Last Sunday, after a New York Times investigation, the story of a mother who did not hesitate to chase her daughter's killers and put them alone with the Mexican drug cartels came to light.
Miriam Rodriguez turned into an activist and took the law into her own hands after her daughter was abducted in January 2014 by the Los Zetas drug cartel. Karen, then 20, was in her car when some gunmen stormed in and abducted her.
Abductions in Mexico are very common. Her family followed the kidnappers' instructions and took out a loan to pay the ransom. Rodriguez even met a member of the cartel who offered to help her find her daughter in exchange for 2 thousand dollars.
But their captors deceived them and Karen was found dead in an abandoned field a few months later. Rodriguez has vowed to spend the rest of her life seeking justice for her daughter. The information she gave to the police was the one that ensured the imprisonment of those responsible for the murder of her daughter.
To find out, she changed her hair and appearance, used a fake ID and disguised herself several times. In one of them, he said he works for a polling company to get their names and addresses.
Another time, he managed to arrest a member of the cartel while he was selling flowers on the street. He recognized her and started running, but Rodriguez overtook him and managed to stop him. He put a gun to his throat and told him to move, he would not hesitate to pull the trigger.
Her action to justify her daughter ended on "Mother's Day" in 2017. A few weeks after she had arrested the last man she had targeted, armed men set up a grenade launcher outside her house and a short time later, her husband he found her dead on the street. Her hand was in her bag, next to the revolver she always had on her.
Last Tuesday, a tweet from the Mexican channel Foro TV wrote "Miriam Rodriguez, the woman who chased her daughter's killers until she caught them."
# LoMásVisto Miriam Rodríguez, the woman who persuaded the shadows of her shadow hasta atraparlos https://t.co/6L8CXR00oq pic.twitter.com/16n71nlO0x
- Foro_TV (@Foro_TV) December 16, 2020
A few weeks before her death, Rodriguez had asked the government for police guards, as she suspected that some of the prisoners who managed to escape from Ciudad Victoria prison would be targeted. Zetas members have been at war with their former bosses for years and have often abducted innocent people for ransom or recruitment. Sometimes they organized fights to the death between their victims.
The governor of the province where Rodriguez lived said that her death should not be another statistic of the mass murders of the cartels. She is now considered a heroine in her city, while in the central square there is a plaque dedicated to everything she has achieved. Putting them alone with the cartels and imprisoning many of their members in prison.