High level officials of the Office of Public Security and of the State Judiciary of Guanajuato put together a protection team to meet the safety issues that concern the federal crime judges in the state, after the murder of federal judge, Vicente Antonio Bermúdez Zacarías, in Metepec last Monday.
Judge Bermúdez was born in León, Guanajuato, and his murder has brought light on the risks federal judges face when having to rule on organized crime sentences like kidnapping, which is punished from sixty to one hundred years of prison.
The protection team will be created after the president of the State Supreme Court of Justice, Miguel Valadez Reyes, expressed his concern in relation to the safety measures required by federal judges who currently address delicate procedures linked with organized crime and who “have been specifically targeted”, he added that: “the protection team and its resulting efforts would have to be treated with utmost confidentiality to preserve the federal judge’s safety”.
“The request is to provide specialized police protection in the most sensitive cases and to allow federal judges to travel in armored vehicles when having to go to hearings in inconvenient schedules”, he concluded.