Mexico mourns young footballer shot dead as outrage grows over police abuse

Sobbing down the telephone line from her home in rural Oaxaca state, Virginia Gómez remembered her 16-year-old son Alexander as a healthy youngster, who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink – and dreamed of playing football for Mexico.

“His only vice was playing football,” she said.

That dream was cut short this week, when Alexander Martínez Gómez, 16, was shot and killed by police in the village of Vicente Camalote. Officers opened fire from a passing patrol car.

The death of the US-born semi-professional footballer has prompted outrage in Mexico, where such cases often go unremarked. Security forces in the country are routinely accused of violence and incompetence – but against a global backdrop of protest, incidents of police brutality are coming under scrutiny as never before.

Demonstrations are planned for Saturday in Alexander’s home town of Acatlán de Pérez Figueroa, 350km south-east of Mexico City, where in the aftermath of the shooting, locals described rampant police abuse and a climate of fear.

Earlier this month, protests erupted in western Jalisco state after construction worker Giovanni López, 33, died in police custody. The state human rights commission concluded on Thursday that he was tortured, beaten and then killed in an extrajudicial execution.

Eighty people heading for a demonstration over López’s murder were themselves abducted by plain-clothed investigative police, beaten, robbed of their money and mobiles and dumped on the outskirts of town.

“This sort of thing has always happened here – this aggression from the police toward young people, toward the locals,” said Monce Gómez, Alexander’s aunt.

“It used to be a quiet place,” she added. “But things have changed in recent years. They’re killing kids, killing young people. They’ve killed women, killed people by mistake, killed others because they were wrongly blamed.”

The exact details of Alexander’s death remain uncertain, but family members say he went out with friends on Tuesday night to buy soda from a nearby gas station.

Alexander was riding on a motorcycle, and was struck in the head with a bullet and died at the scene. A 15-year-old friend was also wounded in the attack.

The local government described the killing as a regrettable mistake, and one police officer involved has been taken in for questioning.

Oaxaca state prosecutor Rubén Vasconcelos said: “A shot was fired directly at nine youths who were riding on motorcycles, and since [Alexander] was at the front of the group of people, he died immediately.”

According to Virginia Gómez, other local officers have gone in to hiding, but none, she claimed, had apologized for the “lies” they told in the immediate aftermath.

“They said my son was carrying a weapon, that he shot himself. There are lots of lies,” she said. “I want the culprits behind bars. I want justice. I want them to pay.”

Alexander and his older brother Alexis, 19, were both born in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the family had moved in search of better economic opportunities than those offered by the sugar-cane fields of northern Oaxaca.

In the US, the boys’ father Teodoro Martínez found work in landscaping, and the family was able to build a small home painted yellow and shaded by trees back in Mexico.

But after a few years, the parents split up, and Virginia Gómez and the two boys moved back to Mexico in 2008. At the time Gómez thought that life in rural Mexico would be safer than in the US – but the security situation soon started to deteriorate.

Alexis eventually moved back to the United States, but Alexander had other plans.

“He wanted to stay in Mexico to follow his dream of being a football player and playing for Mexico,” his mother said. “Everything was going well and his dream was coming true.”

“Chander” – as he was called – received a scholarship to attend college in neighbouring Veracruz state, where he played professionally with a third division club Rayados de Tierra Blanca, an affiliate of top team Monterrey.

On Thursday, he was buried after a funeral in the hamlet of Vicente Camalote on the pitch where he had honed his skills.

His teammates honoured their friend by allowing him to score a final goal. A team-mate passed the ball toward Chander’s coffin – and it deflected into the net.

The team of teenagers then piled onto the coffin for a final embrace as the crowd cheered. After the applause had died away, they stayed there, sobbing.

With reporting from José Luis González Hernández in Acatlán de Pérez Figueroa