The House of D e a t h

Not all times do you fall in love at first sight and eventually become 2 lovely life partners. Only the ones who’ve experienced it knows the beauty in it. Its not that you fall in love with anyone beautiful you see ; like some still think. Its something that is decided up above there , by the Gods , to join two lovely souls and bond them for eternity. Well, that was how Luis Padilla and Janet Padilla fell in love and decided to continue it for eternity, when they married in 1996 after 2 years of dating at school , when Janet was still 16.
Both had attended Socorro high school in El Paso and lived in the US from childhood. Both remained Mexican citizens, ( resident aliens ) with green-card work permits.
Life was heaven for the padillas till Jan 14th 2004, when everything they ever knew changed forever.
It was a bright sunny day, as Luis had, as usual, left for work at 6am. Janet had called her husband in the morning after taking the children to school. When he did not answer the first call Janet made, she assumed he was busy. A mysterious feeling crept in her that something might have gone wrong when she again called her husband a couple of times at lunch.
So she called her dad, who owns the truckyard where he worked and he told her, "He hasn't been here". She then called her in-laws and they hadn't seen him either, and they were already worried because his car was outside their house with the windows open and the keys in the ignition. Janet knew he would never normally leave it like that.
By 4pm, Janet was on the point of calling up El Paso (Texas) police when she received a call from a friend in Juarez. Her friend told her, "I've just seen Luis over here. He was with some cops - they were putting him in a truck".
Janet couldn't figure out why he was in Mexico at all. At 8 o'clock she couldn't stand it any longer and so she went over there by herself. She went to all the different police stations. Nobody had him. Nobody knew where he was.
Two weeks later on 26th January, Janet got a call from the Juarez police. Juarez police told her they had found some bodies. She was to meet them at the city mortuary.
Janet – “I went in there and they had four bodies at that time. There were still ropes around their heads and their eyes were sticking out because they had been suffocated. It was horrible, horrible. “
Janet still did not believe this could have anything to do with Luis. “He never took drugs and he never drank, beyond the odd beer. He never got into fights. He was still really into the church and he'd just been asked to coach middle-school sports. How all this ? “
The police phoned again. This time they asked her to meet them at 3633 Calle Parsonieros. The place looked familiar. It was the hotel where they spent their honeymoon night .
This was the moment she came to know the truth, which literally ripped her soul within.
”I saw his shoes and his jacket. I went into the garden and they were probing the ground with a pole. That's when they found his body.” The police exhumed him, “but it was hard to ID him because he was so decomposed. I looked at his hands and touched them. The flesh fell off.” Tears came pouring by when she uttered the final words .
Luis Padilla, 29, had been kidnapped, driven across the Mexican border from El Paso, Texas, to a house in Ciudad Juarez, the lawless city ruled by drug lords that lies across the Rio Grande. As his wife tried frantically to locate him, he was being stripped, tortured and buried in a mass grave in the garden - what the people of Juarez call a narco-fossa, a narco-smugglers' tomb or the “H o u s e o f D e a t h”.

The Gruesome truth :
His murder, along with at least 11 further brutal killings, at the Juarez 'House of Death', is part of a gruesome scandal, a web of connivance and cover-up that has its roots spread right upto the top government officials.
The story turns on one extraordinary fact of an US government informant, Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, known as Lalo, who was paid more than $220,000 by US law enforcement bodies to work as a spy inside the Juarez cartel. (Mexican drug trafficking organization)

In February 2000, Lalo began supplying information to ICE (then known as US Customs) but also the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, & the Firearms and Tobacco after which he was recruited back by Santillan, a man notorious for acts of savage violence.
In August 2003 Lalo had his first involvement in the Juarez Cartel’s activities in the murder of the Mexican lawyer Fernando Reyes, which also involved two policemen. Lalo secretly recorded this with the help of a wiring provided by the ICE (U.S Customs).
In the days after Reyes's death, officials in Texas and Washington held a series of meetings. Finally word came back from headquarters - despite the risk that Lalo might become involved with further murders, Ice could continue to use and pay him as an informant.
From there on, the garden of the house at 3633 Calle Parsonieros began to fill in with 12 bodies , all witnessed by Lalo. Throughout the period, Lalo says, he continued to talk to his handler up to four times a day - usually in person, their office. He says his meetings with Santillan were all covertly recorded with the help of ICE’s wiring.
Ice got Lalo to arrange a meeting with Santillan in El Paso and on 15 January, 2004, he was arrested.
Two days later, ICE finally revealed that the garden at 3633 Calle Parsonieros was a mass grave. After bureaucratic delays, digging began on 23 January. On 18 February, Santillan was charged for trafficking and five murders - including those of Reyes and Padilla.
On 19th April, the Attorney announced a deal with Santillan - in return for his pleading guilty to trafficking and his acceptance of a 25-year sentence, the murder charges were dropped.
Now no one had any further use for Lalo. ICE, the agency that had cherished him, decided that his US visa was irregular and began legal proceedings to deport him to Mexico - without doubt a death sentence. He is now in a maximum-security jail.
Two other men had been murdered on 14th January, both of them from Juarez. Santillan had told Lalo,” I was asked to kill them as a favour for some associates of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes (Drug Lord). I have nothing against them personally. In some circumstances, murderers can make mistakes”.

Janet smiles at the memory: “I liked everything about Luis straight away. He was silly, funny, a popular guy; he played a lot of sports. He was very religious and I started going to the same church, where he was president of the youth section. For our first date he took me to a Mexican restaurant, and then a children's park. We just sat there on the swings, talking as if we'd known each other for years. “
For the three children who lost their father, and their mother, now struggling to make ends meet, it is difficult to cope. “It's worst at night, when I put them to bed,” Janet Padilla says. “I guess that's when it hits them. I tell them, ‘come on you guys, we got to make a prayer. Don't worry. Your daddy's watching you always.’ But you know, it's very hard to make it as a dad as well as a mom. I miss him a lot” :(

It is said that even now a lot of people disappear in Juarez and you never know what happened to them................................................................................

Let's pray to God, for all their souls to rest in p e a c e .

Trivia :
Mexico has the second-highest number of kidnappings in the world .