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A San Fernando police officer found himself on the other side of the law.
Mexican authorities have arrested officer Joel Resendiz-Moreno for allegedly participating in the kidnapping and murder of 145 bus passengers.
Mexico’s Attorney General Office (PGR) announced the arrest on Thursday evening.
Details have not been released about Joel Resendiz-Moreno’s exact role in the case but PGR officials are expecting to take his statement and possibly file formal charges.
PGR officials are asking anyone who may have been a victim of Resendez-Moreno to come forward.
A total of 68 people have been arrested for the San Fernando massacres but the PGR reports only 55 have been arraigned or formally charged at this time.
The 2011 Tamaulipas massacre was the mass murder of at least 145 people, discovered in mass graves on April 6, 2011. These people were kidnapped from passenger buses. Is the second mass murder of its kind in the state of Tamaulipas since the massacre of the 72 illegal immigrants by the Mexican Los Zetas gang on August 24, 2010.
April 15, 2011:
Federal authorities have pulled 23 more corpses from a mass grave near the town of San Fernando in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, bringing the death toll to 145 in a mass killing that has managed to shock even the violence-hardened residents of northeastern Mexico.
Sixteen police officers were arrested there Thursday for allegedly serving as accomplices to members of a drug cartel suspected in the slayings, the federal attorney general said in a statement.
Twenty-three of the 145 victims found so far were killed at least a month before drug gangs began kidnapping bus passengers along a dangerous highway that leads straight to the U.S. border, The Associated Press reported, citing Tamaulipas state prosecutors.
The killings have left investigators struggling to identify bodies and notify family members across the region and brought criticism of President Felipe Calderon’s bloody war on the cartels to a fever pitch.
“This displays the great rot in our institutions,” Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, who is organizing protests against the violence, said Wednesday, according to the Houston Chronicle. “All of us have serious shortcomings and criminal complicities disguised as legality that have plunged us into chaos.”
San Fernando, just 90 miles south of Brownsville, Texas, has become a favored trafficking route for drug cartels. Officials discovered 72 bodies near the city last summer, and many were identified as immigrants from Central American countries on their way to the United States.
As with so many of the casualties of Mexico’s drug wars, the victims of the latest mass slayings — who officials say were dragged off buses in late March and murdered by members of Los Zetas, one of Mexico’s most powerful cartels — were not necessarily involved in the drug trade at all.
Family members of some of the dead and missing along the route have said their loved ones were bound for the United States, where they had found work.
One woman told the Mexican newspaper El Universal that her husband hasn’t been heard from since he boarded a bus from Tamaulipas to the U.S. border March 27, the day of one of the slayings. Isabel Ibarra Vargas said her husband, Gerardo Martinez, had a job lined up in Missouri, and had planned to work there for eight months before returning to Mexico to be with her and their young son. But now, the family fears Martinez never made it past San Fernando. Officials have yet to identify his body.
According to reports in El Universal and other local outlets, the women taken off the buses outside San Fernando were raped as well.
More than 35,000 people are estimated to have been killed in Mexico since 2006, when Calderon launched a controversial war against the cartels.
Atrribution: http://www.aolnews.com/2011/04/15/police-officers-arrested-over-mexico-mass-graves-death-toll-cli/
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