One afternoon, young Mexican engineer Jethro Sanchez was out partying.
Hours later, he was dying — burned with acid and choking on earth as soldiers buried him alive, his father says.
Mexico called in the armed forces a decade ago to fight drug crime.
Photo: Reuters
However, the military has not been trained for that kind of police work and has ended up torturing innocent suspects, critics say.
Now the Mexican Congress is debating proposals to formalize the use of the armed forces for public security, raising fears that the eventual reform would shield soldiers who commit abuses.
His father, Hector Sanchez, 63, who makes a living recycling auto parts, spoke in a choked voice as he stood next to his son’s grave.
Jethro Sanchez “was studying for his master’s degree” and was out celebrating a successful business investment,” he said — not a drug trafficker as the military alleged.
“There was no reason for them to do what they did to him,” he said.
As politicians argue over the new law, he said he wishes more relatives of torture victims would come forward.
On May 1, 2011, Jethro Sanchez, 26, was at a fair in Jiutepec, a town south of Mexico City, to celebrate the victory of a football team he had sponsored.
A street fight broke out and Jethro Sanchez was detained by police, who handed him over to the military, claiming he was a drug trafficker.
Soldiers threw acid in his face and buried him, Hector Sanchez said.
The body was found two months later in Puebla, 150km to the east.
After a six-year legal fight, the grieving father is hoping that three soldiers arrested in connection with his son’s death would finally be tried and sentenced for the crime.
In December 2006, then-Mexican president Felipe Calderon turned to the military to wage his war on drugs, saying that the police were too corrupt for the task and needed cleaning up.
Since then, non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International have documented scores of similar cases of torture and abuse in the country.
“For years, we have warned that involving armed forces trained for combat in internal matters, especially in the prosecution of crime, can be a big mistake,” said Juan Mendez, the former UN envoy for torture, who wrote a report on Mexico.
More than 50,000 military personnel are deployed throughout Mexico to help fight crime.
Organizations opposed to the proposed internal security law fear that it will give nefarious elements within the military a “blank check” to commit abuses.
Congress has been studying proposals from various parties on the military’s policing role since September last year.
Details of the proposals have yet to be published. However, the issue has raised so many red flags that the law might not be approved before the parliamentary session ends on April 30.
The military has defended its record in the face of torture allegations.
“We are not systematic violators of human rights,” the military’s human rights director, General Jose Carlos Beltran, said last month.
Mexican National Defense Secretariat legal affairs Director Alejandro Ramos said the armed forces have felt “uncomfortable” doing police work.
“If they think we don’t use the right kind of weapons or have the right police training, then the armed forces were not what they needed,” he told reporters.
Claudia Medina, 36, was also accused of drug trafficking when she was taken from her home in the eastern city of Veracruz in 2012.
She was taken along with her husband, who remains imprisoned.
“We were blindfolded and held incommunicado for about 39 hours, and during that time I was subjected to physical, psychological and sexual torture ... they gave me electric shocks, punched and kicked me,” she said. “In order to stop the torture, I told them I would sign any confession.”
On the way to be questioned by prosecutors, her captors threatened to torture her three children if she did not comply, she said.
Scarcely able to walk, she was paraded in front of reporters along with other alleged criminals, an arsenal of weapons and a large cache of drugs.
She was later acquitted of all charges.
Hector Sanchez fears his son, who was tall and athletic, was tortured for hours.
Forensic results confirmed that Jethro Sanchez had been “doused with hydrochloric acid and that he had inhaled earth, meaning he was buried alive,” his father said.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.