The morning of Thursday, September 14, 1978 in San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco, began like so many others. The milky sky, the heat barely waking up and a dense silence that was only broken by the distant hum of a failed fan. At 7:15, Ramón Herrera Hernández, a 36-year-old mechanic, a reserved and meticulous man, closed the gate of his small workshop in the El Rosario neighborhood with a rusty padlock.
He was wearing his washed-out blue shirt with oil stains, the same one he had been wearing for weeks, and he was carrying a grated sheet lunch box with traces of red paint. He told his neighbor, without much intention of talking, that he would take an urgent assignment in Lagos de Moreno and return at dusk. It was the last time anyone saw him alive.
Ramón had a reputation for being serious, but compliant. He didn’t drink, he didn’t go out, he didn’t talk more than necessary. His world was his workshop, his Chevrolet C10 model 73 truck and the engines that he disassembled as if he were disassembling watches. That Thursday, however, something in his way of looking was different. He avoided the baker’s sight, walked faster, and started the engine with a clumsiness that was not his.
The disappearance was noticed that same night when his mother, a wiry woman, with cracked hands and devotion to the Virgin of San Juan, walked to the workshop when she saw that he did not return. The truck was missing. The gate was still locked with its own padlock, but inside the lights remained on. On the tool bench, a pewter cup with cold coffee and a letter without an addressee.
It said in trembling handwriting and with smudged ink. The only thing that hurts me is the silence. For the first 48 hours, local police assumed it was a voluntary escape or minor settling of scores. There was no formal complaint, until the following Monday.

The initial file was filed under the category of person not located. His mother, in tears, swore that Ramón would never have left his workshop, neither for money nor for fear. What no one knew at the time was that under the parched earth of a forgotten ravine a few kilometers from Moreno lakes, lay in silence the key to a story that would take three decades to emerge.
During the first days, the disappearance of Ramón Herrera Hernández was a constant murmur among the residents of San Juan de los Lagos. No one understood why such a reserved and methodical man, with such a predictable life, could simply vanish. His mother, Doña Ernestina, walked the streets with a framed portrait in her hands, visiting police stations, parishes, gasoline stations.
Every night he would leave a lit candle in front of the workshop and pray in a low voice, as if those prayers could cross the fields, the mountains, the kilometers of silence. The local police acted half-heartedly. In their initial report, they noted that the disappearance could be related to some unpaid debt or a sentimental conflict.

No indication of violence,” said one of the first minutes. There was really no indication of anything. His truck did not appear. His wallet was not used. His signature did not appear again in any procedure. A dry blot, as if he had been torn from reality with surgical precision.
By December of that same year, the search had been reduced to the desperate effort of his mother and Rogelio, his young apprentice, who pasted posters in nearby towns with the black and white image of the mechanic. The truck, a wine-red Chevrolet C10 model 73, was considered a key piece, but no one saw it. Vague theories were considered, that he had absconded with someone else’s money, that he had witnessed something improper, that he had been mistaken for someone else.
None of them advanced. In 1981, a man with a northern accent called from a public phone in Aguascalientes, claiming to have seen Ramón in a notorious boarding house. When police arrived, they found a confused alcoholic, with no identification. In 1991, a retired former traffic agent declared that he had stopped an identical truck in the 70s, but the files were incomplete and the trail was lost.
In 1999, an anonymous complaint claimed that the truck was being used with false license plates in Tepatitlán. A patrol was dispatched. They found a burnt vehicle in a ravine, but the serial number had been filed. Again, nothing conclusive. Over the years, the case became a shadow. The new police officers did not even know how to pronounce the full name of the disappeared.
The workshop was closed, covered and then demolished to build a chain pharmacy. Rogelio moved to León and never spoke about the matter again. Doña Ernestina died in 2003 in her bed with a lit candle next to her and the photo of her son pinned to the wall. He never knew anything. On his grave, someone painted with lime.

He didn’t leave, he was swallowed. No one erased that inscription. San Juan de los Lagos grew, but Ramón’s case was left behind. like so many other stories of men who disappear on secondary roads. The archive was transferred to a judicial warehouse in Tepic and dusty for three decades, but the silence was not forgotten. Something was waiting underground.
It was in September 2008, after a particularly severe storm in the Lagos de Moreno region, that everything changed. The rains washed away a patch of parched land on an unnamed rural road, opening a ditch of several meters. In the background, rusty and covered with roots, a metal fragment with recognizable curved lines appeared.
A farmer looking for firewood saw it glowing in the mud and alerted the police. It was the rear end of an old truck, half-buried, with paint erased by the years. No one knew yet, but time had begun to unearth the truth. On Monday, September 22, 2008, on a dusty sidewalk that crossed between the limits of Ejido El Platanar and the parched fields of La Estrella, Tomás Lerma, a 63-year-old peasant, walked with his machete on his shoulder looking for dry branches for firewood. After the rains of the previous week, several roads in the
area had been blocked by mud and landslides. It was then that as he approached a ravine eroded by the storm, he noticed a metallic sheen between the exposed roots and the wet mud. At first he thought it was an old tire or the side of a rusty trailer, but when he cleared the brush that covered it with the machete, he revealed what appeared to be the top corner of a truck with the paint completely erased by rust and the hood sunk under a broken rock.

The discovery, silent and opaque as a whisper swallowed by the earth, disturbed Tomás. Without touching anything else, he returned to the town and notified the command of Lagos de Moreno. The next day, Tuesday morning, two state agents and a forensic expert went to the scene with shovels, yellow tapes, and portable flashlights.
After more than 3 hours of manual removal, a half-buried vehicle emerged, a Chevrolet C10 truck, old model, visibly damaged, without tires, without glass, with a collapsed rear bumper. Inside there was debris, branches, caked earth, but the chassis and part of the structure still retained the distinctive lines of the seventies design.
It had no visible plates, but the serial number engraved on the inner edge of the driver’s side chassis was still partially legible. After carefully cleaning the corroded metal and photographing it, the expert compared the digits with the state database of old vehicles. It was then that a file filed decades ago jumped out. The truck matched the one reported missing in 1978, associated with a forgotten name.
Ramón Herrera Hernández. The case, dormant for more than 30 years, had slept under layers of institutional indifference. No one in the Regional Prosecutor’s Office remembered Ramón. The truck was extracted with a crane at noon. When moved, the detached earth exposed the driver’s door and part of the floor of the vehicle.
The interior, dissolved by humidity, smelled of rancid metal, rotten rubber, of confinement. There was no trace of the original seats or the steering wheel, but under the rear seat, surprisingly intact, one of the agents found a kind of makeshift compartment. It was a rectangular cavity covered by a metal sheet riveted and sealed with hardened pitch. When they opened it carefully, they found several stacked wads of bills.
They were old pesos from the 70s. With the image of Miguel Hidalgo printed on thick paper, they were damp, stained with mo, stuck together by time, some practically disintegrated. The total could not be counted at the time, but experts estimated that there must have originally been several million.

The money, evidently hidden, could not be there by accident. It was money hidden, preserved, designed to remain hidden for a long time. An awkward silence invaded those present. [Music] One of the agents proposed to search the rest of the vehicle before moving it.
It was then that they noticed that the rear floor of the chassis had a welded sheet. different from the rest, with improvised weld marks. The forensic expert recommended not to handle it on site. The truck was secured and sent to the facilities of the Guadalajara Forensic Medical Service with armed custody and a protection order. The case was assigned to the Prosecutor’s Office of Property Crimes. The news was barely leaked to the local press.
The newspaper La Región published a brief note. There is a truck buried with old money in Barranco de Jalisco. However, that line was enough to reach the ears of Rogelio, Ramón’s former apprentice, who still resided in León, a few days later. Seeing the file photo published in the note, he recognized the dent on the left side of the rear bumper.

He decided to appear before the prosecutor’s office. with a trembling voice,” he said, “That was the truck of the master Ramón. No one else had one like it. Three days after the discovery, on September 25, 2008, the truck was inspected in a closed warehouse of the Guadalajara Forensic Medical Service. The procedure was led by prosecutor Leticia Muñoz with the presence of two forensic experts, a criminologist and a physical anthropologist.
The interest was no longer only the deteriorated money, from which more than 800 partially legible bills had been recovered, but the mysterious sheet welded to the bottom of the chassis, a metal plate without screws, fixed with irregular welding, as if someone had improvised a hiding place with urgency or fear.

With specialized tools and cameras recording every angle, the technicians began cutting the plate. The smell that emerged was penetrating, acidic, unmistakable, a mixture of rust, confinement and old decomposition. After completely removing the cover, they found what looked like a rectangular cavity about 70 cm deep. Inside, wrapped in deteriorated black plastic bags, lay incomplete human remains.
First some long bones were visible, then fragments of cloth and further down a skull in a lateral position with the jaw displaced. The fabric, undone by time, still retained vestiges of a blue shirt. A small aluminum identification plate hanging from a rusty cord read R herrera H.
There was no doubt for the prosecutor, they were in front of the remains of the mechanic who disappeared 30 years ago. The autopsy was complicated by the advanced state of decomposition and prolonged exposure to the closed environment. However, preliminary anthropological analyses established a correspondence in age, complexion, and height with Ramón Herrera Hernández.
In addition, bone samples were extracted for mitochondrial DNA analysis, which would be compared with preserved tissues from their mother. They are still available in an old sample taken at the civil hospital during his last hospitalization in 2003. The revelation shocked investigators. It was no longer a simple disappearance or money hidden by smugglers.
There was a body, a name, a crime carefully silenced. The compartment where the body was found appeared to have been designed to remain invisible for years. At the same time, the experts analyzed the banknotes. More than 40 bundles retained fragments of fingerprints, albeit heavily degraded.
Some of them were printed on security paper used between 1973 and 1975, reinforcing the theory that the money had been collected during that decade. One of the bundles, tied with a completely fossilized blue garter, had a barely visible inscription on one of the edges. RDC 878. That acronym reactivated an old suspicion.

During the initial investigations of the 70s, there were never confirmed rumors that Ramón was linked to a money laundering group through mechanical workshops in the Los Altos region. One of the names that appeared in those anonymous complaints was that of the then commander Rodolfo del Sid, head of the traffic directorate in Lagos de Moreno in 1978.
Although he was never formally investigated, his name appeared in a couple of citizen complaints that spoke of bribes, covert disappearances and favors to local drug traffickers. Muñoz immediately requested access to the historical archive of the State Public Security Directorate.
Dels’ file was incomplete, partially burned during a flood in 1994. Still, one key document survived, a typed sheet with a list of vehicles seized between July and September 1978. Among them was a Chevrolet C10 without license plates, without an identified driver, retained for 4 days and released without a file or responsible signature.

That information changed the course of the investigation. The vehicle had not only been located in 1978, it had also been in the hands of the authorities, albeit fleetingly. Who ordered his release? Why was it not linked to Ramón’s disappearance then? Why did no one report that finding? Prosecutor Muñoz’s team decided to reconstruct the movement of the vehicle during that month.
The truck, according to emerging clues, did not disappear completely. It was detained, manipulated and then deliberately concealed. A systematic cover-up seemed to have been set in motion. The question was, who and why? On September 27, prosecutor Leticia Muñoz called a discreet press conference without cameras or flashy headlines.
The case was too old, too delicate. At that point, it was no longer just a matter of clarifying a disappearance. What was coming to light was a structure of institutional complicity that at the time allowed not only Ramón Herrera to disappear without a trace, but also that his body was deliberately hidden inside a vehicle that in turn was retained and released by the local police without any justification. The working hypothesis began to take shape.
Ramón had not been the victim of a crime of passion or confusion. he had been eliminated for having known too much. Some documents recovered from the judicial archive pointed out that his workshop, although modest, was being used by third parties to modify vehicles that then crossed into Zacatecas and Aguascalientes, loaded with illicit money.

Ramón, probably without knowing it at first, was a technical accomplice. But something changed in August 1978. A letter written by his own mother kept in a parish notebook mentioned that the boy was nervous as if something ugly weighed on his conscience.
Investigators were quick to confirm that Rodolfo del Sid, the former commander linked to the vehicle, had died in 2001 in a car accident on the way to San Luis Potosí. Although he was never formally charged or even investigated, several sources pointed to him as an intermediary between corrupt security elements and emerging criminal groups during the second half of the 1970s.
With him, many answers had been lost. However, the testimony of Rogelio, the former apprentice, provided a new thread. She said that weeks before her disappearance, Ramón had confessed to her that he was thinking of closing the workshop. He told me that he didn’t like the people who came, that they smelled of death and that they wanted silence.
From that sentence, the prosecutors began to study Ramón’s immediate environment. The name that came up was that of Rubén Arteaga, alias el tapatío, an intermediary known in the area for moving troops without traces. Arteaga had been arrested in 1984 for tax evasion, but was released due to lack of evidence.

He died in 1992 of natural causes. Although Arteaga and Dels Sid could no longer be interrogated, the crossing of their names in the records was constant. Both frequented the same bars, shared certain properties under front men and had links to other unsolved cases of the time. The pattern was repeated.
Disappearances, manipulated vehicles, police officers who remained silent. prosecutors who filed. During the final inspection of the truck, a revealing detail was found. Under the scrap upholstery of the right panel of the door was a small rusty metal cross tied with wire wrapped in a scrap of cloth with the initials eh embroidered by hand. Doña Ernestina Herrera was almost certainly an amulet placed by her.
Perhaps at some point when you helped your child in the workshop. That relic was given to Rogelio, who wept silently when he received it. That was hung by his mother. He always told her not to go out without her. The case, although apparently solved, left more questions than certainties.
The motive pointed to a silent execution to protect a money laundering network in which Ramón, apparently, stopped wanting to collaborate. His death then was a warning, the burial of the truck, a symbol of power and silence. The prosecutor’s office issued an official statement closing the case based on the forensic findings, recognizing Ramón Herrera as a victim of intentional homicide and requesting the State Commission of Historical Memory to place a plaque in what was his workshop, today converted into a bank branch. The petition was approved. In the small
laying ceremony, no one in the family survived anymore. Only Rogelio, in a wrinkled suit, remained silent in front of the freshly painted wall. There it was read in bronze letters. Ramón Herrera Hernández, who disappeared in 1978, was found 30 years later. The silence did not erase him. After the discovery of the remains of Ramón Herrera and the buried C10 truck, the Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office activated an investigation parallel to the reopening of the original case, focused not on clarifying a disappearance, but
on unraveling the possible existence of a structured network of complicities between authorities, police forces and economic crime operators during the second half of the 70s. Prosecutor Leticia Muñoz formed a special multidisciplinary team that included criminologists, specialists in historical archives, forensic anthropologists and two deputy prosecutors.

The objective was to reconstruct step by step what happened to Ramón from the last day he was seen alive until the moment when his body ended up hidden in the chassis compartment. One of the first steps was to return to the original file, the same one that had been filed in 1978 with the label of person not located.
That folder, made up of just 12 typed pages, included his mother’s complaint, a couple of contradictory neighborhood statements and an unsigned police report. Beyond that, everything else was omissions. The workshop was not investigated, nor was the young apprentice interviewed, nor was the route to Lagos de Moreno traced.
For Leticia Muñoz, the fact that at no time had a vehicle location warrant been issued was the first serious indication of negligence or cover-up. Rogelio, the apprentice, was formally interrogated under oath. He stated that in the week before his teacher disappeared, two men in gray suits had come to the workshop to demand something from him.

Ramón, as he recalled, went out with them to the back alley and returned pale with trembling hands. That same night, Rogelio heard him murmuring as he closed the workshop. I don’t want to continue in this anymore. No one in 1978 asked him anything. The prosecutor’s office obtained judicial permission to inspect the land where the workshop once stood. The structure had been demolished in the 90s, but the original plans of the premises were preserved.
Under the concrete slab, which now supported a medicine warehouse, three underground storage compartments were discovered, possibly used to store parts or tools. One of them, of unusual dimensions, contained the remains of old tools wrapped in hardened rags, a broken wooden box with inscriptions in Pro i78 running ink and a rusty drum that still contained traces of industrial solvent. But the most disturbing finding was not physical, but documentary. In the General State Archive
, an employee named Edgar Villaseñor found a loose sheet inside a folder labeled Authorized Workshops 19779. The paper signed by Rodolfo of the SID dated August 1978 and authorized the administrative inspection of the Herrera Servimotor workshop for alleged activity unrelated to its registered business. No evidence was ever found that such an inspection had been carried out.
However, on the same sheet appeared the signature of receipt of a certain R. Arteaga, identifiable as Rubén Arteaga, the alleged intermediary of illicit money. The prosecution team then formulated a hypothesis. Ramón Herrera had been forced to modify or hide vehicles linked to washing operations.

When he tried to break out of the scheme or showed signs of repentance, he was eliminated. His truck, an ordinary vehicle, with no visible license plates, no conspicuous external modifications, was chosen as his coffin. To hide it was not only to disappear Ramón, it was to erase the existence of betrayal, of disobedience. To support this hypothesis, more than deductions were needed.
The exhumation of the body of Rodolfo del Sid, who died in 2001, was ordered to obtain a genetic sample that could be compared with the partial fingerprints found in some wads of banknotes. The order was authorized by a district judge. During the exhumation carried out in the Jardines del Recuerdo pantheon, it was discovered that his tomb had been altered. The coffin did not match the registered model and the inner box showed signs of having been replaced. The body, although preserved, did not have hands.
For Muñoz, that was no longer just a case of impunity, it was an organized plot to destroy evidence. The news about Rodolfo’s exhumation from the SID was not leaked to the media, but within the prosecutorial team it caused a silent shudder.
The fact that the body was without hands, that the original box had been replaced and that there was no formal record of this change in the records of the pantheon, activated an institutional alert. Someone had operated on the body years after his burial. Who would have had access? To what end? To erase what trace.
The death certificate indicated that Del Sid died on August 17, 2001, the victim of a car accident while driving in the early hours of the morning on the highway to San Luis Potosí. The vehicle, according to the expert report at the time, had been thrown on a curve crashing into a tree. There were no witnesses or recordings.
The body was taken directly to a private funeral home and buried the next day. The funeral home consulted in 2008 had changed owners. The file of the lost income. One more line of disappearance within another. Leticia Muñoz requested a review of Del Sid’s family environment. His only daughter, a resident of Querétaro, refused to testify.
However, a former domestic worker provided a disturbing piece of information. In 2004, 3 years after the death of the former commander, a group of men dressed in dark suits went to the cemetery accompanied by a government lawyer to carry out a review for legal issues. The woman did not remember the names, but she did remember the time. It was at dawn in secret.
That intervention was not recorded in any official database. Meanwhile, the forensic laboratory managed to recover a partial fingerprint of one of the plasticized rubber bands with which the bills hidden in the truck were tied. The fingerprint, although incomplete, showed patterns coinciding with old records of police personnel.

It was not possible to determine the identity with certainty, but the matching algorithm yielded the first result. Legally insufficient, narratively devastating, authorities began to weave together a broader dossier, a web of omissions, cover-ups, and manipulations that appeared to have operated with total impunity in the Altos Norte region of Jalisco for at least 5 years.
Ramón Herrera, a small mechanic from the provinces, had been a minor piece in a larger machine, but his refusal or his simple discomfort made him a target. It was not necessary for him to speak, it was enough for him to hesitate. Rogelio’s testimony took on even more weight when he recalled that two days before his teacher’s disappearance, Ramón had been visited by a man who was called the engineer. He never knew his real name.
He was wearing a white keychain, driving a bottle-green bocho and asked for the Tuesday order. Ramón replied evasively. That same night he said he was considering closing everything. The engineer did not reappear, but the nickname was tracked down by Muñoz’s team in several files. He appeared linked in 1977 to a case for illicit enrichment against traffic agents.
His name, Gerardo Esquivias Nágera, former technical official of the Jalisco Department of Transportation. He had died in 1995, but his properties were still active in the name of third parties. [Music] A farm in Encarnación de Díaz registered in the name of a shell company was searched by court order on October 9.
In one of its basements, destroyed files, remains of vehicle parts and even a complete set of vehicle license plates from the 70s were found, many of them with adulterated numbers. The search also threw a dusty notebook inside a rusty safe. On the cover it read Ram Hal 0978.
The initials seemed to coincide with Ramón and Jalisco, and the date reinforced the timeline. Inside there were figures, names, routes. Many were crossed out. One of the notes read, “The one with the engine doesn’t want to. He says that he is not going to run anymore for anyone, fix it before the 15th. Ramón disappeared on the 14th. The chronology was narrowing. The indications were no longer suppositions.
There was a pattern of coercion, of subtle warnings, of forced silences. The fix seemed, in that context, not to refer to any mechanical repair. That finding triggered a review of similar cases in the area between 1976 and 1980. At least five disappearances of small businessmen had not been solved. A blacksmith, a tire merchant, a cargo transport driver, an upholsterer and a taxi driver.
All had had contact with vehicles, routes and modifications. They all disappeared without a trace. None were thoroughly investigated. In each of these cases, as in Ramón’s, there was constant administrative silence, police and family omissions that never got answers.

The cumulative impact of the findings forced the State Attorney’s Office to accept that what was coming to light was not an isolated case, but part of a network of dark operations that had operated for years with institutional cover. The figure of Ramón Herrera Hernández acquired in this context an unexpected symbolic weight, not only as a victim, but as a silenced witness of a system that preferred to erase those who doubted rather than face the risk of being exposed.
Prosecutor Leticia Muñoz ordered the centralization of all files related to the disappearances of independent workers between 1975 and 1980. In an attempt to put together a more complete map, one of the most revealing documents emerged from the dead archive of the defunct Guadalajara vehicle directorate.
An official letter dated August 29, 1978, signed by Gerardo Esquivias Náera, the now deceased engineer, authorizing the issuance of five sets of temporary license plates for vehicle inspection field projects. One of these alphanumeric combinations partially matched the sequence found in the buried truck.
It was a clear sign that Ramón’s vehicle had been used as a front for illegal purposes, possibly after his death. At the same time, interviews were reopened with retired former officials, one of them, Salvador Paniagua, former head of sector in Tepatitlán.
Today, at 82 years old and in a wheelchair, he agreed to receive the prosecutorial team at his home. During the conversation he confessed that in 1978 he had received direct orders not to intervene in cases with a mechanical code. That ambiguous phrase seemed to refer to some informal code to refer to workshops involved in special operations. You would shut up young. In those years, those who asked a lot didn’t last,” he said while holding an old notebook where with a trembling pulse he marked with an X the names of colleagues who, like him, were forced to look the other way. That network of institutional silence, built out
of fear, convenience or directly by complicity, made it possible for Ramón’s case to be buried for 30 years. No one signed the inspection of his workshop. No one reported the retention of his truck. No one investigated the registration of the old banknotes.
Everything seemed to have been carefully faded away, but not all of it could be erased. In the final forensic reconstruction of the case, the experts managed to determine the exact position of Ramón’s body inside the chassis compartment. The body had been placed in a fetal shape, with its arms crossed over its chest and its head tilted to the right side. That position was not accidental.
indicated that he had been forced into the vehicle with violence, but also with a thorough knowledge of the vehicle. It was very likely that whoever hid it knew exactly which parts to disassemble, how to distribute the weight to prevent the vehicle from giving away its cargo and how to cover it to withstand years of humidity without collapsing. The body had old fractures compatible with a fall or a blunt blow.
There were no gunshot wounds. In the final report, the cause of death was established as severe head trauma with untreated internal bleeding. The blow, according to estimates, occurred between 8 and 12 hours before the concealment, which implied that Ramón probably agonized before dying in solitude, in silence.
The only belongings found with him was a rusty St. Benedict medal hung from a hemp thread around his neck. That medal was returned to Rogelio, the only one who has arrived alive with direct links. He held it between his fingers for several minutes before putting it in the inside pocket of his jacket. He wore it every day.

He said he protected him. But there are things that not even saints can against. At the same time, the State Human Rights Commission issued an extraordinary pronouncement, recognizing the institutional responsibility for serious omission in the disappearance and cover-up of the case.
It was the first time in the recent history of Jalisco that a forgotten victim of the 70s was officially recognized as such. The media, which at first had barely paid attention to the discovery of the truck, began to cover each advance with more interest. Local television programs interviewed historians, lawyers and specialists in past crimes.
For the first time in decades, there was talk of the possibility of reopening dozens of forgotten cases. Ramón, unwittingly, had become a symbol, a symbol of what happens when a single man refuses to continue pretending. The last stage of the investigation coincided with growing media pressure and strong institutional resistance.
Not everyone within the state apparatus was comfortable with the conclusions that prosecutor Leticia Muñoz’s team was approaching. Some files began to disappear inexplicably. Others, such as the records of the entry of vehicles seized between August and September 1978, were turned over with torn or illegible pages.
The prosecutor, however, did not stop. She resorted to old copies kept by civil associations, notes from local newspapers and interviews with retired former officials, carefully woven to form an indisputable chronology. The final report of more than 600 pages detailed precisely how the network operated.
Small workshops were used as transition points for vehicles loaded with money, weapons or messages. The mechanics, in most cases, were not members of organized crime, but functional pieces subdued by fear, money, oppression. As soon as someone stepped out of the line like Ramón, mechanisms of neutralization, disappearance, intimidation, and murder were activated.
The most chilling thing was that all this happened with the passive or direct participation of elements of the traffic police, municipal officials and, in some cases, subordinate prosecutors. One figure emerged strongly among the documents. Manuel el Tuerto Gudiño, head of vehicle inspections between 1976 and 1981, who had been singled out in at least three citizen complaints for illicit enrichment.
In the files there was a sheet with a list of names and dates. Ramón Herrera’s name appeared next to that of three other disappeared. The blacksmith of Díaz’s incarnation, the upholsterer of Tepatitlán and a driver named Hilario Díaz, last seen in Arandas. The list was titled A mano, sinco. Gudiño was located living in Mazatlán, retired and away from all public office for more than two decades. When he was summoned to testify, he took refuge.
He did not deny knowing Del Sydney, Esquivias Náera. But he claimed not to remember details or names or vehicles. The prosecutor’s office did not have elements to formally charge him, but his name was recorded in the report delivered to the National Search Commission as a key actor in the context of Ramón’s disappearance.
At the same time, the forensic anthropology team reconstructed a three-dimensional model of the compartment, where he wasthe body was found. Using fingerprints and chassis scans, they were able to prove that the cavity had been purposely built with industrial tools. It was not an improvisation. Someone knew exactly what he was doing.
The vehicle was modified to transport the body without the weight altering its normal functioning. There were no signs of fluid leakage or traces on the outside. Everything was designed to disappear without arousing suspicion. A crucial new piece appeared in the final days of the investigation.
A photograph sent anonymously to the physical mailbox of the prosecutor’s office. It showed Ramón’s workshop taken from the street in 1978. In the image you can see his truck parked outside and next to him a man in traffic uniform leaning on the bumper. The image was wrinkled, worn, but the faces of the people were recognizable. It was Rodolfo del Sid.
The photograph was authenticated by an expert. There was no doubt. Del Sid had been in the workshop the same month as the disappearance. That evidence not only reinforced his direct involvement, but also completely denied his alleged ignorance of the case, as always maintained in the official reports. With the delivery of the final report to the State Memory Commission, Leticia Muñoz closed the investigative phase.
He knew that there would be no arrests, that many of the culprits were already dead, that the survivors had learned to hide behind amparos. omissions, legal loopholes, but I also knew that the truth, however fragmented, had come from the earth, from rust, from the rust of a vehicle buried for three decades. The workshop where it all began, now converted into a pharmaceutical distribution center, was secretly visited by Rogelio days before the commemorative plaque was placed.
He walked to the fence, rested his hand on the cold metal, and murmured a prayer. He didn’t ask for justice, he just muttered his master’s name, as if by naming him something he could come back for an instant. What was closed was not a file, it was an old wound, a memory that refused to die.
20 days after having initiated one of the most delicate investigations in the recent history of Jalisco, the case of Ramón Herrera Hernández was officially closed, not for lack of evidence, but for lack of living culprits. There were no prosecutions, no hearings or sentences, but there was a public recognition, an admission of institutional guilt and above all a recovered truth that for 30 years had remained buried underground, rust and silence.
The plaque was placed on Monday, October 20 under gray skies. The ceremony was brief, sober, without cameras or political speeches. Rogelio, in a simple suit, stood in front of the white wall of the old workshop. He held in one hand the rusty medal of St. Benedict, in the other a white carnation.

Prosecutor Leticia Muñoz, present discreetly, watched from a distance. There was no band or ribbon cutting, just a quietly read of the words engraved in bronze. Ramón Herrera Hernández worked here. Disappeared in 1978, found 30 years later. The silence did not erase him.
In San Juan de los Lagos, some elderly people still remembered the quiet man with firm hands who fixed engines without looking at the clock. But for the new generations, Ramón was now a story that was told in schools, in the media, in talks about the past that the country is trying to repair.
A story where the crime was not only to kill, but to make no one ask. The final report of the case was incorporated into the State Archive of Unfinished Crimes. In it, a sentence closes the last paragraph with words that do not seek consolation, but memory. Not all the disappeared were silenced by death. Some spoke from the ground.
Rogelio, when he left, left the flower at the foot of the wall and walked without looking back. He kept the medal no longer as a symbol of protection, but as a relic of resistance. Because although justice does not always arrive as expected, the truth, when it finally emerges, has a weight that no silence can bury. M.