Kidnapped for 22 days, villagers recount how cartels control communities in Mexico

EL BALCÓN, Mexico (AP) — An elderly man recalled how gunmen asked what kind of death he preferred. A teenager recounted his terror at the thought of being turned into a hit man as gunmen talked about sending people off to fight. Another man begged his captors to shoot him rather than prolong his suffering.

They were among eight villagers kidnapped from El Balcón, a remote community in Mexico's southern Guerrero state. One remains missing.

The villagers said they were part of a group of 136 people, a figure they heard from a gunman when he requested food rations for the “squirrels.” They were called that because they had to hold their handcuffed hands to their mouths to eat.

Mexican drug cartels kidnap people to subjugate, recruit or punish them. Their families sometimes report them as missing, but there are no reliable figures on how many remain in captivity or how many are eventually found dead or alive — if they are found at all.

The Associated Press talked to six of the kidnapped villagers, most of whom spent 22 days in captivity, along with a dozen other residents of El Balcón. Their accounts — shared on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation — provide a rare insight into how cartels control territories and offer clues as to the possible fate of some of Mexico’s 130,000 disappeared .

Here is their story.

On Sept. 24, dozens of armed men walked into the community of 750 residents high in the pine-covered mountains, six hours from the nearest town via rugged rural roads with minimal government presence.

The gunmen began capturing and tying up anyone they came across: an elderly man tending livestock with his 13-year-old grandson; a teenager helping his uncle treat a cow with screwworm; a driver, a mezcal producer and two brothers in their 20s working in the fields.

“There were hit men all along the road,” the mezcal producer recalled.

Cartels in Guerrero had threatened the close-knit village for years. El Balcón, a model of sustainable forest management, decided decades ago not to grow poppies — the source of the heroin that enriched drug traffickers. More recently, it faced the same dilemma as many others in Mexico: either collaborate with the cartel or flee. The residents of El Balcón refused to do either.

The attackers presented themselves as members of La Familia. Filiberto Velázquez, a priest and director of a local human rights center helping the community, said the cartel wanted to expand its territory toward the coast. El Balcón — and its logging resources — stood in their way.

Residents knew what was happening almost immediately through a security network linking villages across the area. When they were alerted to suspicious activity, they sent up a drone and watched as the gunmen were abducting the last of the eight villagers. The community quickly mobilized, pressuring authorities to find them. Some members of the military were deployed to protect the village.

The kidnapped farmers were taken to a house crowded with others taken by the cartel. They slept crammed together, the elderly man said. Blindfolded, they could only lift the cloth slightly when eating.

First came the interrogations — they were accused of belonging to a rival cartel — followed by threats to burn them alive, blows with rifles, and kicks to the body. If the cartel members overheard them talking, the punishment intensified.

The extreme heat was suffocating. The teenager fainted several times from hunger and thirst. One villager said he saw a man drinking his own urine.

On the armed men’s radios, they could hear warnings about military movements, which meant quickly cramming more than 100 people into small trucks where they could barely breathe, in order to change hiding places, they said. Everyone feared that each trip might be their last.

A few days after the abductions, the captives were brought before a leader who told them what the cartel wanted: to control their territory and their wood business. He told them the government would not help them.

“That’s when we lost faith; we accepted that we were going to die,” said the mezcal producer.

A week after the attack, the cartel released the elderly man’s grandson. The community saw the release as a tactic to persuade the villagers to agree to its demands.

The gunmen left the barefoot boy several hours from his village. Eventually, he made his way to his grandfather’s house, where villagers gathered. He was shocked to see so many people crying and hugging him, he recalled.

With the information he provided and clues gathered by the villagers and their allies, the community drew up a map of where to search, which they handed over to the authorities as protests demanding greater efforts by Guerrero officials to find the kidnapped intensified.

“He brought hope,” his father said proudly.

Despair was growing in the camp. “The more time passed, the less food there was,” said the teenager.

Speaking in whispers so as not to alert the gunmen, El Balcón's villagers learned details about some other captives. The mezcal producer said one man told him he had been held captive for 2 1/2 years and a woman explained that she was being punished for her son’s defection from the cartel.

The gunmen told other captives that they were going to be forced into battle against enemy cartels. That played to the teenager's worst fear: He didn’t have the strength to stand up, much less to carry a weapon or tactical gear.

Several times, they heard helicopters. One day, one flew very low as they were being moved again. Three of them said that as the gunmen briefly dispersed, they lifted their blindfolds slightly and saw that it was a National Guard aircraft. Within a few seconds, it was gone.

Around Oct. 7, a video circulating on social media shocked El Balcón. Six of the missing men, in military uniforms and handcuffed, were being interrogated. One resident recognized his two sons. He assumed he would never see them again because in Mexico, many of those videos end with a point-blank shot.

“That day, they pointed their rifles at us and told us what to say,” said one of the brothers. They, too, expected to be shot. Instead, a leader informed them that they would be freed.

Velázquez, the priest, said the cartel likely released the men because the military, acting under pressure from villagers, had disrupted its operations.

On the day of their release, the six farmers were separated from the bigger group and placed in a vehicle, handcuffs removed. One was ordered to drive.

The teenager said he expected a bomb to go off or a burst of gunfire. The men moved forward. Some were laughing nervously. Then they saw a military checkpoint.

On Oct. 16, the army said it had located six missing persons from El Balcón through “military intelligence operations.”

When the six men were reunited with their families, joy turned to grief. One of the kidnapping victims said he couldn’t stop crying when he saw the wife of his fellow farmer who remains missing.

Guerrero prosecutors are investigating, but Velázquez, the priest, is pushing for federal prosecutors to take over because of the large number of captives. Authorities did not tell AP if they were looking for the more than 100 other people the villagers said were with them.

Nearly a month after the release, some of El Balcón's residents gather at night to allay their fears. Some talk about leaving. The military remains with them.