The family of Pablo Osorio Sánchez is calling on federal authorities in Mexico to link the killing of the 26-year-old engineer with the ongoing investigation into the January kidnapping of 10 Canadian mining firm workers.
Osorio Sánchez was kidnapped in the same town and around the same time that armed men seized the Vizsla Silver Corp. employees and contractors. His body was buried in the same clandestine graves where federal authorities located nine of the 10 kidnapped workers.
The family believes the facts around the Vizsla Silver kidnappings could also reveal the truth behind Osorio Sánchez’s fate.
“We want answers, we need them to explain to us who kidnapped him, for what reason. Who were they? We have so many questions and so few answers,” said Jaime López, Osorio Sánchez’s uncle, in a phone interview with CBC News from Florida.
Between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. on Jan. 23, armed men, allegedly aligned with a Sinaloa cartel faction, stormed a gated compound in Concordia, Sinaloa, called La Clementina where Vizsla Silver housed its workers and parked some of its vehicles.
Around 7:30 that same morning, Osorio Sánchez walked from his residence in Concordia, a municipality roughly 50 kilometres east of the Pacific Coast city of Mazatlan, to a bus stop. He called his girlfriend while waiting for his regular weekday ride to his worksite at a highway tunnel several kilometres to the east.
During the phone conversation, his partner suddenly heard male voices. One said, “We can fix this.” Then the line went dead. That was the last time she ever spoke to him, according to family testimony and filings from the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
‘Indicio C’
Federal authorities located the body of Osorio Sánchez, originally from Taxiaco, Oaxaca, about two weeks later. He was buried at a depth of two metres along with an unknown number of other bodies in one of at least two unmarked, clandestine graves dug into an open field in El Verde, a village about 19 km northwest of Concordia.
Authorities identified the spot where Osorio Sánchez was found as “fosa 2,” or Grave 2, according to investigative records obtained by CBC News. They wrapped Osorio Sánchez’s body in a blue surgical sheet and tagged his body bag with the label “Indicio C” to identify it among the other bodies found in the same area on Feb. 6.
Post-mortem examinations determined he died from a gunshot wound to the upper right side of the head and that his body suffered severe blunt-force trauma before his death. A suspected bullet wound was also found on his right jaw, with no exit point.
“We are destroyed, mentally, because this is a very big loss for us,” said López.
Osorio Sánchez was the oldest of three brothers.
The El Verde gravesites also included the remains of nine of the 10 men kidnapped from the Vizsla Silver compound. Some of the other bodies were found with similar signs of blunt-force trauma with gunshot wounds to the head, according to information obtained by CBC News.
The whereabouts of the 10th kidnapped Vizsla Silver worker, Francisco Antonio Esparza Yáñez, who was responsible for community relations, remains unknown.
Maurillo Santiago, a lead lawyer with the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Council for Indigenous Peoples in Oaxaca, said separate branches of the federal Attorney General’s Office are handling Osorio Sánchez’s case and the Vizsla Silver workers investigation.
Santiago, who is representing the family, said that investigators with the forced disappearances unit are managing Osorio Sánchez’s case, while the organized crime branch holds the Vizsla Silver file.
The Attorney General’s Office did not respond to a CBC News request for comment.
‘A gap that we can’t cross’
Yetzy Santiago Lorenzo, a lawyer with the same human rights group that’s also handling the case, said there are still outstanding questions around how the clandestine graves were found, who found them and who was buried alongside Osorio Sánchez.
She said it remains unclear whether it was federal and state authorities that found the graves in El Verde or civilian collectives that search for disappeared persons.
“There is a strange secrecy around this, because the moment the graves were found, federal authorities, the Attorney General’s office, took over and guarded the area,” said Santiago Lorenzo.
“Why does the Attorney General’s Office separate Pablo’s investigation from the group? There is a space, a gap that we can’t cross yet.”
Osorio Sánchez and the Vizsla Silver workers were kidnapped and killed amid a more than two-year-long civil war within the Sinaloa cartel between La Chapiza, those still loyal to the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, and La Mayiza, those loyal to the son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambado, who once co-led the Sinaloa cartel with El Chapo.
The civil war, which has left thousands of people dead and disappeared across the state, flared after one of El Chapo’s sons lured El Mayo to a July 2024 meeting on the outskirts of the Sinaloan capital of Culiacan to have him kidnapped and turned over to U.S. authorities.
Mexican federal authorities have said a cell linked to the La Chapiza faction was responsible for the kidnapping and killings of Vizsla Silver’s workers.
In June, a local, La Chapiza-aligned boss named Gabriel Nicolás “El Gabito, El 80” Martínez Larios was arrested in connection with the Vizsla Silver kidnapping. This month, federal authorities announced the arrests of Angel Gabriel, known as “El Tronco,” and Milton Yair, along with 11 other people, including two minors, who were part of the La Chapiza cell linked to the case.
Gabriel and Yair were reportedly members of a La Chapiza commando unit known as Los Menores.
In the middle of conflict territory
A July report from International Crisis Group on the civil war said hundreds of families fled the Concordia region in September 2024 as the conflict exploded and La Mayiza gunmen “dislodged the local strongman” affiliated with La Chapiza.
Vizsla Silver’s exploration operations are in the middle of this conflict territory. The Canadian mining firm is conducting exploration work across 35,000 hectares in a remote and mountainous area as part of its flagship Panuco Project, roughly 25 km east of Concordia’s urban centre.
“Dozens [of families] have since returned … Many services, however, are now controlled by [La Mayiza], including public transport,” said the report.
The deaths, violence and chaos of the conflict in Sinaloa have likely played a role in the decision by federal authorities to treat Osorio Sánchez’s case differently from that of the Vizsla Silver workers, which received widespread coverage, said Mexico City lawyer Cesar Gutiérrez Priego, a specialist in national security and military affairs.
“That has created enormous legal uncertainty and problems. No matter how hard the federal government tries to show results, the reality is that Pablo’s case, for example, is just one more among many that keep piling up,” he said.
“It isn’t a priority for the media or authorities. They simply haven’t placed the necessary emphasis on conducting the investigation as it should be done.”
Gutiérrez Priego said the family’s lawyers should petition a federal judge to join the cases.
Santiago Lorenzo said that at the moment, they are focused on convincing the Attorney General’s Office to add the case to the one involving the Vizsla Silver workers before making any applications to the court.
The wait for answers weighs heavily on Osorio Sánchez’s family.
“I call on the Mexican authorities not to let this become normalized,” said Lopez.
“There are many young people, students, who want to become engineers, too, and it would be sad if [their careers] ended in the same way.”
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