The Crime

Migration | Mexico

Commemorating the 10th Anniversary of the San Fernando Massacres, with human rights witness Camilo Perez-Bustillo

In the wee hours of August 23, 2010, a young man clearly in distress, limping, dehydrated, and bleeding from his neck, approached a military checkpoint in the northeastern Mexican town of San Fernando, the last stop on the well-trodden route to the Texas border. He was the sole survivor of a massacre, he reported. The bullet that pierced his neck was intended to shatter his head in a little-remembered human rights crime that took place 10 years ago today.

A decade later, Los Zetas’ territory stretched all the way to Texas, where they were engaged in an escalating turf war with the Gulf Cartel for control of lucrative drug and people-smuggling routes into the Rio Grande Valley. San Fernando was both the gateway for asylum seekers hoping to find safe haven in the US and ground zero of the cartels’ armed conflict.

The bullet intended for Lala Pomavilla’s head miraculously missed its mark, entering his neck and exiting his jaw. Once the bad guys had fled the killing fields, and Lala Pomavilla realized he wasn’t dead, he pulled himself up and slipped, terrified, into the sweltering summer night. He followed the road to the west for about seven miles before veering north in the direction of a distant light. It belonged to a sorghum warehouse on Mexican Federal Highway 101. There, a night watchman directed the bleeding young man southward to the military checkpoint. In all, he traveled an estimated 15 miles before falling, near dead, at the feet of Mexican Marines.

On Tuesday, August 24, 2010, the Mexican government announced that its elite Marine Corps had discovered a drug-gang’s slaughterhouse, where 72 lifeless forms lay in a tangle, swarmed by flies. They were 51 Central Americans — 24 from Honduras, 14 El Salvadorans, and 13 Guatemalans — as well as five other Ecuadorians, four Brazilians and one Indian. The rest remain unidentifiable today. Another survivor would later emerge: an unnamed youth from Honduras. But he never surfaced publicly.

Fear and skepticism greeted Lala Pomavilla’s story. How could an executioner miss at such short range? How could anyone wander such a distance in that condition? A wall of silence surrounded the terrified town of 60,000. Both national and international press were kept away on the grounds that the State of Tamaulipas, where San Fernando is located, was “too dangerous to risk lives.” Before anyone could get a statement from him, Lala Pomavilla was spirited into a witness protection program.

Whispers could be heard from Mexico City to Matamoros: Did the cartel allow him to live to send a message? Or was the local government hiding something?

“They just kidnapped us in San Fernando,” the 21-year-old student from Mexico City wrote to a friend.“If anything happens, just tell my parents, ‘thanks, I love them.’ ”

The two brothers were never seen alive again.

Stories like these make Camilo Perez-Bustillo’s blood boil. A US law professor of Colombian origin, who has lived in Mexico for most of the last 20 years, he has been documenting human rights abuses there for decades. Camilo knew that such acts of impunity were becoming more and more commonplace; that many other massacres, without survivors, were hiding all over Mexico.

The event was deep into the planning stages when the crisis that almost took Lala Pomavilla’s life put Tamaulipas, Mexico, on the map for many. Suddenly exposed for its lackluster police enforcement, where criminals slipped through government checkpoints, while migrants were routinely forced off buses and disappeared, it was clear to the world that any urgency to bring the San Fernando executioners to justice was gallingly lacking.

In total, the San Fernando discovery turned up 193 bodies in 47 clandestine graves between April and May of 2011. (More recently, the migrant death toll in that one municipality for that one year was estimated at 268.) This hardened the perception, on the part of both the public and human rights groups, that northern Mexico, in particular the border state of Tamaulipas, had been lost to criminal gangs…and for quite some time.

Angela Pineda of Chiquimula, Guatemala, spoke about the five loved ones she lost that night: her husband, daughter, son, daughter-in-law, and cousin. Maria da Gloria Aires from southeastern Brazil shared memories of her young nephew, Juliard, 19, who died alongside his friend Herminio, 24. Fifteen-year-old Yedmi Victoria Castro, of Pasaquina, El Salvador, who was finally to be reunited with her mother, Mariluz Castro, was another of the many lives remembered that day.

1 Mexico’s failure to protect people in motion from drug and human traffickers suggested a generalized pattern of complicity with law-enforcement, military, and government at all levels, they stated. Human rights abuses constituted “a policy of state terror against migrants,” made even more vulnerable by their stateless status.

2 The governments of the migrants’ countries of origin were implicated for fostering the conditions of violence and poverty that paved the way for the commission of these mass crimes.

3 But the greatest burden of responsibility, the Tribunal stated, lay at the feet of the US, whose decades-long prioritization of corporate interests over the needs of people and rights of sovereign nations constituted the greatest violation of all: creating the economic impoverishment and brutal repression in migrant’s countries of origin that forced them to strike out in search of a more dignified life in the first place.

What’s more, though the US had stepped up aid, following the Mérida Initiative of 2007, to help Mexico combat its “War on Drugs,” the recipients of that aid — police and immigration agencies — were the most likely culprits in the continued commission of human rights violations. Arbitrary and abusive detention and other forms of inhumane and degrading treatment of people transiting through Mexican territory, including torture, were growing increasingly common.

Camilo’s timing was prescient again: A little more than a year later, the lid blew off the San Fernando Massacre and mass grave cases, proving the veracity of the Tribunal’s findings.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an autonomous organ of the Organization of American States, ordered an Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) to investigate the incident. But the Mexican Army stonewalled. The government followed suit, denying the GIEI permission to solicit testimonies from the soldiers of the nearby battalion in Iguala, Mexico, where the students had been disappeared.

US intelligence proved that by 2014, the nefarious activities of Central American drug cartels were widespread, and embedded at all levels of police, military, and government. Additionally, that their impunity had grown so out of hand, even Mexican citizens were no longer immune to the violence.

But that didn’t stop the dangers suffered by stateless migrants. Rather, it left the Gulf Cartel to rule the territory without rivals. Little wonder the entire region running the length of the Rio Grande, from Brownsville to El Paso and beyond, remains to this day under a US State Department Level-4 travel advisory, along with Syria, Iran, and Iraq.

“Since its implementation, MPP has disappeared more than 60,000 people, including pregnant women, young children, and the very ill — all who have legitimate asylum claims — to live in squalor on the Mexican side of the border, where they are vulnerable to the same criminal gangs that took the lives of 72 people in an abandoned San Fernando barn, and hundreds more buried in dozens of mass graves just 90 minutes south of here. The US and Mexican governments are jointly responsible for those human rights crimes, and MPP is one more example of their complicity in crimes against humanity committed against migrants, refugees, and the displaced!”

Camilo beseeches us not to forget the victims of San Fernando, that they should not have died in vain. Though emblematic of a broad pattern of state secrecy, gang-related violence, and complicity in human rights atrocities by both the Mexican and US governments, the 2010-11 massacres have largely fallen from view. Ten years after the event that nearly claimed Luis Fredy Lala Pomavilla’s life, not a single person has been sentenced, nor a single government official investigated, despite intelligence from both sides that proves multiple layers of official collusion.

Since MPP rolled into Matamoros in July 2019, at least 636 cases of kidnapping, rape, torture, assault, and other violence against asylum-seeking families have been reported. But the numbers of deaths related to MPP are far higher. As I wrote this article, a 20-year-old father of two was found dead on the riverbank. The press said it was an accident — that he drowned in the Rio Grande, while helping two women to cross. Others say members of the Gulf Cartel perceived him to be encroaching on their business.

They cross the desperate, and for outlandish sums. So they decided to make an example out of him. They beat him lifeless and dumped his body in the river while officials of the local Instituto Nacional de Migración looked on.

So how much is a migrant’s life worth? That depends on whether you’re the cops, the cartels, or cronies of Trump & Co.

THIS IS WHY WE WITNESS!

Thank you for reading Episode 16 in my travelogue of a road trip gone awry: THE FIRST SOLUTION: Tales of Humanity and Heroism from Trump’s Manufactured Border Crisis, rolling out on Medium as fast as I can write it because it’s Just. That. Urgent. For earlier episodes, click here.

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