MEXICO CITY (AP) – Mexico’s top immigration officer faces prosecution over a fire that killed 40 migrants in Ciudad Juarez last month. Federal prosecutors said he failed to prevent the disaster, despite previous signs of trouble in his agency’s detention facility.
The decision to indict Francisco Garduño, director of Mexico’s National Institute of Immigration, was announced late Tuesday by federal prosecutors.
There have been repeated calls from Mexico and some Central American countries not to drop the case as five junior police officers, security guards and a Venezuelan immigrant have already been charged with murder.
On Wednesday, President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador said the Office of the Attorney General had investigated Garduño, but prosecutors provided few details and it was not clear what he would be charged with.
“We will wait for the (right) moment to make a decision,” Lopez Obrador said. The outrage initially focused on two security guards who were seen fleeing the March 27 fire. But President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Tuesday he didn’t have the keys.
The attorney general’s office said several other officers from Garduño’s agency would also be charged with negligence, but prosecutors could not explain what the specific charges were or identify the officer. I didn’t.
Prosecutors said the case showed a ‘pattern of irresponsibility’
The Immigration Office’s public relations office, headed by Garduño, reached out by message and phone for comment.
Prosecutors said after a 2020 fire at another detention center in the Gulf Coast state of Tabasco killed one person and injured 14, immigration officials knew they had issues to address. He said he was However, they claimed no action.
Corruption and poor conditions in Mexico’s immigration detention centers have long been complained about but never taken seriously.
Lopez Obrador’s comments about a security guard in last month’s fire in the border town of Ciudad Juárez, the same day the bodies of 17 immigrants from Guatemala and six Hondurans who died in the fire were returned to their home country. came.
It was unclear what impact Lopez Obrador’s comments would have on the trial of the guard previously imprisoned for the fire.
“The door was closed because the person who had the key wasn’t there,” Lopez Obrador said. Video from the facility’s surveillance cameras shows guards walking away as fire broke out in a cell housing immigrants in late March.
As the facility filled with smoke, the guards hurried away, seemingly unwilling to release the immigrants.
Three Mexican immigration officers, a security guard and a Venezuelan immigrant have been detained to investigate the fire. You will be charged with manslaughter.
The immigrant allegedly set fire to foam mattresses in the detention center to protest what he believed was a plan to deport or deport migrants. A Mexican military plane transported the bodies of six migrants to Honduras and 17 to Guatemala. Officials say 19 of the 40 dead were from Guatemala, but two bodies have yet to be identified.
Eleven more Guatemalans were injured in the fire.
Guatemalan Foreign Minister Mario Bucaro escorted the bodies, which were transported overland to their hometowns in nine different states.
The bodies of some Salvadoran migrants were returned to El Salvador last week. So far, 31 bodies have been sent back to their home countries.
