translated from Spanish: Widow of victim in Reynosa recounts attack in Tamaulipas

Juan Francisco, of Guatemalan origin, worked in a mechanical workshop in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, and also repaired cell phones. He wanted to take advantage of his day off to fix a bicycle, he was about to leave in a taxi for the missing parts, but he was killed outside his house.
So says Norma, wife of one of the victims of the multihomicide that occurred last Saturday, June 19, in Tamaulipas.
“The bike was left in the door of the gate, and on that side was the taxi driver, when I was coming back I saw that a van stopped. The man or boy got off, he saw the gun and like a vest and told him what he brought in the backpack to show it to him, my husband opened the backpack and showed it to him and what I did was close the door slowly and I choked it and I went to my room,” she says.

As soon as Norma heard the gunshots, she took her three-year-old baby, two daughters, nephew and granddaughters and locked herself in the bathroom.
“I heard my husband say ‘no sir’, my baby would say ‘my daddy my daddy’ and I would say ‘no, nothing’s going to happen’. I was there for about 40 minutes or an hour locked in the bathroom, when I heard nothing anymore we went out from the back and crossed the fence to my sister’s house.”
Not knowing what to do, the woman says she went outside and saw Juan Francisco lying on the sidewalk.

Read more | Workers, students, the elderly, young people and families, the victims of the Reynosa massacre
“I’m not burying my husband yet”
Norma has only been able to recognize Juan Francisco’s body and give a statement, but notes that she has not received support in the procedures to be able to bury him in Mexico, where he resided after being deported from the United States in 2016.
“I still don’t bury my husband, they don’t release my body. I went to the Attorney General’s Office and they told me that they occupied a role where one of the sisters (of Juan Francisco) has to make a letter to ask that she be able to stay here,” she explains in an interview.
“I went to the Semefo for the recognition of my husband and from there they sent me to the attorney general’s office and pus already told me that they were going to talk to me about the Guatemalan consulate, but from Sunday to here I have been going round and round and they did not completely tell me what I needed to have my body released,” she laments.
In less than two months, Norma has had to listen to the murders of her husband and son, who was also murdered on their doorstep on April 28.
“When he got out of the gate, armed people stopped and they wanted to take him, I ran out and they released him, but when he ran to get into the yard they shot him too,” he recalls.
Norma is afraid to report, because she fears reprisals from the armed groups that saw her directly in the killings and that locate her home in Reynosa.
However, he denounces that the violence that occurred this weekend is not new.
“It’s not a month and a half right now, it’s not a year, we already have a lot of time like that. I moved house, I am with my mother because I am very afraid, I have 5 girls in my care, three daughters of mine and two granddaughters”, explains Norma who has focused these days on the procedures that are missing to recover the body of her husband.
When asked if she would be willing to apply for asylum in the United States, given the violence that surrounds her, Norma replies that she has thought about it but before the possibility of being rejected she stops any attempt.
“When my son (his murder) thing happened I had thought that (asylum) but my family reassured me and as they say here, ‘he was at the wrong time and place’. Yes I have thought about leaving here, but it has not occurred to me to ask for political asylum because sometimes I think they will not give it to me.”
The prosecutor of Tamaulipas, Irving Barrios Mojica, said on June 22 that the strongest hypothesis behind the Massacre of Reynosa is the intervention of organized crime groups from Matamoros and Rio Bravo, however no further information has been detailed about it.
With information from White Elephant
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Original source in Spanish

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