They arrived suddenly—five white vans, identical and unmarked, blocking the street.
It was February 9, 2023, and Mauricio Morales was leading a group of migrants he had found at a bus station through Mexico City’s San Rafael neighborhood. Mau, as his friends called him, had told the migrants he could help them at the nearby refugee camp where he worked. They had just crossed a busy boulevard and were making their way down a side street when the five large utility vans lurched to a stop in front of them.
Men with machine guns, wearing tactical gear, spilled out and started barking orders and threats:¡Entren todos!¡Ahora mismo, hijos de puta!Were they police? Military? Mau couldn’t tell, and there was no time to ask for identification. Within seconds, the migrants were being shoved into the vans. When Mau tried to resist, something hard hit him on the head, and he fell to the ground. As he was loaded into the back of one of the vans, he heard gunshots. He thought of his mother.If this is the end, he remembers thinking before he lost consciousness,please let her be okay.
Mau woke on the floor of a dank, windowless room with a single mattress and a bucket in one corner. His wallet was gone; so was his phone. He had no idea where he was or why he’d been taken, but for the next few days, he and several other captives held with him were beaten and tortured. Men took turns pummeling him—breaking his ribs and pulling out his fingernails. When he tried to ask what they wanted, the beatings only got worse.
Then one day the men removed him from the room without explanation and deposited him back into a van. Assuming he was about to die, Mau began to weep. But when the van came to a stop and his captors hauled him out, he noticed that they were being careful with him now, almost gentle. “The boss wants to talk to him,” he heard one of them say.
The facility they took him to was strange. It vaguely resembled a school: four wings divided into classroom-like compartments and an enclosed courtyard in the middle. But there were no children here. Instead, men with guns patrolled the premises while women who looked like they were dressed for a night of clubbing loafed around.Narcocorridos, accordion-heavy cartel ballads, played loudly over speakers in the courtyard.
Mau was taken to a makeshift office, where a man with a paunch and a thick mustache sat behind a desk. He was flanked by a large bodyguard in a butcher’s apron and a voluptuous woman in a low-cut, form-fitting dress. He seemed irritated as he assessed Mau. “Look at him,” the man grumbled. “He’s so fucked up.” He sent the bodyguard and the woman, who seemed to be his girlfriend, out of the room. Once they were alone, the man became warm and friendly. He introduced himself as Don Paco, and apologized to Mau for what he’d been put through.
“I know who you are,” Don Paco said.
He told Mau that his men had noticed a tattoo of the Olympic rings on his wrist. After some research, they discovered that they had inadvertently kidnapped a world-class athlete—an Olympic runner who’d competed in Beijing, London, and Rio de Janeiro. This was serendipitous, Don Paco explained, because he happened to be in the market for athletes.
He said he was a leader of an organization called La Unión Tepito. Mau had heard about La Unión on the news. The cartel was relatively new, having risen to power in the past decade or so, but its tight grip on Mexico’s capital city had made it one of the country’s most notorious criminal syndicates. Don Paco told Mau that for all the attention paid to bloody turf wars and theatrical executions, organizations like his were an important part of the community—and Mexico was better off when its cartels got along.
Source: Drudge Report
