Two former Chapala police officers have been arrested and charged with the homicide of a Guadalajara taxi driver who went missing last summer.
The suspects are identified as Luis Miguel Rentería Cortés and Javier Carretero Zaragoza.
In announcing their arrest late last week, Jalisco Attorney General Eduardo Almaguer Ramírez revealed details of the crime and the lengthy investigation carried out to solve the case.
The victim was Gabriel Josué Casillas Gaspar, a 34-year-old cabbie affiliated with Guadalajara taxi stand 22, who was reported missing when he didn’t return home after his July 16 work shift.
Based on evidence gathered in the probe, it is alleged that on the night Casillas disappeared the suspects hired him to drive them to Chapala for an agreed upon fee. Once they arrived, they asked the driver to turn around and take them back to El Rodeo, on the outskirts of Ixtlahuacán de Los Membrillos. Apparently a dispute arose over the cost of the return trip and Rentería “settled” the matter by pulling out his gun, fatally shooting Casillas in the head and abdomen.
The two policemen then enclosed his corpse in plastic bags and dumped it in the nearby Santiago River. Rentería absconded with the taxi for his personal use, disguising it with a black paint job and false license tags. Carretero pocketed the victim’s cell phone.
Investigators eventually tracked down the vehicle by reviewing more than 150 hours of video surveillance tapes captured at different points in the metro area and picking up GPS signals from a location chip implanted in the cab.
Once the case finally broke in mid-November and the suspects were taken into custody, authorities were able to find the cabbie’s badly decomposed body tangled among weeds along the river bank and confirm his identity through DNA tests.
Last Friday, the day after the story began spreading in the news media, Chapala Mayor Javier Degollado called a press conference to clarify some misleading reports suggesting that one of the crooked cops was still working for the city. He provided background information on both men drawn from the Department of Public Security files.
Carretero, a resident of San Antonio Tlayacapan, was employed as a Chapala policeman from February 2012 until October 2014, when he was dismissed for failing to pass the requisite control and confidence screening exams. No information was provided concerning his job history since then.
Rentería, registered with a Chapala address, served on the local force from September 2011 until he quit in July of last year to join up with the state’s Fuerza Única Regional (FUR) police command. The date of his resignation was exactly two days after the taxi driver’s murder. Two disciplinary reports were found in his Chapala employment file. He was still on active duty with the FUR at the time of his arrest.