When he arrived at the Cancun airport, he texted his mother to tell her everything was okay. Two long weeks of silence have passed. And the next message was: “Mom, they deceived me, they took all my papers and they beat me. » Between one communication and another, the nightmare of Iván Cano unfolds, a 25-year-old Colombian, suffering from a genetic disease that causes muscle failure, heart problems and vision problems. For the first time in his life, Cano boarded a plane to leave his humble home for a supposed job offer in Mexico. But it was all a trap. He was first enslaved by Mexican mafias, then imprisoned, accused of being a paid paramilitary.
His story is told by my colleagues Beatriz Guillén and Natalia Herrera with access to the investigation file, their testimony, that of their family, that of the Colombian embassy and the voices of experts. The case of Cano illustrates the phenomenon of forced recruitment by cartels. Fake offers on networks or pages. Humble young people, poorly trained and desperate to work. Payment of travel expenses. Once in Mexico: kidnapping, subjugation and forced labor.
Cano’s hook was an office worker position for a salary of 45,000 Mexican pesos per month, or about $2,500, or three times the salary of a similar job in Colombia. Flight and hotel paid. Added to this are 5,000 Mexican pesos (around $250) to cover the costs of his transfer from Villavicencio, his Colombian town, to Guadalajara. “I felt very good. I spent a lot of time looking for a job. I thought it was a good opportunity for me. I said ‘let’s do it, I consider it completely legal and I will be able to work to help my family,'” Cano told his colleagues by telephone from prison.
The so-called office was in reality a ranch, where the mafiosi lock up their victims to force them, under torture and threats, to work for them. Most of the time, they are trained to be hitmen, cannon fodder. In Cano’s case, they wanted him to be their hacker. “While I indicated on my CV that I was a development and cybersecurity technician, they thought I could do the opposite: be computer hacker. They wanted to force me to hack accounts, to do everything wrong”, he himself says in the report. The big mafias, like the Sinaloa cartel or Jalisco Nueva Generación, use pirates to access surveillance systems, track information and assassinate informants.
After two weeks of torture and death threats, the National Guard arrived at the ranch. Cano’s version is that he was tied by his left ankle to a stick, with a sort of chain. He thought the officers were going to save him. “But they also threatened me. They wanted to force me to give them information and I told them: ‘No, I’m kidnapped here, see how I’m doing.’ The military version is that Cano walked through the mountains armed with a semi-automatic rifle and pretended to be part of the Mencho Special Forces, a sort of elite corps that answers to Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, the powerful leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
Cano is charged with carrying weapons for the exclusive use of the military, a federal crime. There is only one piece of evidence against him: the testimony of the military. Eleven other Colombians are being held in the prison where Cano is being held. Most have military training and are linked to processes as suspected cartel mercenaries. For this reason, when Iván Cano arrived at the prison, with his big glasses, his extreme thinness and prostrate in a wheelchair due to the weakness caused by his illness, in the corridors of the prison, people began to say that his case was different. At the end of the call with my colleagues, Cano doubted the report, confessed to being afraid, exposing himself too much to tell his story. Then he took courage and agreed to tell the horrors – of crime and of the State – that he experienced. He ended the conversation by saying, “I just want you to help me get out of here.” »
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