Heriberto López Peña, 27, of Caleta, Michoacán, disappeared on December 10. Testimonies included in the complaint filed by his wife with the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) indicate that elements of the Secretariat of the Navy captured him on the beach in the town of Toril, in the municipality of Lázaro Cárdenas.
Since then nothing has been known about him. His relatives believe that the officers handed the young man over to a criminal group operating in Pichilinguillo, very close to the place where he was disappeared. Residents of Caleta maintain a sit-in to demand their return alive and that the authorities act against those responsible.
“Those who raised my brother are the sailors who were in Tupitina. The two patrols they have at the base there were the ones that did it,” says Marisol López Peña, 32, sister of the disappeared.
See also: Victims waited three years for the arrest of 30 sailors accused of disappearances
His version: that Heriberto approached the beach, possibly smoking marijuana, when he was intercepted by naval elements. “The two vans were separated, one on the road and one on the beach. My brother passed by and they ran around him. He managed to call one of his friends. That was his last call,” she explains. The complaint filed with the FGR includes the testimony of a hotel worker who claimed to have seen how the sailors pursue and capture him.
“From there they don’t take it to the city, they take it to Pichilinguillo. There is a checkpoint of armed people, whom they call the Pulidos. There were people who say that the sailors handed him over to them,” says López Peña.
“If they had grabbed him with marijuana, what they had to do is report, take him and do what had to be done. But they didn’t show him anywhere,” says the missing man’s sister. He assures that he went to the nearest base together with the young man’s wife but that the sailors denied having any connection with the facts.
Animal Político consulted with the Navy, the FGR and the government of Michoacán about the case, but at press time it had not received a response.
After the disappearance of Heriberto López Peña, residents of Caleta placed a sit-in on the coastal road that goes to Lázaro Cárdenas.
On Tuesday, 14 Navy officers showed up at the sit-in and denied colluding with organized crime. Commander Félix García Reyes said that it is most likely that there were cloned vehicles of the Mexican Navy. This is an argument that institutions have repeated on occasions when they have been singled out for human rights violations.
It happened, for example, between February and May 2018 when the Navy was accused of perpetrating 47 disappearances in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. When questioned by relatives of the disappeared, the authorities alleged that they were criminals disguised as sailors, something that the investigations ruled out. There are currently 18 officers imprisoned for the crime of enforced disappearance and another 12 were recently released.
According to Marisol López Peña, the Navy launched an operation on Wednesday 15 in which the wife of the disappeared participated. According to this version, three people were detained, but armed men tried to free them by causing blockades with burning vehicles.
“We had never had problems with anyone. Neither with the people nor with the government. In the village everything was quiet,” says López Peña, who demands the presentation alive of his brother.
Human Rights organizations such as the Association of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees and Victims of Human Rights Violations in Mexico issued an alert demanding the release of López Peña, the investigation of the case and a meeting of the inhabitants with the governor, Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, in order to deal with the criminal problems in the place.
Michoacán has been experiencing a conflictive situation in recent years due to the confrontation between the Jalisco Cartel New Generation and the United Cartels, formed by various criminal groups.
Marina has been accused on several occasions of perpetrating forced disappearances. It happened in the first half of 2018 in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, and at the end of 2018 in Guanajuato.
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