The First Criminal Court based in Pachuca, in the state of Hidalgo, issued this Tuesday the order of formal imprisonment against Hector Luis Palma Salazar, alias el Güero Palma, for being presumably responsible for the qualified homicide of the jurist Juan Pablo de Tavira Noriega, father of Mexican actress Marina de Tavira, who was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in the film Roma.
With this determination by the judge, Güero Palma will be prosecuted for allegedly having ordered the murder of Juan Pablo de Tavira, in events that occurred in November 2000, inside a restaurant located in the University Extension Center of the Autonomous University of the state of Hidalgo, informed HIGH LEVEL a spokesperson for that entity’s Attorney General’s Office.
The accusation against the capo by the Hidalguense Public Ministry was formulated on May 22, with the support of the Attorney General of the Republic (FGR), but it was not until this Tuesday when the First Criminal Court determined the legal situation of Palma Salazar, who must remain confined in the maximum security Altiplano Prison, in the State of Mexico, throughout this process.
The spokesman for the Hidalgo Attorney General’s Office explained that in the next nine months the period of investigation of the criminal process against Güero Palma will be carried out, it is the first stage before the prosecution within the previous criminal system that governed in Mexico, which does not include oral trials.
Héctor Luis Palma Salazar cannot be tried in this case with the current penal systembecause in the year 2000, when he allegedly ordered the murder of Juan Pablo de Tavira, criminal procedures in Mexico had not yet been reformed, which occurred in 2008.
According to the person in charge of the office of the Hidalgo Attorney General’s Office, Santiago Nieto Castillo Palma Salazar and Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias “El Chapo” Guzmán, ordered the murder of Juan Pablo de Tavira in revenge for the treatment given to both criminals in the Altiplano Prison, when the lawyer was its director.
The Hidalgo Prosecutor’s Office “will not rest until a conviction is obtained for these events, and in doing justice for the victim’s family,” said Nieto Castillo, former head of the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), in an editorial published in the newspaper El Universal.
At the same time, the drug trafficker will also face another process in a Court of the state of Jalisco, an instance in which he is accused of allegedly being the mastermind of the murder of Juan Castillo Alonso, deputy director of the Federal Center for Social Imprisonment number 2, now defunct, located in Puente Grande, Jalisco.
Both proceedings before the criminal courts of the states of Hidalgo and Jalisco do not warrant that Palma Salazar be transferred to said entities, Firstly, because these do not have maximum security prisons that can house the defendant, and in a safe place, because the trials will be carried out with the help of Courts that are based in the Altiplano.
In this sense, the president of the Supreme Court of Justice of Jalisco, Daniel Espinoza Licón, told the press that “the possibility of Güero Palma being changed prison is ruled out”, because in this entity there is a lack of “a confinement that meets the characteristics to have a personality” like that of the drug trafficker.
Juan Pablo de Tavira, father of actress Marina de Tavira, was killed by a man, unknown to this day, who shot him four times in the head. The jurist was also the founder of the Altiplano Prison, the first maximum security prison to be built in the country.
With these two processes already formally initiated against Héctor Luis Palma Salazar, the freedom that the capo had obtained -on May 10- is suspended indefinitely because, although he was acquitted by a federal court of the crime of organized crime, he must remain in prison until it is proven whether or not he is responsible for the two homicides of which he is now accused.
Güero Palma was fortuitously detained in June 1995, in the vicinity of the states of Jalisco and Nayarit, after the crash of the plane in which he was traveling. In 2007 he was extradited to the United States, where he was sentenced to 16 years in prison for drug trafficking and organized crime, although he was released for good conduct in 2016.
After his return to Mexico, the former Attorney General of the Republic accused him of organized crime, in the form of crimes against health. This was the last federal offense against him, and of which he has already been acquitted twice, the first in April 2021, and the second on May 10.
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surya palaces Journalist and lawyer, specialist in legal analysis and human rights. She has been a reporter, radio host and editor.