Source: El Universal
Author: Ricardo Raphael
December 2, 2019 (Original publication in Spanish on Nov. 6, 2019)
Translation: Jorge B.
Gualberto Ramírez: the Government Agent Who Invented Kidnappings
Forgery of documents, evidence fabrication, theft, conspiracy, torture and cruel and inhuman treatment: Gualberto Ramírez Gutiérrez, who for nine years was in charge of the Anti-Kidnapping Unit of the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), recently transformed into the Prosecutor’s Office, has been denounced for all these crimes.
The arrest warrant issued a few days ago against this former official is relevant evidence when taking a look at some of the most controversial cases in which Ramírez Gutiérrez was involved during the past decade.
For instance, the Vallarta-Cassez, Wallace, Martí or Ayotzinapa cases have also been singled out for being the result of fabricated evidence, testimonies obtained through torture, as well as conspiracies between criminals and authorities.
These are only a few among thousands of files that passed through Gualberto Ramírez’s desk. These are among the most remarkable, but obviously not the only ones on which he acted under a presumed similar pattern.
In this context, it makes sense to understand why, upon the arrival of Alejandro Gertz Manero as Attorney General, the official was dismissed with little warning, and his files were confiscated.
A charge against him was a first complaint made by Ana Patricia Moller Vuilleumier , a woman who was charged with fabricated evidence for criminal acts that she did not commit.
According to the complaint made, the intimate partner of this victim paid a lawyer to have her prosecuted for participating in a fictitious criminal gang. That lawyer, in turn, would have obtained the services of Gualberto Ramírez and public officers under him so that the false accusation would continue its course.
If this hypothesis were proven to be true, the PGR’s Anti-Kidnapping Unit —during the governments of Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto— would have provided, among other services, the fabrication of organized crime offenders.
The cases mentioned above, such as the Wallace-Cassez-Martí triad would concur with their own evidence to showcase the modus operandi of that unit, a vital component in the fight against criminal impunity.
In the Wallace case, for instance, a drop of blood from the alleged victim—Hugo Alberto León Miranda—was falsified to put six innocent people behind bars. In the Cassez affair, which destroyed the life of a French citizen and the entire Vallarta family, the famous band of the Zodiac would have been created.
And, in the Martí case, more than forty people, whose responsibility has not been fully clarified, allegedly, would have invented two integrated gangs.
For a judge to have granted a stay order on the arrest warrant against Gualberto Ramírez Gutiérrez does not imply, in any way, that the investigations against him will stop.
In fact, it is worth asking whether in the above cases those were who were his superiors at the PGR would not have been complicit in crimes similar to those which Ramírez Gutiérrez was charged with.
The same questions should be asked about a long list of public officials, who were let go by the Attorney General’s Office, but who quickly made themselves comfortable working for the governments of the City of Mexico and the state of Mexico under the Fourth Transformation program.
In fact, the school to which Gualberto Ramírez belongs still has its best students protected by the payroll of the public prosecutors’ offices that operate in the Valley of Mexico.
