The case of Alexa and Leydi, the two girls of 7 and 11 years killed by Tuesday in Badiraguato, in the Sierra de Sinaloa, seems something more complex of the stories that have appeared in the media these days. Relatives of the minors point out that they were not victims of crossfire, an explanation that appears in tens of notes, but that does not appear in any official statement of local or federal authorities. Instead, they say, military shot at them, without stopping them. As a result of the shots, the two girls died, two other children under 12 and 14 were injured, just like the marriage that was in the front of the truck, father and mother of one of the deceased girls.
“Their truck ran into the military command and they shot,” says Reynalda Morales, cousin of the truck driver, Saúl Rojas, in a telephone interview with El País, from Culiacán. “They fired like ten seconds,” adds one of the two surviving minors, a 12 -year -old boy, cousin of the others, who is next to Morales, in the hospital. “I was in the batea of the truck. When the shots started, I threw myself on the floor and made a ball. I don’t know how many times, but they all shot at the same time, they shot many at the same time,” adds the child. The boy was shot in the left leg. “It has it totally shattered, all the carnita started. They will have to do grafts,” says Morales.
Like the woman, a nephew of Rojas, Víctor Medina, has published a video on her Tiktok account, in which she gives a version of what happened, very similar to how Morales does. “My uncle told me … clarifying that they ran into the military, they did not give them the stop, they simply threw them. That it is very clear. It is something very delicate, it gives courage, impotence and sadness,” he said. His uncle, Saúl Rojas, 45, was badly injured with the nose and shoulder. His wife, Anabel González, 40, was injured in the hip.
The tragic episode occurred on Tuesday, at about 14.00. Rojas and González grabbed the truck to go down to the municipal head of Badiraguato, about 15 minutes from their home, in the Juanilla community. They were going to make the purchase and leave the two elders in high school. “What happens is that just at the height of the Cieneguilla the road was chopped, by the evil,” Morales explains, referring to the criminals who travel through the area. All this week, criminal groups have faced bullets in Badiraguato and the nearby peoples of Guamuchil and Mocorito, in the context of the war between factions of the Sinaloa cartel, a situation that persists since September.
When they saw that the road was cut, “they returned back to go to the ranch. Then, on the same road, they are at the military command. But they never saw the evil,” Morales continues. The four minors were in the batter of the family truck, a Sierra GMC, black color. The two young girls were sitting on a portable icebox, supported against the cabin glass. The bullets gave them fully. “The little ones died on the spot, one gave the other in the head in the head. The other two cousins are injured, but stable,” Morales continues. The 14 -year -old girl suffered a small wound in the buttock, for the chop of one of the bullets shot.
After the shots, the military arrived running to the truck, which barely distributed 100 meters from them, according to the woman’s story. The soldiers were aboard two Humvee vehicles. “And there, the military jumps to the truck, wanting them to go down with the rifles yet on the tip. But the doors blocked by the shots and could not leave. They broke the glass with the rifles and took them out. And then they saw that it was an entire family. But still they continued to mistreat them. They hit them to the doors and told them, ‘get children of their mother.
Then, the soldiers gave first aid to the family. Then they went to the ditch that the criminals had opened on the road and filled it enough to be able to pass over and reach the municipal capital of Badiraguato, where there is a hospital, according to Morales. In the minutes that passed between the shooting and the work in the ditch, ministerial police officers of the State Prosecutor’s Office arrived, according to Morales. The ministerials had gone to collect the bodies of three people from the community of LaPara, on the other side of the main road, dead in a confrontation recorded the previous day.
More or less at the same time, at 14.52, the Culiacán Command, Communication, Communication and Computing Center, the C-4, received a report from an “armed confrontation between police and civilians”, on the “Badiraguato to Parral road, at the height of the Cieneguilla.” By chat messages, both situations began to circulate, that of the confrontation and that of the attacked family, supposedly occurred in nearby places. At some point on Tuesday afternoon, both events merge into one, until reaching media throughout the country. In the versions published these days, the military appears shooting in support of the Ministerial Police of Sinaloa, supposedly attacked by criminals. Even in some notes, there is talk of injured military.
In all these days, neither the Ministry of National Defense (Sedena), nor the Prosecutor’s Office of Sinaloa, nor the Attorney General’s Office (FGR), which attracted the case, nor the Ministry of Federal Citizen Security and Protection, spokeswoman for the Security Cabinet, have officially given information of this matter. Asked about this, the FGR Social Communication Directorate has indicated to this newspaper that “we have no data because it is an ongoing investigation.” This newspaper has contacted General Carlos Javier Pérez Vara, spokesman for Sedena, via text message, to ask him about the matter. Pérez Vara has indicated that the agency issued a statement in this regard, but such a statement does not appear on its website, or in its social networks. The military chief has not forwarded him to this newspaper.
A repeated story
Reynalda Morales stands these days in the family representative before the government bureaucracy. Not for anything: it is the second time that a similar story lives. 17 years ago, military killed her husband in a strange episode, also in Badiraguato, in a somewhat more isolated town, in the Santiago de los Caballeros union. In that attack, the soldiers killed the husband of Morales, Zenon Alberto Medina, and five more people, three friends from Medina, who went with him in his truck, and two soldiers, wounded to death by the bullets of his own companions, victims of a fatal error.
It happened on March 26, 2008. As detailed later, the National Human Rights Commission, from the story of two survivors, friends of the victims, civilians were on their way to a 15 -year party, at about 21.00. The soldiers, alerted by the vehicle in which they moved, a Hummer, shot. They were the first months of the government of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), who, shortly before, had declared war to drug trafficking with military operations throughout the country. Events such as this happened during his term and the following years, for example of the murder of two students at the Tec de Monterrey, at the hands of military, in 2010, or the execution of at least eight civilians in Tlatlaya, in the State of Mexico, in 2014, already with Enrique Peña Nieto in the Presidency.
From the criminal point of view, Sinaloa and the surrounding states also suffered the first layers of one of the first internal battles of the Pacific cartel. The arrest of Alfredo Beltrán Leyva in January of that year faced his family with that of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán and his henchmen, one of the most important legs of the organization. The war lasted years and many now in Sinaloa remember her as an obvious antecedent of the present battle, which faces the children of Chapo with the henchmen of her old partner, Ismael May Zambada
Started in mid -September, after the controversial detention of Zambada in the United States, the new battle, which had taken place mainly in Culiacán and its unions in the southern part, has moved to municipalities in the north of the state, with clashes in Guamuchil, Angostura, Mocorito and Badiraguato. In that context, death occurred to Girls Alexa and Leydi, which Governor, Rubén Rocha, from Morena, lamented on Wednesday, in an appearance before the media, in which he also did not report the details of what happened.
Regarding the case of her husband, Reynalda Morales keeps a bitter memory. It was not only his death, but the military attempt to make what happened as the result of a confrontation between military and civilians. “They – the military – then said they had heard a detonation of my husband’s truck,” Morales explains, “but they didn’t bring weapons or anything,” he adds. The case even came to the Inter -American Commission on Human Rights, which measured so that the Mexican State apologized to the woman and the families of the victims, an event that just happened last month. “But it was the Undersecretary of the Interior who apologized. Sedena never wanted,” says Morales.
The ditch woman: “I feel that we live again, the same massacre, with the same tune. They say the same thing again, that it was a confrontation, the crossfire, they try to give versions that are not. I asked for measures of non -repetition in their day. That is, we asked that these things are not repeated and we are living the same Or later, the truth comes to light.
