Guadalupe Lizárraga Viernes, 14 de Julio del 2023
Fabrication of guilty: Hugo Amed Shultz
Miroslava Breach, in her column Don Mirone, made several slanders to Hugo Amed Schultz.
Six years after the murder of the Miroslava Breach, the investigation remains incomplete, and with human rights violations by former Governor Javier Corral and agents of the FEADLE
FIRST PART
By Guadalupe Lizarraga
Dressed in sweatpants, a gray sweatshirt, and tennis shoes, the prison’s uniform in Aquiles Serdán, Chihuahua, Hugo Amed Schultz Alcaraz narrates what it was like that day when he received the call from Javier Corral Jurado to go to the Government Palace, two months after the murder of the journalist Miroslava Breach Velducea.
He asked him to go “have a drink”. He did not mention what he needed from him in the call but Corral was the governor, and Schultz, the former municipal president of Chínipas. Due to the lack of contact between them, as public servants, Schultz assumed the call to be an order, both being from the same party.
It was May 27, 2017, Saturday. He arrived at the governor's office at around 6 pm, it wasn't dark yet, but soon it will be. Corral was accompanied by the then General State Prosecutor César Augusto Peniche, in addition to Carlos Mario Jiménez Holguín, from the Central District Prosecutor's Office, and Erick Alejandro Rangel Ríos, prosecutor of the Specialized Unit of Homicide Crime Investigation, who was in charge of the investigation folder 19-2017-8091 for the murder of the aforementioned journalist, and there was a fifth agent, José Roberto Frías Aguayo, then coordinator of the Specialized Crime of Drug Dealing Investigation Unit.
“I arrive at the office and I’m introduced to each of them. The governor was drinking a beer, he offered one to me and said:
–Listen, teacher, I called you here because we are going to interview you to avoid media pressure, we want to protect you.
–What is it about?- Schultz asked, nervous in such an unusual situation.
–It’s about Miroslava- the governor answered without hesitation.
A computer was ready in the office, and Javier Corral, walking towards the table where it was, speaks to Schultz:
–Come on, teacher, we are going to give you a hand.
"And they begin to ask me questions, pushing me to say the name of Los Salazar," says Schultz to Los Angeles Press, emphasizing Corral, Peniche, and Jiménez Holguín, to whom he repeatedly replied: "I know nothing about them".
Even the Homicide Investigation prosecutor, Rangel Ríos, insisted somewhat annoyed:
–That doesn't give us anything, teacher!-
–How do I prove it to you? I don't know anything! – Schultz answers Rangel in the same tone.
“They insisted on me speaking about the Salazars. Rangel was writing on the computer, while he was asking questions and I was reading the screen, which I could barely see because I wear reading glasses” explains Schultz about how the Prosecutor's office took his statement in Governor Corral's office. Rangel Ríos, while typing, asked Schultz: “Like this, teacher?”. And Schultz defended himself, “no, I'm not saying that. Take it off, please." Rangel Ríos quickly read the answers given by the interviewee on the screen, and asked again “Is this correct now, teacher?”.
Schultz reiterates to this journalist that they were very insistent on putting the surname “Salazar” in his statements like he was in denying it. Corral was also insistent on offering him beers when the tension started to grow between them.
“But I was very tired and stressed, and I didn't know anything about what they were asking me. Corral and Peniche distorted what I was saying, and when I corrected them, they would ask the same questions again. There were six hours of a lot of pressure, until midnight, where they would make questions, write and erase, and write again. ”, says Schultz Alcaraz.
The men from the prosecution were speaking at a separate table in the boardroom. They had a printer there, at some distance from where they were interviewing Schultz. At all times, Corral and Peniche were there.
“They printed the final document and gave it to me to sign without letting me read it again. And once signed, I said goodbye to everyone. I was very nervous, but I wasn't going to distrust the governor, because I also had nothing to fear”, he explains, “but later, I read things that they wrote and that I hadn't said”.
During the interview in prison with Hugo Schultz, which lasted a couple of hours, his private attorney, Manuel Norberto Cortez Vázquez was present, whom when expressly asked by this journalist about his client's right not to testify, replied: "As a witness, he has no right, as a defendant yes. But when the teacher was invited to the governor's office, it was not as a defendant, his lawyer was not there, nor could he be coerced to testify against himself or other people”. The attorney points out: "it has no legal value."
However, in volume IV of the aforementioned investigation folder, under the heading of the Prosecutor's office agent José Roberto Frías Aguayo, this statement by Hugo Amed Schultz is found on three pages and, in the end, on a fourth only the Legend: "Certificate: At the same time and date, it is stated that the identity data of the witness was collected separately, which are kept in a sealed envelope." It concludes with the signature of Frías Aguayo.
In that same statement, it is specified that it was carried out at 3:30 p.m. on May 27, 2017, and that it is the reserved identity witness with the code "Boby", who - it is specified - sworn under oath to be driven by the truth in the terms of article 49 of the National Code of Criminal Procedures and "by informing you of articles 307 and 308 of the Criminal Code for those who make false statements before the authorities..."
Those printed sheets bear the signature and fingerprint of Hugo Amed Schultz Alcaraz, but they did not take his oath, they did not read him his rights, nor was it at that time that he met with them at the governor's office. The Chihuahua State Prosecutor’s General Office fabricated his testimony with alterations as a ministerial statement as a "reserved identity witness" with the code "Boby."
Prosecutor Peniche and Governor Corral also said that the statement had been made by Schultz at the prosecutor's office, but Schultz stressed to this channel: "I never went to the prosecutor's office, there is not one proof that I was there, a recorded video of me, I was never sent a subpoena for me to make a statement. This is the first time that I give my version”.
Sixteen days later, on June 12, 2017, the Office of the General Prosecutors of the Republic, through the Criminal Investigation Agency, in collaboration with the investigation folder FED/SDHPDSC/UNAI/0000214/2017 incorporated the information of Hugo Amed Schultz as a "person of interest" within the nominated group Los Salazar.
The origin, May 2016
Miroslava Breach, in her column Don Mirone, published by El Norte de Juárez newspaper, made several references to Hugo Amed Schultz between April and May 2016, which a year later led to his accusation. She described him as "unpresentable" and in November 2016, she pointed him out again without any evidence, only under the argument that she was from Chínipas and that she knew everyone who was related to drug trafficking. She wrote: "He is the same one that saw, silenced, and negotiated with the town's drug trafficker the designation of his nephew Juan Miguel Salazar as a candidate for the municipal presidency." In that same space, she mentioned him as "an emissary to intimidate political parties or journalists" (Don Mirone, El Norte de Juárez, November 25, 2016).
On May 27, 2016, Schultz went out to the media and responded on his own to the allusions in the press: “there is a wrong perception regarding the public safety conditions in Chínipas, because, although the population is located in a high-risk area due to the close presence of groups dedicated to drug trafficking, in the municipal capital and the towns of the municipality, there have been no serious incidents of violence or aggression against residents, tourists, or distributors of basic supplies. (El Heraldo de Chihuahua, May 27, 2017).
According to several sources in Chínipas, Miroslava had not visited her homeland for years. She also did not personally know Hugo Schultz, nor his family, there was never a call between them or any other type of communication. This information was corroborated by the person who directly assisted Schultz in the municipal presidency, but they also confirmed it themselves, each one on its time.
When Alfredo Piñera Guevara, the former spokesperson of the PAN, recorded Miroslava on his initiative, in a telephone conversation, he asked her: "Have you never met the people of San Juanito or the municipal president?" And she replies: “No, with nobody. Absolutely no one. I am from Chínipas and I know who it was” (Agreement of attraction from the investigation folder FEDSHDPDSC/UNAI-CHIH/0000214/2017, FEADLE, January 7, 2018).
In this same document, the testimony of Hugo Schultz, given at the Government Palace to Javier Corral and César Augusto Peniche, on May 27, 2017, subsequently fabricated by agent Frías Aguayo as a ministerial declaration as a " Reserved identity witness Boby'' is taken up again, and in point number 10 of the document it says: “Statement of the witness named Boby, who in what matters informed that he does not know Miroslava personally, that he knew her only by the notes she published…”.
Before this, the statement of Alfredo Piñera Guevara stands out, who said that "his phone automatically records all outgoing and incoming calls, so he kept the audio recordings of both calls, and later Schultz called him and asked if he had already spoken to the journalists (Miroslava Breach and Patricia Mayorga), he answered yes, and the witness decided to send him the recordings from May 25, 2016…”.
However, Piñera did not present the recording of the alleged call from Schultz, nor did he specify the precise day and time of those telephone or WhatsApp interactions, nor was a computer analysis of his cell phone or Schultz's carried out to verify the exchange of calls, being that it was one of the main pieces of evidence for the attraction of the FEADLE case. Only Piñera's words, and the recordings of his conversation with the journalists, were enough for the PGR to indict the former municipal president.
During the prison interview, Hugo Schultz told Los Angeles Press that he never received a recording, neither physically nor by electronic messaging, as Piñera claimed. Neither in his arrest, on December 17, 2020, when his cell phone was confiscated, an analysis of his calls nor the computer he used to manage him in the municipality was made.
When this journalist asked the defense about Schultz's cell phone and the items seized from the detainee, the answer was that it was unknown where that cell phone with the number 635 294-8191 had been. There was no chain of custody, nor was there a document notifying the confiscation by the prosecution, it does not exist in the 26 volumes of the investigation folder. From his wallet, cash was taken along with a gold chain, and the cell phone.
During the three months following the murder of Miroslava, both the Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office and the PGR carried out exhaustive computer analyses on the cell phones and computers of the victim and two defendants, Juan Carlos Moreno Ochoa 'El Larry', 49 years old, and Jaciel Vega Villa, 32. However, Schultz's cell phone was not only excluded from these computer analyses but was also lost without issuing any report.
The fabrications of the FEADLE
On July 9, 2020, at 10:21 a.m., the agent of the Public Ministry of the Federation Iris Gabriela Santoyo Cuervo, who assumed the coordination of the case for FEADLE on January 7, 2018, electronically sent a request for an arrest warrant against Hugo Amed Schultz Alcaraz to the District Judge at the Criminal Justice Center in Chihuahua, who at that time was Judge Eduardo Javier Sáenz Torres on administrative duties.
The following day, the answer was given in a private hearing at 7:33 p.m., by Control judge Nelson Pedraza Sotelo, refusing to issue the arrest warrant against Schultz, because "the test data did not justify the probability of the stake".
The test data presented in a narrative by Santoyo Cuervo fit four legal-size pages; the first was the presentation and legal references and the last, was the signature. The name Hugo Amed Schultz was indicated with inaccuracies. The Prosecutor’s agent said that "since the interests of Crispín Salazar Zamorano were affected, he instructed his group to identify who had delivered the information to Miroslava Breach Velducea", referring to the columns that a year earlier, 2016, had been published in El Norte under the pseudonym Don Mirone.
Santoyo Cuervo could not sustain with arguments that "Crispín Salazar had instructed his group to identify the source", nor that Hugo Schultz belonged to the same group mentioned, much less could he explain how at the same time Schultz operated with Carlos Arturo Quintana 'El 80', being antagonistic groups in such a specific region, just as Miroslava had launched it in her columns. The agent of the Federal Public Ministry could not present evidence, test data, or witnesses as to why Schultz, being from the PAN, would have been the promoter of the PRI candidate as his successor to Juan Miguel Salazar, according to what was written by Miroslava, who falsely listed him as Schultz's nephew.
The supposed relationship of Schultz with Juan Miguel Salazar was very easy to corroborate with the birth certificates, and interviews with the family circle of both, even the same FEADLE agent could have requested the genetic tests since there are two direct relatives of Juan Miguel Salazar in federal centers for social rehabilitation. This was done with the family of Jaciel Vega Villa and Juan Carlos Moreno Ochoa, as well as with the relatives of the perpetrator of the crime, Ramón Andrés Zabala Corral. In addition, the closest network of Los Salazar was reconstructed -with certain inaccuracies- and Carlos Arturo Quintana Quintana was interviewed. However, in the case of Schultz, the family was not investigated, nor were the alleged links he had with Los Salazar or with 'El 80' investigated.
The agent of the FEADLE Public Ministry, Iris Gabriela Santoyo Cuervo, asked the control judge for an arrest warrant for Hugo Schultz, based only on opinion articles by the victim and accusations of threats without evidence from his relatives.
"This information reached the then municipal president of Chínipas, Hugo Amed Schultz, who on his account decided to identify the journalist's source of information...", the prosecutor alleges the so-called intervention of Schultz in the homicide.
The pressure fell on the former municipal president when he was in Chínipas; "Some hooded men stopped him in a public park and asked him if he knew who was giving Miroslava that information." Schultz did not know and, according to the account of the prosecutor Santoyo Cuervo, he "did not want to get into trouble." and proceeding, that after this event, Schultz appealed to his party, the PAN, for support so that the situation could be publicly clarified with a press release due to the seriousness of the matter. However, Schultz, in his capacity as municipal president, had gone out to the media on May 27, 2016, to personally respond to the media slander.
Another misrepresentation made by the agent of the Public Ministry Iris Gabriela Santoyo Cuervo was to tell the judge that the person in charge of social communication Alfredo Piñera Guevara, with the Casio confidential identity, "delivered via WhatsApp the recording of the conversations to the accused Hugo Amed Schultz Alcaraz, as well as the recording of the conversation with Asia (Patricia Mayorga). With these recordings in his possession, the defendant returned to Chínipas and handed them over to Juan Carlos Moreno Ochoa, 'El Larry', who at that time was the head of the Los Salazar ground in the municipality of Chínipas."
Hugo Amed Schultz explains that, if what Piñera Guevara said was true, they would have identified the message and the recording as evidence on his cell phone that they confiscated during his arrest. However, the only piece of evidence was the statement of the Public Ministry agent.
After the judge's refusal to release the arrest warrant against Schultz, on July 15, 2020, FEADLE, through Santoyo Cuervo, appealed the judge's decision. But there was no public hearing for the indictment of Hugo Schultz; Although the prosecutor's office did not have the obligation to inform him that they were investigating him, the formulation of the accusation had to be through a public hearing, according to criminal lawyer Gerardo Augusto Manrique, who explained to Los Angeles Press that although he has been accused with the charge is invalid and they would have to repeat the process.
However, on December 15, 2020, FEADLE promoted a second arrest warrant against Schultz in a court of appeal, incorporating the statement extracted under torture from Édgar Salazar Gaxiola, 23, son of Crispín Salazar Zamorano, who had been arrested on January 22, 2019, on false extortion charges. The torture was carried out by federal police officers from the Intelligence Division, under the order of agent Iris Gabriela Santoyo Cuervo, which purpose was to fabricate a witness to establish the Schultz-Salazar relationship.
The arbitrary detention of Hugo Schultz
On Thursday, December 17, 2020, at around 8 in the morning, Karina Martínez, wife of Hugo Amed Schultz, asked him to go get tortillas for breakfast. Their children were at home for Christmas holidays, along with a cleaning lady who helped them in the house. Schultz left and, says his wife, "he never came back."
She even said to the cleaning lady: 'I think Hugo went to plant the corn and grind the flour because hasn’t come back'. Martínez says that is what she mentioned when more than an hour had passed, and they did not hear from him. At first, she was not concerned because she "thought he had been entertained by a neighbor to talk," but it was not until after almost three hours that they allowed him to make a call to his family to inform them that he was detained at the state’s prosecutor's office.
Schultz declares in detail, that when leaving his house, walking, he sensed a car that was slowly following him, but without looking he kept going his way. Suddenly, the Sentra model, gray car with no logos, stopped, from where several men in civilian clothes got out with squad pistols. He immediately thought it was a kidnapping. They put him in the Sentra. When he arrived at the prosecutor's office, he was told that he was under arrest for the murder of Miroslava.
Accusations without evidence
At 10:18 a.m. on March 23, 2017, the body of journalist Miroslava Breach Velducea was admitted to the forensic service of Chihuahua city. The record of her death was at 6:46 a.m. due to the impact of eight shots. The investigation folder began with the victim's full name in capital letters and the date, in the State Attorney General's Office with the single case number 19-2017-8019, while in the PGR it was identified with the file number C.I FEDSDHPDSC/UNAI-CHI/0000214/2017 under the warning of “classified information” and “confidential” for five years.
The person in charge of these first steps was the agent of the Public Ministry, José Roberto Frías Aguayo, attached to the Investigation Unit in Crimes against Life, the same agent who fabricated the testimony of Hugo Schultz under compulsion in a ministerial statement as "witness of reserved identity”. But also, the Attorney General's Office and FEADLE intervened with interviews to relatives, neighbors, workers from businesses near the victim's home, taxi drivers, as well as friends and journalists with whom Miroslava lived, and the close circle of "people of interest”, including girlfriends, wives, children, and other relatives.
Those closest to the victim and public servants were protected as "identity-restricted witnesses," and for the next two months after the murder, the Chihuahua prosecutor's office had sufficient information and test data on three people who allegedly participated in the murder, Ramón Andrés Zabala Corral, 25, the alleged perpetrator of the crime; Juan Carlos Moreno Ochoa, the alleged mastermind, and Wilber Jaciel Vega Villa, who provided the car and help to perpetrate the crime.
Among the interviews with neighbors, there was a lady - whose identity we withhold for security reasons - who in her testimony to the state prosecutor's office mentioned seeing Governor Javier Corral enter Miroslava's house shortly after the events, at around 9 in the morning. She was the only person who mentioned him in the interview record, however, some journalists affirm the existence of a video from security cameras that recorded his presence.
Three hours after the supposed search on Corral, at 12:36 p.m., Andrea Plata Breach, 22, Miroslava's eldest daughter, gave her first ministerial statement to the FGE about the facts and pointed out without hesitation that Hugo Schultz and Carlos Arturo Quintana 'El 80' are responsible for the threats to his mother.
The young woman was in an altered state, according to C4 Emergency Narrative 066, under the number 1901.01667931, dated March 23, 2017, starting at 6:53 a.m. and finishing at 11:26 a.m., with an update at 12:19 p.m. on the same day. Andrea Breach was called by her younger brother immediately after the events, he saw her mother in the SUV, heavily injured, she called 066 Emergencies, and her aunts Rosa María Breach and Alcira Guadalupe Figueroa Velducea, one of her mother’s cousins. She attended to Javier Corral and testified -with apparent precision in journalistic details of her mother's authorship- in less than five hours, at least twice to the agents of the Public Ministry of the state prosecutor's office.
She said that her mother had written a report "about people linked to drug trafficking who were running for public office, mostly in the surrounding areas, Chínipas one of them..." published between April and June 2016, before the electoral process, the young woman specifies and affirms: “after that, I know that she received a message or rather that they were looking for her to give her a message from the person nicknamed 'El 80', through the former mayor of Chínipas named Hugo Schultz, who said not to stand one foot on La Sierra…”.
Six hours after Miroslava's body entered the forensic service, her sister Rosa María Breach Velducea and her cousin Alcira Guadalupe Figueroa Velducea attended before the Public Ministry to identify the body.
The Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office sent the documents for forensic services and the civil registry so that the family had a death certificate. The time was recorded at 4:41 p.m. on March 23, 2017. Twenty minutes later, at 5:00 p.m., Rosa María Breach Velducea gave her first statement to the FGE after identifying her sister's body, and immediately alluded to former governor César Duarte Jáquez, pointing out that Miroslava had carried out a "fully documented" investigation, "related to illegal activities carried out in said administration, in regard to drug trafficking ties and all the illegal properties that the governor and all his associates had bought."
On March 25, Miroslava's sister declared in reference to the alleged threats by Hugo Schultz, that "the elected governor Javier Corral instructed to speak with the municipal president of Chínipas, Hugo Amed Schultz Alcaraz, a situation that reassured Miroslava since the threatening calls went down…”.
Rosa María Breach also testified before the PGR that day, and refers to Hugo Amed Schultz, "that a year and a half ago, Corral had to call him to ask her sister for protection due to his threats." Right there she refers to César Duarte, who, according to her sister, she was also afraid of, because she had received threats.
Very similar statements before public ministries of the two prosecutor's offices, the state and the federal, came from her other sister, Brissa Guadalupe Breach, and her cousin Alcira Guadalupe Figueroa, on March 23, 25, and 29. These are the only accusations against Hugo Amed Schultz for alleged threats against Miroslava.
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This article is published originally in Spanish here: Hugo Amed Schultz: un cabo suelto en el caso de Miroslava Breach.