of the Governorate, Olga Sánchez Cordero, said that the criteria that applied to Cassez should also apply to Israel Vallarta, so his case will be reviewed.
“This is a very important case because since 2005 that you saw that you were arrested, on 8 December 2005, and it is April 2021, there is not yet a sentence, it is also a very serious violation of a legal process because how old this process is already, so I think it would also be important for judges to actually comply with the constitutional principle of expedited justice.”
The representative also said that he will review Azucena Pimentel’s performance in assembly of the Cassez case, as she worked as a producer of the “First News” program, and currently works in the area of presidency communication.
“If she is involved in this matter, she can no longer work in the government of us, we must ask her to explain what her situation is. Jesus is going to report on this,” he said.
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