Confession offers clue to fate of missing people

Desperate families press for 'pozolero's' homes to be examined

Second of two parts.

TIJUANA – The last place where Santiago Meza confessed to making bodies disappear in acid is similar to his other macabre workshops, located in an isolated plot of land in the city's eastern fringe.

This place, in a community called Ojo de Agua, was baptized by the national and international media as "el pozolero's country house" where he had dissolved the bodies of 300 people killed by criminal drug cells.

In his confession, however, Meza said that in the year that he lived at the house "ten people at most were dissolved there."

He made that confession -- two days after his arrest near Ensenada on Jan. 23, 2009 -- to investigators from Mexico's specialized unit against organized crime, known as Siedo. Some information from the confession was released, but the entire document was kept confidential.

A copy of it, however, was leaked anonymously in September to Fernando Ocegueda, a long-time advocate for families searching for loved ones who disappeared in Baja California at the height of the drug violence in the mid- to latter part of last decade.

Ocegueda shared the document with sandiegored.com, hoping the information somehow helps the families find out what happened to their loved ones.

In fact, a Mexico City-based forensic team from Siedo arrived Monday in Tijuana and has been exploring various plots of land in eastern Tijuana where Meza may have left traces of bodies he dissolved. The team is to depart on Thursday, Ocegueda said.

Meza's confession reveals gruesome details not known before of the first body he dissolved in 1996, how he perfected his technique in the ensuing years, and of the people who ordered him to do this, murderous leaders of drug cells serving a drug cartel.

It is unknown if Meza's account is true. He's detained at a federal prison in Nayarit, awaiting sentencing on charges of organized crime, covering up crime and illegal possession of firearms.

At the Ojo de Agua site, Meza said he dumped what was left from the dissolved bodies in pits, 6.5 feet across and almost 10 feet deep.

In the spring of 2009, a few months after he was arrested, federal forensic investigators found bone fragments, teeth and rings in the pits at the Ojo de Agua property.

"In this last place, the dead people were brought to me by pure 'plebes,' young people 20 or 21 years old who were new," Meza said. "Some were getting their instructions for "La Perra" (Feliberto Parra Ramos) and others from 'Muletas' (Raydel López Uriarte). Both cells belonged to the organization commanded by 'El Teo' (Teodoro García Simental) who I worked for directly."

All three of the men Meza cited were arrested.

At the end of 2007, Teodoro García Simental no longer accepted Fernando Sánchez Arellano, alias "The Engineer," as the leader of the Arellano cartel. The next year García Simental began a bloodbath in an effort to eliminate Sánchez Arellano's troops, according to Baja California authorities.

Sánchez Arellano had inherited the post after Francisco Javier Arellano Félix had been detained off of Baja California Sur waters in August 2006, according to authorities.

The Arellano cartel, with Tijuana as its center, had grown to be the most feared criminal group that moved drugs from Mexico's Pacific Coast toward the United States.

Without Francisco Javier Arellano , all manner of smugglers moved into the region to fill the power vacuum, including cells working for the Sinaloa and La Familia de Michoacán cartels. Disputes between "El Teo" and "El Ingeniero" over drugs grew increasingly violent.

The city's east side is home to impoverished families newly arrived at the border who have few public services at their disposal. It's populated by young people who can't find jobs and who frequently had been well armed by the cartels.

Lourdes Dehesa found human remains on April 23, 2011, on land in Valle Bonito, one of the rural sites in eastern Tijuana that Santiago Meza confessed to using to dissolve murder victims. Though Dehesa paid a ransom for her kidnapped son, he was never seen again. Omar Millan / SanDiegoRed.com

According to authorities, that area was controlled by Teodoro García Simental, who had inherited a criminal cell from his brother, Mario Alberto García Simental, who was arrested.

Mario Alberto had served one of the original Arellano founders, Benjamín, but his brother was not willing to follow Fernando Sánchez Arellano. Instead, the brother allied himself with the Sinaloa cartel, commanded by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, a bitter rival of the Arellanos.

In his declaration, Meza said that Teodoro García Simental ordered him to take three blue drums containing human remains and lye to a seafood restaurant called Mariscos del Pacífico, along with a hand-written poster. The message Meza wrote: "This is what is going to happen to those who are with 'The Engineer.' "

Passersby reported the drums to police on Nov. 30, 2008. The grisly discovery horrified the community.

Some 80 per cent of the 488 known cases of people who disappeared (390 victims) occurred between 2007 to 2010, according to the organizations that represent the survivors.

However, Meza declared that he dissolved the majority of bodies from 2002 to 2007.

That is why it's possible that many of these victims are not known either by the family organizations or authorities.

The state's special prosecutor for missing people, Miguel Ángel Guerrero, said that 70 to 100 bodies that Meza dissolved may not be known to his unit and that these victims do not have a name nor any DNA on record.

It's possible that some of the disappeared were buried in the paupers' grave in the municipal cemetery, located just five minutes from ejido Ojo de Agua, because it's just been since 2005 that the state began to take DNA samples from these bodies before they were interred.

Dozens of unidentified bodies, many of them victims of murder between 2008 and 2009, were sent by the coroners' office to the paupers' grave 36 hours after they arrived if no one claimed them.

Associations representing family members of people who disappeared have pressed authorities to thoroughly inspect all of the sites Meza said he used to carry out his gruesome work. Their weariness is evident in their words.

"The authorities have obligated us to investigate the cases of the disappeared ourselves because each agency passes the buck and no one does anything," complained 60-year-old Irma Leyva, during a march in August in the Río zone to raise awareness of people still missing.

She is the mother of Diego Alonso Hernández, a young state police investigator believed to have been kidnapped on Jan. 1, 2007 in Mexicali by a criminal cell. No ransom request was ever made, she said.

That sunny day in August, some 40 relatives of people who had disappeared prayed and placed banners around a traffic circle that bore the photographs of their sons, husbands, and fathers who were missing.

On the street, pedestrians and motorists passed by them indifferently. The plight of missing people is seen as a sad one, but far removed from the life of most of the city's residents. The marches and protests have only attracted family members of the missing – or what is left of the families.

"El pozolero's" worked in isolated places, such as this property in Ojo de Agua on the eastern fringe of Tijuana, the last he used to dispose of murder victims. David Maung / SanDiegoRed.com

Omar.millan@sandiegored.com

First part.

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