![]() ![]() He studied hard, went to church assiduously and tried to live up to his parents’ high expectations. His local priest and first boss both described him as “honest” and “honourable”. But music was his true calling – the guitar, mandolin, piano and, his favourite instrument, the accordion. On the field, he played second base or shortstop, positions that required agility and a strong throwing arm. His father was an engineer and, though the family wasn’t wealthy, Ramírez was encouraged to follow his twin passions: baseball and music. Manuel Ramírez was born in 1978 in the heart of Mexico City. To do so, he would try to prove that the man he was convicted of killing was still alive. He would spend the next two decades trying to clear his name. After she insisted that the men should be allowed to give their version of events, an officer said he would rape her if she didn’t shut up.Īs he was locked in a cell, Ramírez struggled to digest what had happened A year later, after what Ramírez estimates were almost 20 separate hearings, the court would convict him of murder and sentence him to 40 years in prison. According to statements she gave later, she wasn’t allowed to read any documents. The cousin of another prisoner was brought to the interrogation room to witness the confession. He says that the police filled in the confession afterwards. He then signed at the bottom of the page. Ramírez pressed his shaky index finger onto an ink pad and made a print on a blank sheet of paper. The threat restored him to partial lucidity. “That’s when they told me my little son and wife would pay the price for my stubbornness,” he said. The police threatened to beat her if she “didn’t shut up”. When his mother was let in briefly she began to cry. Ramírez’s family and friends had been waiting anxiously outside the police station. He slumped in a chair, bloody and delirious, his back throbbing, but refused to comply. “You will confess to this murder,” they kept saying. The officers dragged Ramírez to an interrogation room. “You ordered us to find a culprit, and here he is.” “Well, it’s not going to change now,” the commander replied. But as he entered the building he recalled hearing Rafael say, “No, not Ramírez. Ramírez didn’t have the strength to speak and his ears were still ringing. He saw an unexpected figure talking to the head of the police unit: Rafael, father of Martínez Elizalde, whom the police said Ramírez had killed. When he came to, the officers dressed him, threw all three prisoners into cars and drove them to a police station 20 minutes away. Ramírez’s body fizzed, shuddered and he lost consciousness. An officer fetched a battery and connected the electrodes to Ramírez’s testicles. Ramírez could smell the sweet stench of alcohol on his breath. “All right then, motherfucker, we’ll see who’s tough now!” one of his captors said. Then a policeman hit Ramírez so hard on his left ear that all noise seemed to be filtered through layers of wadding. Through the punches, slaps and accusations, Ramírez continued to deny everything. Ramírez’s father later told me he’d even loaned money to the family. As far as he knew, there hadn’t been any discord between the families, let alone violence. The name was familiar to Ramírez: his father and Martínez Elizalde’s father were acquaintances Emmanuel and Ramírez were around the same age. ![]() The officers punched his head with the heels of their hands and kept insisting, “You killed Emmanuel Martínez Elizalde, didn’t you?” Ramírez was submerged up to his shoulders. All three tell the same story: their captors, who turned out to be police officers, stripped them naked, bound their hands above their heads and dunked them in freezing water. The other was Ramírez’s brother-in-law, Gabriel Vera. One was Carlos Alberto Sánchez, whom Ramírez knew from town. Two other men were also led in, similarly handcuffed. The apparatus he saw did not bode well: two huge steel drums, car batteries, handcuffs and buckets of ice. “It looked and smelled like a beer cellar,” Ramírez said. His captors lugged him out of the car and marched him into an empty, dimly lit space. Disoriented by fear, Ramírez had no idea where he was or how long the drive had been. The only sensation he could feel was the engine’s throb through the fabric of the seat. Then they hauled him off the floor, dragged him out of the house into a car and sped off up the rutted track that led to the centre of Tepexpan.Īs the vehicle roared around the dirt roads, the men forced Ramírez to stay face down, handcuffed, with a jacket over his head. Two of the men pounced on Ramírez and beat him half-unconscious with the butts of their pistols. Immediately he shouted, “I’m Manuel Ramírez!” “She had my little son in her arms,” he recalled. The men rapped on the furniture with their weapons. ![]()
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