A California welder with U.S. citizenship has been in a Mexican jail since Aug. 12 on a fuel-theft charge, and Mexico’s National Detention Registry shows no record of him at all.
The man, Joel René Cárdenas Carrillo, 46, of Visalia, Calif., had gone back to his home state of Colima in June for his father’s birthday, his first visit in almost five years, and his return flight to California was set for Aug. 15. His wife, Verónica Sánchez, says she has now gone three weeks without knowing which prison holds him, and a search of the registry, kept by the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection, turns up his name neither as a Mexican nor as a foreign national.
Mr. Cárdenas Carrillo was detained as he left an amateur soccer match in Manzanillo, where he had gone to help carry the water bottles for his father’s team. According to his wife, several police patrols blocked his car, and officers beat him and accused him of stealing fuel, the black-market siphoning known in Mexico as huachicol. His friend Leonel Cárdenas Rodríguez, who was in the car, was also detained, and relatives of both men have held demonstrations demanding their release.
Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office describes a different man. In a statement in late August, it said Mr. Cárdenas Carrillo, identified as Joel “N,” and five other men were caught in the act extracting hydrocarbons from a pipeline that runs to Petróleos Mexicanos facilities in Manzanillo. At another site, the agency said, investigators seized seven tanker trucks, three pickup trucks and stolen fuel, and found two clandestine taps. A control judge in Colima declared the detentions lawful and ordered pretrial detention, the federal prosecutor’s statement said. The next hearing is scheduled for Oct. 20.
“I am not guilty of those filthy acts,” Mr. Cárdenas Carrillo wrote in a letter from a Colima city jail. “They pulled us down and dragged us inside. They beat us and gave us no chance.” In the same letter he told his wife to gather what could help his case: his U.S. passport, his plane tickets, business cards for his small welding company and the locations of security cameras near the field. She could not get the footage. A nearby business owner told her someone had destroyed the recordings, and that he was afraid to speak out.
From California, where she works as a farmworker, Ms. Sánchez, 47, has tried and failed to get the charges dropped. A Colima lawyer she paid $5,500 stopped answering her calls, she said, after asking for $8,000 more for “bail,” though the court had already said release on bail was not possible. “They want to use him to cover for someone; we don’t know. Or to make him disappear. That’s what we fear,” she said in a telephone interview with EL PAÍS. “They already know he is a U.S. citizen and they don’t want to let him go.”
She flew to Colima as soon as she learned of the arrest and reached the hearing while the charge, illegal extraction of hydrocarbons, was being read. “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. During a later jail visit, she said, he told her police beat him and that he went several days without eating or drinking in a Manzanillo lockup. “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.”
The U.S. Embassy in Mexico confirmed it is handling the case because he is a U.S. citizen. “The Department of State takes its commitment to assist U.S. citizens abroad very seriously and is providing consular assistance,” a spokesman said in a written statement to EL PAÍS, adding that privacy considerations limited what could be shared. The embassy did not comment on the torture allegations. Mexico’s Secretariat of Foreign Affairs referred questions to the Attorney General’s Office, and an agency spokesman in Colima would say only that “the matter is being handled by the FGR authority responsible in Manzanillo.”
Mr. Cárdenas Carrillo was born in Colima and emigrated to the United States at 19, his wife said, to help his parents. The couple met in Nebraska in 2000, married and later moved to California; he received his green card in 2005 and became a citizen two years later. Their two children, 23 and 24, were born in the United States. He learned welding in Colima as a teenager and recently opened his own company, and he has been the family’s main earner. After almost two months without his income, his wife said, “savings have run out. We even want to sell some of his equipment.”
The soccer field where the arrest began sits beside a Pemex facility, on a street where tanker trucks line up to load gasoline and diesel, a few blocks from the port of Manzanillo, one of Mexico’s largest. From 3,000 kilometers away, Ms. Sánchez is asking the Mexican government to take another look. “What he is accused of is not true,” she said. “Open an investigation. He has lived longer in California than in Mexico.”