Mexico: Mother doing what police won’t: solving son’s disappearance
by The Associated Press on Apr. 04, 2006, under Nation/World
Maria Isabel Miranda next to one of the last photographs of her son at her home in Mexico City. When Miranda's son, Hugo Alberto Wallace, was kidnapped last year, Miranda decided she would have to solve the case herself – without police help.
MEXICO CITY – Maria Isabel Miranda didn’t hesitate to call police when her son was kidnapped.
She might have saved her breath.
Authorities widely acknowledge that most kidnappings in Mexico aren’t reported, for fear of official corruption, negligence or plain incompetence that endanger the victims’ lives. Miranda soon learned she would have to solve the case herself.
What she did next nearly cost her life.
Miranda’s nightmare began July 11, 2005, when she did not hear from her son, Hugo Alberto Wallace, a 36-year-old fumigation company owner. He had a date that night with a woman identified as Juana Hilda Gonzalez, and didn’t return home.
Miranda filed missing-person reports with city, state and federal police, but was told they wouldn’t investigate.
So she divided the megalopolis of 20 million people into sections, recruited 40 friends and relatives, and they searched street by street for her son’s SUV.
Amazingly, they found it, not far from the shopping center where he had planned to take Gonzalez to a movie.
A neighbor had witnessed a man being taken from her son’s car into a nearby building. Residents said a man with distinctive tattoos entered the building as well, and they suspected that he was an officer of the judicial police.
About a month later, Miranda received an anonymous letter saying her son had been kidnapped and she would have to pay ransom to get him back.
Rather than paying, she returned to the police to file a kidnapping complaint. Again, the police were no help.
“All the time we were calling, asking them to investigate,” Miranda said. “We’d bring them what information we had, but they just ignored us.”
Police agencies denied knowing any officer fitting the neighbors’ description. So Miranda went south to the state of Morelos, where she learned that Cesar Freyre Morales, a former judicial police officer, had tattoos of his mother on his right arm and flames on his left.
Using the phone book and talking with neighbor after neighbor, she found the house Freyre kept with Juana Hilda Gonzalez. She learned that her son had been introduced to Gonzalez by a man named Jacobo Tagle, and that Freyre was involved with another woman, Keopski Daniela Salazar.
Miranda began to follow the men and women herself – a desperate act that paid off in January. Eavesdropping while eating at Salazar’s restaurant, she overheard the hostess saying she would leave with Freyre for El Salvador in two days.
“That’s when I made the decision to catch Cesar,” Miranda said.
She and her brother followed Salazar home, found Freyre and demanded that he tell her where her son was, Miranda said. Freyre pulled a gun and the brother knocked him to the ground. Somehow, Miranda managed to flag down a passing Mexico City police car, she said.
As he was being led away in handcuffs, Freyre vowed “it wasn’t over, that there were still a lot of people in his gang and that he was going to kill not only me, but my granddaughter and my daughter,” Miranda said.
But Miranda was just getting started.
In February, she paid for billboard advertisements featuring Freyre’s mugshot and this message: “If you have been a victim of this criminal, report him.” Her idea was to persuade other potential victims to come forward.
Weeks later, with Freyre, Gonzalez and Salazar under house arrest, she put up new displays, offering $23,000 for Tagle’s arrest. Then still more, offering $4,570 dollars for the arrest of two other Freyre associates, Tony Castillo and Brenda Quevado.
Castillo was promptly detained. And last month, prosecutors began protecting Miranda with two armed bodyguards.
Miranda believes others were involved in her son’s kidnapping, and won’t give up until everyone is jailed and she finds her son – even if it means just recovering his body.
“Of course I’m afraid,” she said. “But nothing is going to stop me, not even fear. I’ve got to have justice for what they did to my son.”
