Oscar Lopez
- 2023
Fellowship Title:
- Mexico’s Disappeared
Fellowship Year:
- 2023
They were 2 Chicago pizza delivery guys. Then, they ran a Mexican drug cartel, feds say
By Oscar Lopez and Frank Main The Guerreros Unidos cartel that authorities say brothers Adan and Mario Casarrubias Salgado led fueled Chicago’s appetite for heroin. It’s also blamed for the massacre of 43 students in Mexico. Adan Casarrubias Salgado (left), known as El Tomate, and his late brother Mario Casarrubias Salgado, nicknamed El Sapo Guapo, or the Handsome Toad. The Mexican government blacked out Adan Casarrubias Salgado’s eyes in the photo.Mexico attorney general’s office, Chicago Police Department Loaded with drugs, the buses left Iguala in southern Mexico every week bound for Chicago. Secret compartments made detection at the border almost impossible. At warehouses in Aurora and Batavia, the heroin was unloaded, then distributed around Chicago and across the country. Over a year, starting in July 2013, the Guerreros Unidos Mexican drug cartel imported about 2,000 kilograms of heroin to Chicago, authorities say. Millions of dollars were sent back to Mexico in the same compartments. “When we came to the realization as to the volume of heroin that they were trafficking, the significance really hit home to us,”
Land of no return: the Mexican city torn apart by cartel kidnappings
What woke María Zapata Escamilla was the sound of shattering glass. Armed men in military fatigues had burst into her home: they dragged her disabled husband outside, along with her 14-year-old son, still in his pajamas. Then they drove away into the night. Two weeks later, her husband’s brutalized body turned up, along with nine others. But after more than a year, her son remains missing. María Zapata Escamilla stands outside Mexico’s Congress holding a photo of her missing son. Credit: Oscar Lopez “I was left navigating alone,” she said through tears in a recent interview. “If they told me, ‘Give up your life in exchange for your son,’ I would give it.” Zapata’s ordeal has become terrifyingly common in Fresnillo, a city in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas that is currently being torn apart by a battle between the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels. More than 70 people went missing in the mining city between January and March – nearly one person a day, and a fivefold increase compared with the same period in
A Mexican town celebrates even as it mourns the victims of forced disappearance: ‘There’s still this emptiness’
Cristina Bautista, center, walks with her mother, daughter and granddaughter in front of the procession heading to the church to celebrate Holy Saviour. Photograph: Luis Antonio Rojas/The Guardian Life goes on for Benjamín Ascencio Bautista’s family, although the unsolved case overshadows their festivities with grief The flowers were bought first: five dozen roses in crimson, coral, gold, pale yellow and white. Then 36 long candles at a market filled with the smell of cilantro. Finally, the first of three pigs was slaughtered, its death-squeals echoing over the mountains. In all, preparations for the feast took two days, a whole family called in to help, lugging sacks of corn to be boiled in huge steel vats on the street. The parts of the pig were washed in salt water and hung up to dry. Yolsitlalin Hernández, 11, and Joanna Hernández, 8, nieces of Benjamin Bautista, clean roses for the Saint Salvador celebration. On Saturday evening, it all came together: the pork and corn had boiled for nearly 12 hours to make a rich pozole in giant