A Jocotepec man captured last month in connection with the June 7 kidnapping of the chief of police in the south shore municipality of Tuxcueca has been tied to seven recent homicides committed in the lakeshore area.
Juan Pablo Amezcua Gonzalez, 22, was arrested in Tamazula de Gordiano on June 8 while driving one of three vehicles used the previous day to pick up and intimidate Tuxcueca public security director Guillermo Garcia Santana. Garcia was beaten up by his captors before being released later the same day in Ciudad Guzman.
Amezcua was caught behind the wheel of a white Toyota Land Cruiser reported as stolen at gunpoint in Mexico City back in 2009. He was held under house arrest until July 12 when the state attorney general’s office (PGJEJ) turned him over to the Tamazula criminal court to face prosecution for auto theft. At the same time he was put at the disposition of Chapala’s criminal court which has issued arrest warrants against him on various kidnapping and murder charges.Put under questioning after he was nabbed, Amezcua admitted that he pertained to a local cell of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) cartel and had taken part in a series of brutal homicides, including the triple execution of Ajijic natives Jose Felix Yañez Lorenzana, Jorge Armando Real Lopez and Tomas Garcia Casillas, whose tortured bodies were discovered April 14 near San Juan Cosala. He also confessed to involvement in the murders of Jorge Bojorquez Gonzalez and Javier Ceja Camarena in Tizapan el Alto and Jose Nava Macias in Jocotepec, all carried out between April 14 and 23. In addition, he provided information leading state police to a burial site on the outskirts of Jocotepec where the body of a so-far unidentified man was uncovered on June 9.
In related news, three men and a woman, members of the CJNG who are behind bars in Tala, Jalisco are under investigation by the PGJEJ as suspects in the mass murder of 18 people whose mutilated bodies were found May 9 near Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos. Luis Adalberto Villafan Huerta, 20, Juan Carlos Antonio Mercado, 28, Cesar Alejandro Rodriguez Cervantes, 20 and Laura Rosales Sanchez, 25, were charged in June with depriving 12 persons of their liberty and killing two more, all kidnapped in the Tala area last May. Investigators believe that the four detainees, plus five other suspects who remain fugitive, may be the culprits of the the massacre as well as the Tala crimes.