02 April 2005
Alfredo Jiménez Mota
Unknown
Jiménez Mota, a crime reporter for the daily newspaper, El Imparcial, disappeared from his home in the city of Hermosillo in the northwestern state of Sonora on 2 April.
The night of his disappearance he called a colleague at El Imparcial to say that he was going to meet with one of his contacts. Jiménez Mota told his colleague that the contact was "very nervous."
No one has heard from Jiménez since that call. Before he went missing, Jiménez Mota had been investigating drug-trafficking families in the region. Sonora prosecutors have linked his disappearance with his journalistic work. The Prosecutor General of the Republic, Francisco Daniel Cabeza de Vaca, has opened 11 lines of investigation into the case.
The national media published the case as a journalist who had been kidnapped by drug-trafficking gangs and who was later murdered. After the kidnapping, two sisters from Sonora state, Elba and Johann Palma Morquecho, publicly announced that they had been kidnapped by the same gang and that during their captivity they overheard the gang members saying that Jiménez Mota “was dead” after they had “tortured, burned and buried” him.
The declarations of the Morquecho sisters also brought to the forefront the possible implication of the State Police Chief of Public Safety in Sonora, Roberto Tapia Chan, in the disappearance of Jiménez Mota. However, this suspicion was subsequently thrown out by the General Prosecutor following a meeting on the matter with the governor of the State of Sonora, Eduardo Tours on 21 July.
