A federal judge located in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, did not link Enrique Rivas Cuellar, former mayor of Nuevo Laredo, to the trial and determined that the Marina vans that appeared in the municipal presidency in August 2018 were not cloned, but were part of the security team.
Rivas Cuellar confirmed the court decision, which took place at a hearing on February 7. “This is a politically motivated case,” said the former municipal president, who insisted on his version of not having committed any wrongdoing.
The Navy vans were seized by the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) on August 15, 2018. These are two vehicles that were discovered by the collective of relatives of disappeared at the hands of the Mexican Navy.
At that time, the mayor had as escorts naval elements, but the victims denounced that they were apocryphal vehicles since they did not carry official plates. In addition, they considered that they could have been used in some of the disappearances.
The judge’s decision endorses the version offered by the former mayor: that they were vehicles owned by the municipality and that they were delivered to the Navy so that they could adapt them to use them as part of security. “Those vans were not used for any crime, so it was proven by the expert evidence,” he said.
Read: Navy reserves orders received by its elements accused of disappearances in Nuevo Laredo
However, the hearing was never intended to find out if the vehicles participated in disappearances, as reported by the families of the victims. In fact, Rivas Cuéllar was accused of the alleged crime of “improper use of decorations, uniforms, hierarchical grades, currencies, insignia and acronyms,” according to article 250 1 bis of the Federal Criminal Code, which provides for penalties of between one and six years in prison for storing “vehicles with beacons, colors, equipment, originals, counterfeit or with an appearance such that they resemble vehicles used by the armed forces or public security institutions.”
The judge’s decision is already final since the FGR did not file an appeal nor did the Executive Commission for Attention to Victims (CEAV), which represents the families of the complainants.
“It is an offense to the victims, it exhibits the degree of collusion between the judiciary, the FGR and the Navy. With this decision we will take the matter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), said Raymundo Ramos, director of the Nuevo Laredo Human Rights Committee that accompanies the families of the disappeared.
“The judge does not take into account the context of the existence of these vans. It is contradictory that on the one hand the Mexican state recognizes the serious human rights violations that occurred in 2018 and a judge decides in the opposite direction,” he said.
The case was being investigated within the folder FED/SDHPDSC/FEIDDF-TAM/0000445/2018 and was presented to the judge by the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office on Forced Disappearance. This was part of the investigations into the wave of disappearances attributed to the Navy between February and June 2018. At least one family pointed to Rivas Cuellar’s bodyguards and the vans they used as present in one of the disappearances. These are the relatives of Juan Carlos Pérez Navarro, who disappeared on May 21, 2018. For the time being, however, the judge has not agreed with them.
The FGR has opened 34 investigation folders for 47 disappearances, although 20 of them were found dead. Animal Político revealed that there was at least one more case that took place in December, just two weeks after Andrés Manuel López Obrador came to power and when most of the Navy secretariat’s troops had already been withdrawn from the border city.
Read: FGR singles out former Mayor of Nuevo Laredo for Use of Cloned Navy Vans in 2018
There are currently 18 sailors in prison accused of three forced disappearances: those of Noé Alférez Hernández and Jonathan Ballesteros, Julio César Viramontes and José Luis Bautista Carrillo. At first there were 30 imprisoned. Among them was Alfredo Reyes Mondragón, head of the Special Operations Unit (UNOPES) in Nuevo Laredo, but was released after filing an amparo. The case is paralyzed while waiting for the judge to resolve the amparos presented by the rest of the members of the Mexican Navy, who have been in prison for almost a year.
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