THEY LEFT THEIR HOME (AND HEARTS) IN SAN FERNANDO

By Juan Montoya
A few years ago, Miranda and her family (not her real name) started a beauty salon in San Fernando, Tamaulipas.
Miranda was a trained cosmetologist and introduced new techniques, hair and skin treatments and other beauty treatments not available in other salons. The family business flourished.
Often, she would travel to the border and acquire materials for her shop. She also encouraged those of her workers who could travel in the United States to go with her on shows sponsored by national beauty shop supply chains in San Antonio and Houston.
Then the visits to their business began. At first, it was a request for a "voluntary" donation by men who made it obvious that they were armed. Then, after the payments began, it turned into an outright demand for monthly, then weekly, payments for protection.
The family looked north. They bought a home in the Rio Grande Valley and set up a beauty shop and salon business in McAllen and then expanded into Brownsville. They maintained the San Fernando business open, but only marginally. A hired man was paid to maintain their home and her mother's loved jardines.
On one of their return trips to San Fernando, they were surprised to find their family home occupied by a contingent of heavily-armed men who informed them that the house was no longer theirs.
"Nosotros no sabemos nada," said one. "Aqui nos tiene el jefe." (We don't know anything. Our boss ordered us here.")
Alarmed, they went to the local police with the intention of filing a complaint. In a town like San Fernando, everyone knows each other, or about each other."
The chief took them to a private office and told them that it would be best if they just left town and forgot about their home.
"Mejor vayanse a los Estados Unidos y dejen esto por la paz," he said. (Better leave and leave tings as they are.)
Miranda and her family had no way of knowing that the San Fernando police force had been operating in cahoots with the Zetas and other armed groups that have virtually invaded and taken over large swaths of northern Tamaulipas and other states along the US-Mexico border.
A memo sent by the Mexico Attorney General's Office to the National Security Archives,  a Washington D.C.-based research organization that solicited the information under Mexican transparency laws, indicates that San Fernando police were involved in the 2011 massacres of 193 mainly Central American migrants whose bodies were found in mass graves.
It published the memo on its website on Monday and highlighted the similarities in the case to what happened with the 43 teachers college students who disappeared in southern Guerrero state in September.
The new information obtained by the National Security Archives states that in San Fernando, a city of 60,000 inhabitants, local police worked as lookouts for the Zetas drug cartel, as well as turning a blind eye to cartel activity, according to members of the Zetas cited in the memo.
The Zetas were fighting for control of human trafficking networks with the Gulf Cartel.

In 2011 there were many cases of the mass kidnapping of migrants heading north to try to cross illegally into the United States. Officials have said that most of the bodies found in and around San Fernando belong to migrants kidnapped off buses and killed by the Zetas, some because they refused to work as drug mules.
In the memo, detained Zetas told authorities that local police helped in the "intercepting of people."
This is the first time the Attorney General's Office has declassified documents related to the mass killings of migrants perpetrated in northern Mexico in recent years. 

These are the killing of 72 migrants in San Fernando in August 2010, the discovery of at least 193 bodies in 47 clandestine graves in San Fernando between April and May of 2011, and the discovery of 49 human torsos in Cadereyta in the neighboring state of Nuevo Leon in May 2012.
Ana Lorena Delgadillo, the director of the Foundation for Justice and the Democratic Rule of Law, a group that advises relatives of the victims in San Fernando, had already denounced the alleged participation of authorities in the crimes.

Delgadillo, told The Associated Press that the memo confirms "the degree of participation by the police."

Miranda and her family don't know when and if they will ever recover the family's home. They say that have passed by and see that its gardens have been well kept and that the home appears to be in good condition.

"For now, we can only hope that there will be a day when we can return to the home where I grew up," she said. "I tell my children about the days we lived there and I attended school and went for walks to the plaza in the evenings. They ask me when they can go visit and I don't know what to tell them."