Tortured: the sad story of the Mexican who spent 21 years in prison for the murder of a thug who pretended to be dead

Since 2000, German Manuel Ramirez Valdovinos He remained a prisoner accused of a homicide which, he assures us, he did not commit; he was released on July 16, after 21 years of confinement.

Torture, non-compliance and inconsistencies… anomalies and violations of due process were the reasons domestic and foreign human rights organizations came forward and demanded justice for Manuel’s case.

And the fact is that the irregularities started on the day of his arrest, on the night of May 26, 2000 when eight policemen They violently entered his home in the state of Mexico and punched Manuel away.

During the arrest, he said, the elements they did not present any search or arrest warrant and They also did not explain the reason for his arrest.

Later they put him in a patrol car and took him to a warehouse where he was brutally tortured: they hung him by chains, beat him, gave him electric shocks and finally they submerged it in a container of frozen water to erase traces of assault.

All that for Manuel to sign a confession made by the police themselves. After the acts of violence, he was transferred to the public prosecutor’s office where they threatened to harm his family before refusing to sign another declaration.

Manuel was in danger of his family being in danger. plead guilty to murder, what it was worth a sentence of 40 years, 7 months and 15 days in prison.

“I am very marked by torture (…) I no longer want to remember all this rot that hurt me”, He told media Tuesday afternoon, days after regaining his freedom.

Another of the major anomalies of his case concerned the body of the alleged victim, because, according to Germán’s account, the prosecution attested to the removal of the body at the same time as the forensic pathologists were already registering its admission to the annex of the Amphitheater of the Attorney General’s Office (PGJ) facilities in Texcoco, Mexico.

In addition, three years after the conviction, they managed to exhume the body and verify as well as the characteristics of these did not correspond to those contained in the expert reports or were subsequently modified to make them coincide.

This accusation gained momentum years later when Acolman’s neighbors pointed out that the murdered 19-year-old was still alive and living in the United States.

Likewise, relatives of the alleged victim told Manuel Germán’s relatives that the young man had a criminal record, so, hand in hand with his father, they orchestrated the act to “pass him off as dead” and thus escape justice. .

The father, they point out, would have paid the court more 150,000 pesos for immediately catching an alleged culprit, and that person was Manuel Germán Ramírez V.

KEEP READING: