Mexican Drug Cartel Kidnaps Three Innocent Students, Tortures Them And Then Dissolves Them In Acid Just Because They Could

Last month, three Mexican university students were filming a school project when they disappeared. The last time they were seen alive, they were being forced into a car by two armed men dressed as police officers in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city, in the western state of Jalisco.

For more than a month, the case of the missing students remained a mystery. But on Monday, Mexican authorities revealed gruesome details from their investigation.

After they were abducted, the film students were beaten and killed, and their bodies dissolved in acid, the attorney general’s office in Jalisco said in a televised news conference Monday.

The students, who authorities say had no connection to any criminal gangs, found themselves inadvertently enmeshed in an ongoing conflict between two drug cartels. Members of Mexico’s most powerful cartel, Cartel Jalisco New Generation, may have confused the students with members of a rival drug cartel, the attorney general’s office said. Authorities have arrested two suspects in connection with the crime and have issued arrest warrant for six others, all believed to be part of a cell of Cartel Jalisco New Generation.

The three young men hailed from different parts of Mexico but were all students at the University of Audiovisual Media in Guadalajara. They had been working on a film project in a house they were told belonged to one of their aunts, located in Tonala, a city outside Guadalajara.

But it turns out the home was also used as a safe house for a gang known as the Nueva Plaza cartel, headed by a leader known as El Cholo, according to the attorney general’s office. In 2015, a prominent member of that cartel, Diego Gabriel Mejía, had been detained at the house alongside other members. (Authorities said Mejía and the student’s aunt both had ties to a massage parlor that served as a prostitution business.)

Because Mejía was soon to be released from prison, members of his rival gang, Cartel Jalisco New Generation, began keeping a close watch on the safe house. The presence of the three young men on the property may have raised their suspicions, the Jalisco attorney general’s office said.

“Without knowing it, the students were in a place of grave risk, watched by a criminal cell of the Cártel Nueva Generación,” the Jalisco attorney general’s office said.

Then, on March 19, the three students, along with a fourth classmate and three other young people, were leaving the area when one of their cars broke down. Two pickup trucks pulled up, and six heavily armed men approached them, authorities said. The armed men, dressed as law enforcement officers, ordered everyone to get down on the ground.

Then, they forced the three students, Gastélum, Ávalos and Díaz, into one of their trucks and drove them to a house used by the cartel to interrogate and torture victims, authorities said.

“It is here that they begin to beat one of them,” chief investigator Lizette Torres said in the news conference. While interrogating the students, the suspects ended up beating one of them so brutally that he died. Therefore, “they had to execute the other two,” Torres said.

Authorities say the suspects then took the bodies of the students to another location, where they dissolved them in acid. Investigators found 46 barrels of sulfuric acid at the site, and believe that other bodies may have been disposed of there. Cartels in Mexico are known to dissolve, burn or dismember bodies as a way to eliminate evidence of crimes. (source)