Mother of disappeared young man requests constitutional protection from the negligence of the authorities who have lost her son's body
The Border Center for Journalists and Bloggers presents you with a report by Esmeralda Sánchez about the ordeal of a searching mother who reports the double disappearance of her son
In an ordeal that has lasted 13 years, Marcela Balderas Rodríguez faces the indifference of Coahuila authorities in her fight to recover the body of her son, Cosme Humberto Alarcón Balderas, who disappeared in 2011 at the age of 16. Although the young man's body was identified, a labyrinth of bureaucratic omissions has evaporated any clue to his final whereabouts. In an unprecedented step, Marcela is seeking constitutional protection. The constitutional hearing will take place on March 8, 2024.
By: Esmeralda Sánchez / Border News
In an unprecedented event, a searching mother sued the Attorney General's Office of the State of Coahuila for “irregular activity of the authority” and requested compensation for the damage inflicted. The lawsuit, filed on October 13, was dismissed by the internal control body of the Prosecutor's Office seven days later and also by an administrative court on November 24, 2023.
Now Marcela Balderas Rodríguez, mother of Cosme Humberto Alarcón Balderas, who disappeared in 2011 when he was barely 16 years old, has requested two constitutional protections because she is convinced of the existence of severe omissions by personnel of the Prosecutor's Office in the municipality of Torreón that led to the disappearance of the young man's body.
The legal area of the Fray Juan De Larios Human Rights Center of Saltillo filed the lawsuit with the Directorate of Comptroller and Inspectorate of the Prosecutor's Office, the body in charge of resolving the administrative responsibilities of its assigned personnel.
In an unusually expeditious process, the Directorate of Comptroller and Inspectorate of the Prosecutor's Office dismissed the lawsuit seven days after it was filed on October 20.
What do the authorities say?
The Attorney General's Office of Coahuila presented an information card in which it states, "To promote the proper provision of the service and, where appropriate, correct possible incorrect administrative activities, it is currently creating an administrative unit with the powers, powers, and faculties to admit, substantiate and resolve the procedures related to the State Patrimonial Responsibility Law.”
According to the Fray Juan De Larios Human Rights Center of Saltillo, the same law obliged the institution to create these resources in 2019.
In its information card, the Prosecutor's Office added that “the specific case is being analyzed before different authorities and various channels, temporarily until the creation of the respective administrative office within the Prosecutor's Office has been published in the pertinent instances, and the appointments of the necessary personnel have been made.
For its part, the communication area of the Administrative Justice Court of Coahuila denied receiving Border Center since the file is protected before the Judicial Branch of the Federation "and classified as reserved information."
“The Prosecutor's Office did not even know what to do because they had never received a lawsuit of that nature; they did not even know what financial liability was,” explained Laura Patricia Rodríguez Martínez, a lawyer who is part of the Center's International Litigation and Strategy Team.
The lawsuit is based on the Law of Patrimonial Responsibility of the State and Municipalities of Coahuila, created in 2019, which states that the victims could request compensation for damage through the so-called “irregular activity of the authority” if damage or harm to a person will be generated; This right to request compensation for property liability has been contemplated in the Federal Constitution since 2002, and the substantive law was passed in 2017.
The lawyer explained that, by that law, the agency should have created, since then, the conditions so that the ordinance could be applied within the three months immediately after it came into force: “It should have provided powers to some agency of the Prosecutor's Office to resolve; however, he did not do so,” said Rodríguez Martínez.
The protections are coming.
The Fray Juan De Larios Center then chose to file two appeals: the first a direct protection, 1307/2023, in the Fifth Court of the District of Coahuila, due to the legislative omission of the Prosecutor's Office, which should have installed the mechanisms at the time. To receive a demand of this nature. “Now that I want to make my right enforceable, [the Prosecutor's Office] is telling me no,” says the lawyer.
The second direct protection was before the Second District against the decision of the Third Chamber of the Administrative Justice Court of Coahuila, whose head, Judge María Yolanda Cortés Flores, dismissed the search mother's claim.
The lawyer from the Fray Juan Center explains it as follows: “I want to challenge this administrative act that rejects my claim because it is a right recognized by the Constitution since 2002; there is jurisprudence that supports that I can demand this right and also this situation continues to cause harm to me."
The Constitutional Hearing will be on March 8. “What we are trying to do in this second amparo is under the concept of violation of the right of access to justice and legality and legal security because we consider that in the contentious administrative trial, they went to the bottom when what should be resolved was the admission or non-admission of the appeal,” said the lawyer.
Marcela's ordeal
On Thursday, May 5, 2011, Cosme Humberto Alarcón Balderas, then 16 years old, agreed to meet his mother, Marcela Balderas Rodríguez, at 8:00 p.m. in Soriana Oriente, in the city of Torreón, Coahuila.
They would see each other after the boy left the City Club on Boulevard Revolución in Colonia Casablanca, where he worked as a match. The mother arrived on time and waited, but Cosme never arrived. He did not answer her calls or messages on her cell phone, and Marcela's heart skipped a beat from which she had never recovered.
At that very moment, she began to look for him. In the early morning, she went to hospitals, police stations, the Forensic Medical Service (SEMEFO), and the Prosecutor's Office for Crimes against Health and Life (also called homicides) and tried. She tried to file a report with the Prosecutor's Office for Disappeared Persons, but they did not allow her to do so because 72 hours had not passed, so he had to return days later to do so.
She asked all the authorities for information about a young man with the characteristics of her son who had arrived in the hours after his disappearance and at all times received a refusal. She went to SEMEFO at least four days in a row and took a recent photo of Cosme.
Lawyer Laura Patricia Rodríguez explained that the group has promoted a method to encourage family investigations, which they have called case review, consisting of joint work with agreements between the family and the authority.
Thus, in 2016, a reference was obtained from a press release dated May 7, 2011, which states that precisely on May 5, they had found the body of a 25-year-old male, which the Prosecutor's Office confirmed, but the case file was lost for years and it was not recovered until 2018.
When she shows Marcela the photographs of the removal of the body, she recognizes her son and realizes that he “died that same day, the body was reported at 8:40, it was lifted at 11:00 by the San Francisco funeral home. Antonio, they did the autopsy and took fingerprints, and they gave the age of my son's body as 25 years old, a young man whose small face was visible just because of his body, which was very big, very tall."
It was because of this mistake that she was never given access to search the older bodies, although the body of her son was in the place all the time, only in the area corresponding to adults. According to her, the personnel who handled the case were not the same ones who had access to these remains at SEMEFO.
The file states that the body had been buried in the Municipal Pantheon 2 of Torreón, where a total of 4 exhumations were carried out, three from specific areas and one with a mass focus, but none of the recovered remains tested positive for Cosme, "for Both that place and the possible location were ruled out and that led us to the question: where is Cosme?”, says the lawyer.
Since SEMEFO previously collaborated with the Faculty of Medicine of the Autonomous University of Coahuila for practices with unidentified bodies, an investigation process was opened in which around 10 thousand bone fragments were recovered that are currently still being analyzed.
During her search, Marcela was re-victimized, says her current partner Antonino Herrera De La Rosa, first telling her that her son had indeed left of his own free will. Even one of the Public Prosecutors who attended to her assured her they had spoken with him in person and told him that he had complained of mistreatment.
Subsequently, she was separated from her other minor children without her authorization and the presence of legal representation so that they were subjected to interrogation, where she claims the Public Ministry was instructed to declare abuse on her part as a cause of the disappearance of Cosme.
Damaging omissions
"In this case, what we call irregular activity is the entire series of omissions that occurred in the case because, for example, Marce was going to the Homicide Prosecutor's Office, to SEMEFO, and in those days the body was kept by the Prosecutor's Office, and At all times he was told that there was nobody with those characteristics when they released the body, it was within five days instead of the 15 days established by law," explained Fray Juan De Larios's lawyer.
He adds that there were opportunities for the Prosecutor's Office to inform Cosme's family of the removal of the body because it was their obligation and because Marcela went to them to request the information, "but these omissions have led to the fact that to date it is not known where it is. Cosme's body", and mainly, that his mother "is experiencing effects on her health, psychological, emotional, physical and others, through an event, which is the disappearance that occurred a long time ago."
Marcela has lost hope of recovering Cosme's body "they will no longer find it", so for her "the fact that they reject the demand is an injustice to me", one more among the many that she has suffered in recent years.