Teenage thieves abused by vigilantes

Several hours after five teenagers were caught stealing from a luxury apartment in the Mexican
city of Tepic two weeks ago, they were found half naked and severely beaten on one of the city's
main thoroughfares. A week later, mobile phone footage documenting the psychological abuse
they were subected to surfaced on !ouTube. "ho was behind this brutal incident and what role
did the police play in it# So far, there's no one answer.
$ne of our $bservers in Mexico, Gabriel Infante brought our attention to this footage.
The footage was filmed on $ctober %& and posted online on $ctober '(. )ow the footage found
itself on !ouTube and *acebook is still a mystery. The only explanation is that it was posted
online by one of the aggressors.
The youths and the police agree that they were arrested by officers + but the police deny having
any involvement in the abuse which followed, pointing out that they use different rifles and not
the A,+-. seen in the video.
/ayarit governor /ey 0on12le1 said on $ctober '3 that 45ustice cannot be carried out at home4
and that 4They're as bad as each other4. )e gave the district attorney and the head of police a %'+
hour time limit to produce substantial findings on the case.
$n Monday morning, the district attorney announced that four suspects had been arrested.
Apparently they had been boasting about the incident in a local bar, and somebody phoned the
police. An A,+-. was indeed found in their possession + albeit a toy one.
[They were] handed over to the men, instead of being charged
Antonio Tello is a radio ournalist in Tepic. )e was the first person to draw attention to the
footage, which he published on his blog Nayarit online *riday '& $ctober, two days after being
made aware of it.
Someone who knew the teenagers sent me a tip on *acebook. The videos were entitled 6Ratitas
de Tepic' 7scoundrels of Tepic8, and captioned 69ook at what happened to them for thieving from
my house'. The original clips were gone by then, but someone had been able to download and
repost them beforehand.
Several days after posting the videos : received an anonymous email, leading me to one of the
boys. : was then able to speak to the family of another of the teenagers. "hat : was able to
gather from the two accounts, is that they were kicked and slapped by a group of around eight
men and two women. They were repeatedly told by their captors that their hands would be
chopped off and they would die and be buried beneath the courtyard. Their heads were shaved
with a ra1or. $ne of them told me that they were whipped with a tree branch and given electric
shocks using some sort of prod. : saw the marks on his body. /one of them said anything about
being raped however.
They were then abandoned in one of Tepic's main avenues, beaten and half naked. Several
neighbours called the police, who arrived and ;uestioned them. The boys said only that they had
been assaulted. :ncredibly, the police left them there and the teenagers took taxis home. The
police report confirms this and details that the boys did not want to file a complaint.
<veryone in /ayarit is talking about the videos. A lot has been said about the involvement of
police and drug traffickers in this affair, either separately or ointly. /ayarit used to be one of the
safest states in Mexico, but recently it has been plagued by urban delin;uency and organi1ed
crime, mostly linked to drug trafficking. Some say that the house the teenagers broke in to
belonged to a prominent drug kingpin. And police brutality isn't unheard of in this state.
)owever, there is no actual evidence of either traffickers or officers playing a role in this case.
According to the teenagers, it was the police who caught them burgling the house. They say that
they were briefly taken to the attorney general's office, and then handed over to the men, instead
of being charged. /ormally the police would open a file, ;uestion them and then transfer them to
an association for underage offenders.
: visited two of the teenagers' homes and contrary to what most people might think, their
situation is not one of extreme poverty. These boys come from middle class families and go to
private schools. As they said themselves, they have a 7drug8 addiction problem and have stolen
in the past in order to sustain it.4