Seven people, including members of the LGTBIQ+ community, disappeared a week ago in a rehabilitation center in the troubled Mexican state of Guerrero, key for drug trafficking, the Police reported in the last few hours, ruling out that they are dead.
Since last Tuesday, a team of 50 police officers has been searching for seven people who were taken from the Spiritual Renewal Rehabilitation Center of Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero, located 100 kilometers from Acapulco.
According to relatives of the missing people, the force rules out that they are dead and today they will add drones to the search.
Among the missing are a minor under 15 years old, a woman and the coordinator for sexual diversity of the Democratic Revolution party (center-left), Moisés Tomás Juárez Abarca.
After a week with no news in the case, dozens of relatives and acquaintances yesterday blocked the main avenue of the tourist port city of Acapulco for a few hours to demand progress in the investigation.
“Nothing is known yet, they continue with the search, the authorities will use drones to locate them, they also ruled out that they were dead,” said Guadalupe Hernández, mother of Brian Josué Vargas, one of the missing, reported the local newspaper Milenio.
The Prosecutor’s Office in charge of the case declared that “it continues with search and location operations.”
The details of the disappearance are unknown, but two versions are circulating: one indicates that an armed group entered a rehabilitation center in the Vista Alegre neighborhood, near the center of Acapulco, and kidnapped them; the other, that they were going to an attached rehabilitation center located in the community of Xaltianguis, but did not arrive at the meeting in which they would participate.
Mired in a spiral of violence, Mexico registers more than 110,000 missing people, the majority since the fight against drug trafficking was militarized in 2006, in addition to some 420,000 deaths.
The most recent episode was the disappearance, on August 11, of five young people in Lagos de Moreno, in the western state of Jalisco, whose torture and possible murder caused shock when recorded in bloody video images.
Lagos de Moreno is considered a strategic location for organized crime organizations, such as the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, as it connects with several key states in drug trafficking.
In Jalisco and Guerrero, both with coasts on the Pacific, and part of the drug trafficking route, there are many complaints about forced recruitment by drug trafficking cartels, which wage war against each other.
Source: Ambito
