Luis Antonio Ortiz Guerra and Andres Barba were last seen in the Ciudadela shopping mall on Avenida Patria on the afternoon of June 21, 2013. Images from the a video surveillance camera showed the two boys leaving the mall in the company of two other youths at around 4 p.m.
Police arrested Isaac, who was 16 years old at the time, after identifying him as one of the youths in the video. He led them to a ranch in the Primavera Forest where the bodies of Ortiz and Barba had been buried. The cause of death was not made public at the time, although unofficial reports suggest they may have been bludgeoned with various objects.
Isaac initially told investigators that he believed he was participating in a kidnapping plot. He said he thought the idea was to lure Ortiz and Barba to the ranch to keep them hostage and demand a ransom from their families. He said he did not know the plan was to kill the boys.
According to the police file, a student at the same private school that Ortiz and Barba attended, known as “Andres,” had created an online alias to tempt the boys into the meeting at the mall with offers of girls and easy money from drug dealing.
As well as Andres, police are also looking for another student from the same school referred to in the case file as “Leonardo,” alleged to be the son of well-known drug capo Miguel Angel Carrasco (El Changel), currently serving a prison sentence in Mexico City, and who owned the ranch where the boys were murdered.
In statements made last June, Jalisco Attorney General Carlos Najera said the murdered boys had “mocked” Leonardo for his father’s past, which led him to hatch a plot to kidnap them. Luis Barba, the father of Andres Barba, told the Reporter this was not true of his son, who did not associate with Leonardo or Angel and only accompanied Ortiz to the Zapopan mall as a favor.
Najera said in July 2013 Isaac declared that three adults had helped drive the abducted boys to the ranch and participated in the murders.
Luis Barba said he had received assurances from Najera that investigators are on the trail of the other suspects and expects arrests to be made soon.
Patricia Guerra Ochoa, the mother of Ortiz Guerra, said Isaac should have been prosecuted as an adult, as would have happened in many other countries. “If I were the judge I would have given him 60 years in prison,” she told Spanish-language daily Milenio.
Luis Barba concurred, saying the sentence should have been for “many more years.”
Even though he is 18 in August, Isaac will serve his sentence in a juvenile detention center (Centro de Atención Integral Juvenil) known as “La Granja” (the farm). The law prohibits the transfer of juveniles to adult prisons once they reach 18, as is the case in the United States and many other countries. Even if the underage perpetrators of the murders are caught in ten years’ time, they will still not have to spend any time in a prison.