A member of the Los Zetas cartel is expected to spend the rest of his life in a Mexican prison after receiving a sentence of 131 years for his role in the ransom kidnapping and murder of a young teenage female. The murder took place even though her mother had paid the ransom twice.
After the murder, the girl’s mother tracked down and investigated the gunmen, eventually forcing authorities to arrest them; her quest for justice eventually led to her death after Los Zetas sought revenge.
This week, a state judge in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, sentenced Enrique Yoel Rubio Flores to 131 years, six months, and three days in prison for the charges of murder, kidnapping, and engaging in organized criminal activity. Rubio Flores was a gunman for Los Zetas in the city of San Fernando and is one of the individuals directly linked to the kidnapping and murder of Karen Alejandra Salinas.
On January 22, 2014, a group of Los Zetas gunmen kidnapped Salinas and held her for ransom. The kidnappers demanded a series of cash payments from her mother, Miriam Rodriguez, a small business owner in San Fernando. Upon learning of the kidnapping, Rodriguez paid the ransom and even took out a series of loans at a bank to pay a second ransom. Despite this, Los Zetas simply killed Salinas and dumped her body in a local landfill.
The case forced Rodriguez into the role of a tireless activist who used every tool available to investigate her daughter’s kidnappers. Rodriguez herself was the one who found Salinas’s body months later in a local landfill.
Rodriguez continued her work and began to search for cartel mass graves, as well as investigating Los Zetas in San Fernando. Despite being targeted by the criminal organization, the woman continued her work, even using disguises, and was able to pressure authorities to arrest key Los Zetas leaders responsible for her daughter’s murder.
As Breitbart Texas reported, in 2017, Los Zetas sent a group of gunmen into her home, where they shot her several times. She died soon after from her injuries.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart News Foundation traveled to Mexico City and the states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas, including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart News Foundation’s Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and their original Spanish. This article was written by “Francisco Morales” from Tamaulipas.
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