Relatives of California welder accused of fuel theft in Mexico say they have gone weeks without news of him

Joel René Cárdenas Carrillo, a Mexican immigrant who became a U.S. citizen and works as a welder, has lived in the United States for more than 25 years. For his father’s birthday, he decided to return to his home state of Colima in Mexico after a long absence. On August 12, as he was preparing to return to California, he went for a walk on a hill and later attended a soccer match held on a field in Manzanillo. But when he left the game in his car, several police patrols blocked his way. Officers detained him, beat him and accused him of stealing fuel, an illegal activity in Mexico known as huachicol. That is the account provided by his wife, Verónica Sánchez.

The accusation by Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office (FGR) presents him as a member of a huachicol gang. In a late August statement, the agency says he and other accomplices were caught in the act while extracting hydrocarbons from a pipeline that runs to facilities of Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) in Manzanillo. Authorities reported in that statement the arrest of Cárdenas Carrillo, identified as Joel “N,” and five other men. The same release says that at another site allegedly linked to their activities, authorities seized seven tanker trucks, three pickup trucks and stolen fuel. That site reportedly contained two clandestine fuel taps, the FGR says.

“I am not guilty of those filthy acts,” Cárdenas Carrillo wrote in a letter from his cell in a Colima city jail. “They pulled us down and dragged us inside. They beat us and gave us no chance.” In the message he also instructs his wife to look for evidence that could help his case: his U.S. passport, his plane tickets from the trip, business cards for his welding business and the locations of security cameras installed near the field.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico confirmed it is handling Cárdenas Carrillo’s case because he is a U.S. citizen. His legal process, however, remains uncertain. “The Department of State takes its commitment to assist U.S. citizens abroad very seriously and is providing consular assistance,” an embassy spokesman said in a written statement sent to EL PAÍS. “Due to privacy and other considerations, we have no further information to share at this time,” the statement added.

“He was beaten”

From California, Verónica Sánchez, a 47-year-old Mexican immigrant who makes a living as a farmworker, has been unable to persuade Mexican authorities to drop the charges against her husband. A Colima lawyer she paid $5,500 to take the case has stopped answering her calls. She has also gone three weeks without knowing to which prison her husband was transferred.

“They want to use him to cover for someone; we don’t know. Or to make him disappear. That’s what we fear. They already know he is a U.S. citizen and they don’t want to let him go. They have his belongings: his phone, his passport. They know he is not the person they’re accusing. Our fear is that they will do something to him,” Sánchez said in a telephone interview with EL PAÍS.

As soon as she learned of her husband’s arrest, Sánchez flew to Colima. She arrived while the hearing at which the charges—illegal extraction of hydrocarbons—were presented was under way. She saw him in a prison uniform, head down, worried about the enormous legal trouble he faced. “That’s when he saw me and started holding on and crying. I saw him wake up, like he was in another world. He was in shock,” she said.

Sánchez says that during a later visit to the prison he told her the police beat him during the arrest and that he went several days without eating or drinking while detained in a Manzanillo jail. “He was beaten all over his body; he was dragged. I would say he was tortured because keeping a person in the sun for several hours, on top of rocks, on gravel, I see that as torture. Kicking his head, his stomach,” she said.

According to the U.S. Embassy, Cárdenas Carrillo remains detained in Colima. However, a search of the National Detention Registry (Registro Nacional de Detenciones) maintained by the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection did not show his name in the database, neither as a Mexican nor as foreign national.

This newspaper contacted the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs to ask about Cárdenas Carrillo’s whereabouts and legal status, but a spokesman limited his response to saying the case is being handled by the FGR. A control judge in Colima declared the detention of Cárdenas Carrillo and the other five accused to be lawful and imposed pretrial detention, according to the federal public prosecutor’s statement. The next hearing is scheduled for October 20.

The U.S. Embassy did not comment on allegations that Cárdenas Carrillo was tortured during his detention. After several attempts, a spokesman for the FGR in Colima responded to this newspaper’s requests for comment by saying only that “the matter is being handled by the FGR authority responsible in Manzanillo,” but no further answers were obtained before publication of this article.

“An investigation should be opened”

Photographs of Cárdenas Carrillo wearing his welding mask and working on projects in Visalia, California, where he lives with his family, are among the pieces of evidence his wife says she has to show he earns an honest living. He learned the trade in Colima as a teenager. The migrant recently set up a small company after several years working for firms in the sector. The couple has two U.S.-born children, aged 23 and 24. Sánchez says her husband has been the family’s main breadwinner and, after almost two months without his income, she is considering selling some of his machinery.

“Savings have run out. He provided the largest share of income to pay the rent. The truth is, what I earn is little, it’s not enough, we can’t cover expenses,” Sánchez laments. “We even want to sell some of his equipment.”

Cárdenas Carrillo was born in Colima 46 years ago and emigrated to the United States at 19 “to help his parents and family,” his wife says. They met in 2000 in Nebraska. They married, their children were born there and they later moved to California. In 2005 he obtained his permanent resident card and, two years later, he became a U.S. citizen.

He had gone nearly five years without traveling to Colima. He went there on June 16. His return flight to California was scheduled for Saturday, August 15. On the day of his arrest, the previous Wednesday, he accompanied relatives to an amateur soccer match of his father’s team. “He went to help carry the water bottles,” Sánchez said.

The field is next to a PEMEX facility. It can be reached via Del Trabajo street, where long lines of tanker trucks typically form waiting to load gasoline and diesel. A few blocks away is the port of Manzanillo, one of Mexico’s largest. At the end of the game, Cárdenas Carrillo and his father left in separate cars. His friend Leonel Cárdenas Rodríguez, who was also detained during the operation, was with him.

Relatives of both men have held demonstrations demanding their release. Sánchez says she was a victim of fraud after paying $5,500 to a lawyer who promised to defend her husband and then disappeared. “He wanted another $8,000 for ‘bail,’ but at the hearing it was said that he cannot be released on bail. So I told him to wait, to let me investigate. Since then he no longer answers my calls,” she says.

Sánchez was unable to fulfill one of the tasks her husband asked of her in the letter: find videos from the security cameras near that field. The owner of a nearby business told her someone had destroyed the recordings and that he was afraid to speak out.

This woman feels trapped in a maze, facing a system she does not understand and 3,000 kilometers away from home. “I would tell the Government of Mexico to review my husband’s case, to free him. What he is accused of is not true,” she says. “Open an investigation. He has lived longer in California than in Mexico.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition