Armed Men’s Kidnapping of Seven Teens in Mexico Results in Six Deaths and One Survivor, Mexican Authorities Reveal
Mexicans are reeling in horror after six kidnapped teenage boys aged 14 to 18 were found slaughtered at a remote farm in the central state of Zacatecas, where security forces found only one survivor.
The surviving teenager, identified as Sergio Acevedo, 18, and the other young men were found on Wednesday morning at a farm in Malpaso, a neighborhood in the municipality of Villanueva, during a flight surveillance operation.
The victims have been identified as: Diego Rodríguez, 17; Jorge Olcon, 14; Héctor Salcedo, 14; Gumaro Santacruz, 18; Oscar Rojas, 15; and Jesús Rodríguez, 18.
Acevedo suffered a head and nose wound and was rushed to a hospital in the city of Zacatecas, the state capital, where he is being guarded by police, Zacatecas’ attorney general said Wednesday afternoon.
The gruesome discovery comes amid a shocking rise in mass kidnappings in Mexico – and just weeks after five students were brutally murdered by cartel thugs, with one victim forced to behead his childhood friend.
Authorities in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas located Sergio Acevedo at a farm on Wednesday. The 18-year-old is the only survivor among seven teenagers kidnapped from a farm in the Zacatecas municipality of Villanueva on Sunday.
Six teenagers were found dead on a farm in Zacatecas on Wednesday, just three days after they were kidnapped. In the photo top row from left to right: Diego Rodríguez, Jorge Olcon and Héctor Salcedo. In the photo bottom row from left to right: Gumaro Santacruz, Oscar Rojas and Jesús Rodríguez
Security forces inspect the farm area where the bodies of six teenagers and a survivor were found on Wednesday
Survivor Acevedo is in stable condition and under the supervision of a psychologist, authorities said.
He told his mother that “he had done nothing wrong,” according to Mexican news channel Milenio.
“Yes, he recognizes me, but he has no idea of the time right now. Maybe it’s because of the abuse, I don’t know,” she said. “He said he’s not up to any bad things, he said, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong,’ I told him, ‘I know, my son, I know.’
The youths, who were attending school and are not believed to be involved in gangs, were hanging out with a group of girls when a group of armed men invaded a farm near La Soledad around 5 a.m. on Sunday.
The property is just 500 meters from a regional public security station.
The teens were forced into vehicles, beaten and left on a farm ten miles away near Malpaso. A motive for the kidnapping has not yet been revealed.
Zacateca’s Ministry of Public Security deployed 10 units of 300 officers to search for the victims.
Parents and friends of the missing teenagers blocked access to two highways on Tuesday in an effort to pressure authorities to speed up the search.
The parents returned on Wednesday to block another road and were there for an hour before being informed of the findings.
Authorities have arrested at least three people in connection with the kidnappings and killings, but the families are furious that officials have not kept them informed of the investigation into the teens’ deaths.
‘I didn’t even see it. I don’t want to see them because they haven’t shown their faces,” Jorgo Ocon’s father told Milenio.
A police cruiser monitors the ranch where the bodies of six teenagers and one survivor lay on Wednesday, following their kidnapping from a ranch on Sunday morning
The incident is the latest tragic outcome in the wake of this year’s mass kidnappings of youth.
In August, a gruesome video circulated on social media showing the final moments of five young men kidnapped in the neighboring state of Jalisco.
In the video you see a pair of tied up, inert bodies lying in the foreground. A young person who saw another victim bludgeoned and apparently beheaded turns out to be the fourth member of the kidnapped group of friends.
At the height of the Mexican drug cartel’s brutality in the 2010s, gangs sometimes forced kidnapping victims to kill each other. In 2010, a Mexican cartel kidnapped men from passenger buses and forced them to fight each other to death with sledgehammers.
In May, as many as eight young workers were murdered in Jalisco after apparently trying to quit their jobs at a call center run by a violent drug cartel that targeted Americans in a real estate scam.
Zacatecas is one of Mexico’s most violent states, where rival criminal gangs regularly clash over lucrative smuggling routes.
More than 500 people were killed in the state in the first eight months of this year, according to government data.