An assistant principal and school board member from the community of El Monte in the Los Angeles area was visiting his wife’s hometown. While out to dinner with friends he, along with five others, was kidnapped and murdered. The full story below was reported by the Los Angeles Times.
MEXICO UNDER SIEGE
Wife of slain El Monte civic leader tells how night out with friends morphed into horror
‘You never think this kind of thing can happen . . . to innocent people,’ Betzy Salcedo says.
By Tracy Wilkinson, January 3, 2010, Reporting from Gomez Palacio, Mexico – They were aware of the dangers. Agustin Roberto “Bobby” Salcedo and his wife, Betzy, knew that this town, like much of Mexico, was no longer the tranquil spot it had been.
“I’ve been coming regularly,” Salcedo’s widow said Saturday of her hometown. “We knew how bad it had become.”
And yet, the Salcedos ventured out for a few beers the night before New Year’s Eve.
“We were just going out with a group of friends,” Betzy Salcedo said, speaking slowly and casting her eyes downward. “You are careful, you look around, but you never think this kind of thing can happen . . . to innocent people. We were having a good time. Then we were in the mouth of the wolf.”
Hours later, Bobby Salcedo was dead, hauled away from the bar with five other men, their bodies dumped in a dried-grass field on the outskirts of town.
Arrangements were being made Saturday to repatriate Salcedo’s body. The 33-year-old, who was born and raised in the Los Angeles area, was an assistant principal and school board member in El Monte.
His slaying underscores the random volatility of the violence in Mexico and the ease with which the pain it causes can seep past the country’s borders.
The Salcedos might also have been lulled into a false sense of security by outdated memories and the comfort of old friends.
Betzy Salcedo cited an old Mexican saying: He who doesn’t owe anything has nothing to fear. She always figured that people who had nothing to do with drug trafficking would not be targets in the country they loved.
One can follow the gruesome news out of Mexico, much of it involving the government’s ongoing war against powerful drug cartels, yet still feel a sense of immunity — that “it can’t happen to me,” that the dangers are remote. It is a common thought among many Mexicans, a defense mechanism, perhaps.
But now Betzy Salcedo and her family are bitter. Mexico has become a poison to them.
The Salcedos and their companions had ended up at the Iguanas Ranas bar on Miguel Aleman Boulevard in Gomez Palacio on Wednesday night.
By day and to the uninitiated, the strip may seem harmless enough. There are dives with names like Mens Club-Boomerang, but also taco stands and convenience stores. The Iguanas Ranas is painted almost whimsically with, as its name suggests, bright yellow and green frogs and iguanas.
At night, however, the environment shifts. “We don’t even go out at night anymore. We are exposed to everything,” said Gerardo Gonzalez, the bar’s accountant.
Routinely, he said, gunmen commandeer cars from passing motorists, demand bribes, enter bars to lord over the patrons. “We are living in times of terrible, daily crime,” said the lifelong Gomez Palacio resident, whose nephew was kidnapped and shot to death on Christmas Eve.
It didn’t used to be like this. Until about two years ago, the Iguanas Ranas admitted families — parents with their children. But then the violence started. About that time, several men were kidnapped from the place and killed.
This year the bar has endured a bomb threat, an extortion threat and robbery. Things have gotten so rough that the owner is considering shutting it down, Gonzalez said.
Betzy Salcedo, 26, remembers the days of her youth, when she and friends could go out at any time of day or night without thinking twice. “That’s all completely gone,” she said.
Bobby Salcedo’s brother Juan, a banker in the Los Angeles area, added: “I’ve read all the stories. Sixteen bodies found here, bodies there. But I always thought it was [happening to] bad people. You mind your own business and you’ll be fine.”
Gomez Palacio is an industrial city in the northern part of Durango, one of the deadliest states in Mexico last year as two drug gangs battled for territory. That battle is part of the nationwide fight involving drug traffickers and the government that has claimed more than 15,000 lives in three years.
In December federal police intercepted a shipment of more than 400 pounds of crystal meth, a few days after intercepting a similar amount of cocaine, both being transported through Gomez Palacio toward the U.S. border.
Police stations in Durango state came under grenade attack Dec. 14. The former mayor of Gomez Palacio was kidnapped Dec. 6 (and eventually released) and the local police chief, Roberto de Jesus Torres, was gunned down the evening of Dec. 2 as he left his home.
On New Year’s Eve, a few hours after Salcedo’s body was found, two detectives were kidnapped in the middle of the day. Their bodies were left in the bed of a pickup on a major highway on the outskirts of Gomez Palacio.
Investigators reported no new developments in the Salcedo case Saturday. They repeated that they were looking into whether any of the people killed with Salcedo had criminal ties, but had found none.
Betzy Salcedo said none of her group was involved in drug trafficking; the victims included one of her oldest friends, Luis Fernando Santillan Hernandez, 27, a lawyer, and his two younger brothers. Another victim, Javier Gerardo Garcia Camargo, 28, was married to her best friend.
Gunmen armed with rifles burst into the bar about 2 a.m. Thursday; there were conflicting accounts of what they were looking for, investigators said Saturday. Some witnesses said the men asked for the owner of a truck parked outside. Others said they demanded to know who was a cop.
The patrons were forced to the floor and ordered not to look as the gunmen hauled off Salcedo and the five others, who had been crowded around a pool table. They were shot to death and the bodies dumped along a canal in a poor neighborhood called September 11.
Although there were calls in the Los Angeles area to solve Salcedo’s killing and bring the guilty to justice, the norm in Mexico is impunity. Most crimes go unresolved.
Manuel Acosta, the lead investigator with the state prosecutor’s office, vowed in an interview Saturday to get to the bottom of the Salcedo slaying. Sometime next week, he said, investigators will begin pulling together testimony from various witnesses.
Betzy Salcedo said she hoped some good would come out of “all these horrors” — that a serious investigation would be launched and “this will not keep happening to innocent people.”
//
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
—
January 5, 2010
A Leisure Guy comments about Mexico being the failed state on our border. He says “We know how to stop this: legalize the drugs and institute a broad array of treatment programs (which would cost much less than the hopeless ‘War on Drugs.’ “ I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately there are too many people in the U.S. who will block these kinds of needed changes.
Coast Contact 
Mexico is not safe period! A shocking 32% of all non-natural deaths of U.S. citizens outside this country occur in Mexico. Many of these deaths are a direct result of poor or nonexistent safety standards both inside and outside of the resorts. To read tragic Mexico vacation DEATH stories, many written by heartbroken family members as well as stories written by victims that “survived” their Mexico vacation go to:
http://WWW.MEXICOVACATIONAWARENESS.COM
This, of course, is useless information unless placed in context. Mexico is by far and away the country more Americans travel to than any other country—more by noon each day than the UK gets for a year. In fact, a “shocking” 32% of all American traveling out of the US, go to Mexico (source US Office of Travel and Tourism Industries) So it is not “shocking” that 32% of all non-natural deaths of U.S. citizens outside this country occur in Mexico. That is the exact number that travel there! This is like saying a “shocking” 100% of people that drown are near water. Yes, the US does have better safety standards than most other countries. The last few decades have led to major safety improvements in the US unseen in the rest of the world. You will not see bicycle helmets outside of the US. I suppose we could not travel anywhere if that were considered, or even go out the front door. We could after all continue of drive towards overwhelming public ignorance of world affairs and culture, while simultaneously sucking all joy out of life. Sadly, we in the US balance our general increase in safety by violence not seen anywhere else on earth. Tijuana, the busiest border town in the world is generally considered a dangerous city, yet has a lower per capita murder rate than, for instance, Houston. No Mexican has ever walked into a school or mall with a gun and shot scores of people. Killings by drug dealers are of other drug dealers, not tourists and limited to small areas of a big country. Our own country went through this tyoe of battle in the 30s through the 50s. At present, we shoot more people here in the US than in any other country in the world. Nor are you a target of Al Qaeda in Mexico. Mexicans acutally like Americans. When traveling use common sense. The most common tourist risks are not what you might think, but instead drowning and auto accidents. Both can be avoided by being careful. You need to use common sense when traveling. By the way, I was born and raised in the USA, am Anglo, and offeded by less than subtle race baiting like this but not “shocked.”