The Attorney General’s Office (FGR) reported this Friday the discovery of a lifeless body “with similar characteristics” to those of one of the 10 miners kidnapped on January 23 in Pánuco, a mountain town in the municipality of Concordia, south of Sinaloa. The body, about which no further information has been detailed, has been found in El Verde, a town about 40 kilometers from the place of disappearance. The agency has also announced the arrest of four people as a result of investigations that began two weeks ago, after the massive deployment of military and other security forces in the area.
The 10 kidnapped workers are Ignacio Salazar Flores, José Manuel Castañeda, Antonio de la O Valdez, Antonio Jiménez, José Ángel Hernández, Javier Vargas, Antonio Esparza, Javier Valdez, Saúl Ochoa and Miguel Tapia. The group of miners was taken from a construction and production camp near a silver mining area owned by the Canadian company Vizsla Silver. The Sinaloa authorities recognized the case on January 28, five days after the kidnapping, when the missing workers’ files began to be made public. The case has fueled the crisis of violence and insecurity that Sinaloa has experienced in recent years, besieged by violence between two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel.
“To get there there is a National Guard van to stop those who want to go to the graves. They did not let us enter by orders of the FGR, but we know that they have worked two graves and that they are removing several bodies,” Mrs. Marisela Carrizales, founder and leader of the group of searchers Por las Voces Sin Justicia, tells EL PAÍS. During the investigations, the authorities located 10 camps linked to criminal groups in the town of Los Naranjos, in Concordia. The last of these discoveries has been the grave intervened this Friday by the federal authorities, that of El Verde, which for the moment has not detailed the total number of people or remains located. “The trucks came out with decomposed bodies, with a very strong smell, of recent bodies. Those trucks were guarded by federal officers,” adds Carrizales.
It is not the only worrying episode experienced by the northern territory in recent days. Six tourists – four men, a woman and a girl – were kidnapped on Tuesday night in Mazatlán, a case that aggravated the security situation in the city a week before its International Carnival, the great festival of the coastal city. The woman and the girl appeared hours later in a nearby municipality.
Two Citizen Movement deputies were shot last week in the center of Culiacán, while they were traveling in a vehicle. The case has intensified tension in the capital of Sinaloa, which has become the main scene of the war between Los Chapitos and Los Mayos. The delivery of Ismael to the US authorities May Zambada, historical leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, by Joaquín Guzmán López, son of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán widened the crisis between the factions of the criminal group, which have maintained terror ever since.
Insecurity in the territory has led the federal government to send 1,600 soldiers to Culiacán and Mazatlán, two key cities for the operations of criminal groups, at the end of January to confront the cartels. “The specific mission of the deployed personnel is to act in coordination with the authorities of the three levels of government in the entity,” the Ministry of Defense specified in a writing.
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