Tijuana, Baja California: Young Male Has Fingers Removed For Refusing To Sell Narcotics

"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat

This is the story of a 16-year-old young man who claims that his fingers were cut off for refusing to sell drugs in Acapulco. His father took his entire family out of the port as best he could to save their lives.

Video translation is as follows:

Ciro Gómez Leyva: The current violence doesn’t just affect Central American immigrants. It also happens with Mexicans, those who want to leave the country because of the violence. Our reporter Humberto Padgett is in Tijuana and he found this young boy.

Humberto Padgett: This is the sentence in Mexico in the year 2021 for a 16-year-old boy who resisted the recruitment of a criminal organization in Acapulco.

So, then they wanted you to sell drugs?

Young male: Yes. I told my dad and we moved. I was at my cousins sweet 15 party and was already heading home in a taxi. When another taxi approached and that was where I was abducted. They placed a gun on me because I didn't want to get in the car. And they took me to Avenida Gran Vía Coloso to assault me. They lowered me from the vehicle to cut off my fingers. It was a cut with a machete. They put a board and a machete on me.

Humberto Padgett: Let me see. Show me how.

Young male: They hit my fingers. Let’s say that this was the finger and they put the machete on it. And they beat the board against the top of the machete so that they could cut them off.

Humberto Padgett: Were you conscious?

Young male: Yes. They hit me with a board on my back. Later they put me in the car and that was when they left me on the bridge.

Humberto Padgett: The young man was admitted to a public hospital in the Acapulco port. From where doctors came up with the idea of ​​looking for the dismembered fingers to reattach them. But they found nothing. So the doctors resigned themselves to building the best stumps possible. His father, a bricklayer, gathered some money to pay for the medicines used and took his son out of the hospital. From that moment on the young man became a person with disabilities.

How much did the treatment cost you?

Victims father: Well, nothing. I just had to pay for the medicine.

Humberto Padgett: How much was it?

Victims father: I paid just for the medicine and the doctors put in the labor.

Humberto Padgett: How much did the medicine cost you?

Victims father: Well, the truth is I have no idea. I’d say about ten thousand.

Humberto Padgett: Ten thousand?

Victims father: Yes. About.

Humberto Padgett: Threatened by the fact that the next punishment wouldn’t be a mutilation, but a beheading or the execution of the entire family. They gathered a few things and fled as fast as they could until they came to a halt at the border wall between Mexico and the United States in Tijuana. Like the thousands and thousands of Michoacanos, Guerrenenses, Chapanecos, Zacatecanos, Hondurans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Haitians fleeing violence. They took refuge in a shelter. They were lucky. Because currently in the 24 government shelters and social organizations, they’re all bursting at the seams. But the persecuted haven’t stopped arriving. There is currently no country or Mexican state that produces displaced people who supports these immigrants with food. 

Pastor Luis Benito Juárez: We’re totally overwhelmed here. Because there are no resources. There is no way to feed them. The sanitary services, the water, the bathroom, there’s none here. This is the worst moment of a crisis that we are experiencing here in Baja California. The “Hugs Not Bullets” approach isn’t functioning here. And the president of the Republic has to take a different stance because this situation is abnormal. 

Ciro Gómez Leyva: Those who arrive and arrive like this, those who reach the northern border of Mexico just a few steps from the United States ...

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