Army adds alleged unjustified attacks

The murder of four-year-old Heidi Mariana Pérez Rodríguez in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, adds to at least five alleged unjustified attacks on civilians by the Army or the National Guard that have caused the death of three other people and injuries to six in that border city in the last two years. In addition, from 2011 to date, the Nuevo Laredo Human Rights Committee has documented 24 civilian deaths.
“Tamaulipas is the clearest evidence that the use of the Armed Forces in public security tasks does not work, and cases like that of Heidi Mariana – and 12 years earlier Martín and Bryan Almanza Salazar – show that those who are paying the bill for this militarization project are the innocent, the children, women and men, students, and on the other hand, those who are being punished less by justice in Mexico are the Armed Forces,” says Raymundo Ramos, president of the committee.
Heidi Mariana died of a gunshot wound on the night of August 31, while being taken to the hospital with a stomach ache, after Griselda, a family friend who was driving the car, diverted her route when she saw a military vehicle and then began to hear gunshots. 

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has defended the version of the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena) in the sense that it was a stray bullet during a confrontation. The girl’s family and human rights organizations insist on avoiding exonerations a priori, as they claim that there is evidence that it was a direct attack. According to the Nuevo Laredo Human Rights Committee’s tally, it would not be the first time.
Asked about the alleged unjustified attacks referred to by the committee, the National Guard and Sedena did not respond until the close of this publication.  

🚨 Follow the press conference in the @CentroProdh on the case of the girl Heidi Mariana Pérez Rodríguez
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— Centro Prodh (@CentroProdh) September 8, 2022

Cases that accumulate
According to the organization’s reconstructions, on April 8, 2021, Jorge Rivera Cardoso finished eating with a friend at a seafood stand a few blocks from Ocampo Avenue, in the heart of Nuevo Laredo. After getting into their van, they headed towards the number one international bridge. On the way, they found four members of the National Guard walking along the sidewalks. 
They passed them without any problem, circulating from south to north, but at 100 meters they began to hear gunshots; one of the bullets killed Jorge. He was driving and his companion later related the fact. Jorge lost consciousness, the van got on the sidewalk and ran over two people: a water vendor and a woman who was walking with some pantry bags. 
Later, the National Guard would compensate the seller and the lady, but not Jorge’s family, on the grounds that the security elements had been assaulted first.   
Of the events that the organization describes this year, the first is the injury of the blacksmith Pedro Eduardo Bartolo Trejo. On January 25, 2022, I was fishing in the Rio Grande. When he finished, around 6:00 or 7:00 in the afternoon, he got into his truck and began to hear gunshots at the height of the number one international bridge. Head-on, he saw four elements of the National Guard chasing a young man. 
Faced with the scene of violence, he distanced himself, turned right and at 100 meters he heard gunshots again and felt injured. He was taken to a private hospital, where he was treated for a wound caused by a bullet that had entered from the back and exited from the side. After the fact, the Nuevo Laredo Human Rights Committee filed a complaint against the National Guard. 
Two months later, on March 24, 2022, another event involving Sedena left three injured in the ISSSTE neighborhood: Carlos Eduardo Orozco, Alfredo Rodríguez and Francisco Javier Espinoza, three friends, two from Nuevo Laredo and one from Monterrey. After picking up one of them at the bus station and before reaching his home, he chased them and fired a military convoy. 
Carlos Eduardo survived serious injuries, while Alfredo Rodríguez has had several surgeries to save his foot and his family has spent more than half a million pesos on the reconstruction of his heel. Francisco Javier, who was a minor, was the least injured. 
On June 28, Christian Uribe, 21, was on the phone with his wife when he himself warned her that he was going to hang up.Orque came the National Guard. He was shot and killed without any confrontation. When he stopped answering the phone about five or ten minutes later, while his wife called him again insistently, she learned that there was a shooting in the Lomas del Río neighborhood. By the time she got to the point, her husband had already died.
Pending justice and military fugitives
Of the cases involving the Army, that of Javier Flores del Ángel, which occurred on February 27, 2021, has been one of the longest battles for the Nuevo Laredo Human Rights Committee. That night, he was at a friend’s house in the Colinas del Sur subdivision. It was about 11:00 on a Saturday.
The group went out to buy beer. On the way, they encountered three military vehicles: one of them overtook them, stood in front of them and began shooting at them without warning. Javier, who was the driver, was shot three times in the body and was left dying at the wheel. “Pray to him, scumbags, get off at the chingada,” the other soldiers shouted after surrounding the car. Finally, they were put face down on the floor, according to the committee’s reconstruction.
The co-pilot was unharmed, but the two friends behind were injured in one arm and leg. Between 30 and 45 minutes Javier waited to receive medical attention; he never arrived and died at the scene, despite the fact that one of his friends insistently asked the military. None had done or carried anything illegal. They got out of the car, took the wounded away in a van and Javier was planted with a goat horn. 
“They make an informative report, which is now called an approved police report, and they justify that Javier and the occupants of the vehicle assaulted them, and that when they saw their lives at risk, they shot in self-defense,” Ramos explains. However, after the expert report requested by the organization, it was known that the shots were going from the outside in; there was no trace of any in the opposite direction. They all came out negative to the rhodizonate test, to know if they had fired the gun. In addition, another expert showed that this was not even fired, because he had the insurance on.
“Therefore, a judge determined that the military’s version was false, and we demonstrated with the testimony of the survivors that they not only deprived Javier of his life, but that they planted a weapon on him, and the version of the aggression falls off. Two of those soldiers have defected and are fugitives. They were given all the facilities, for four months three hearings were suspended because they did not appear, and when the indictment hearing is held, they no longer belonged to the Army, they had already caused discharge due to desertion. This is the Army, this is the Armed Forces,” warns Ramos.
These are documented facts, he stresses, where there are investigation folders in the Attorney General’s Office (FGR), and in the last one, even arrest warrants. In addition, complaints have been filed with the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) without any recommendation so far. For him, this instance is “ignorant, subject to the Armed Forces and complacent.” 
In Nuevo Laredo, Ramos recalls, there have been two decades of violence, and Tamaulipas was one of the first states, along with Michoacán and Chihuahua, where the Armed Forces were used in public security tasks. “It’s two decades of impunity, of violence; two decades proving that the military and sailors and the National Guard are not the solution to insecurity. Tamaulipas today is one of the eight most insecure states in the country,” Ramos emphasizes.
With support to the Army and without attention, as 12 years ago
Last Thursday, after offering a press conference, the relatives, the lawyer and the organizations that accompany the case of Heidi Mariana went to the National Palace in search of an audience with the president. They were not received. In response, they were referred to citizen service officials, so they will be waiting for the Presidency to give them an appointment. 
On Friday they returned to Nuevo Laredo to define the following actions, but one of the first will be to resort to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to request precautionary measures, since they consider that the intervention of the CNDH has been insufficient. In addition, the family has reported that elements of the Army continue to roam the vicinity of their home. 
Juan Martín Pérez García, coordinator of #TejiendoRedesInfancia, stressed during Thursday’s conference that, 12 years ago, the Redim organization prepared the report Childhood and armed conflict in Mexico, after the murder of Martín and Bryan Almanza Salazar during the six-year term of Felipe Calderón.
The brothers, aged five and nine, went toIn Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, when crossing a military checkpoint, soldiers fired on a vehicle for no reason. The Version of the Sedena was, as in the murder of Heidi, that the car had been left in the middle of a confrontation with a criminal group that allegedly fired first at the military, who repelled the aggression.
The Redim report retrieves the details of the case; among them, the investigation carried out by the CNDH to clarify the circumstances of the death of Martín and Bryan. On June 16, 2010, they concluded that the Sedena investigation had no support or attachment to the evidence, since there had been no confrontation between hitmen and the military, in addition to the improper collection of evidence and preservation of evidence, as well as the arbitrary use of public force, cruel treatment, omission of aid and alteration of the scene of the facts.   
“(Since then) it has multiplied by hundreds and thousands of cases; Heidi did not have to die because, on March 4, 2011, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child asked the Mexican State to review the security strategy based on militarization due to the high number of deaths of children, due to the high number of missing persons. In 2015, he asked the Mexican State again, with even more serious data on homicides, disappearances, extrajudicial actions, to review the strategy, and the Mexican State has refused to comply with these recommendations,” said Pérez García.

He accused that President López Obrador is repeating the same pattern that Calderón generated of immediately going out to defend the military. On that occasion, Calderon even accused the family of having criminal ties to evade the investigation. “If we have the president now also coming out before the authorities do their investigative work and a judge determines what happened, in reality what we are having is complicity and cover-up,” he charged.
Last Friday afternoon, the federal government made official, through its publication in the Official Gazette of the Federation, the reform through which the National Guard is incorporated into the Sedena, with which the second will have operational and administrative control of the first.
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Original source in Spanish

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