Those who attack and kill foreign nationals are the real criminals
"Please everyone be alert because a plague of child kidnappers has entered the country…It appears that these criminals are involved in organ trafficking...In the past few days, children aged 4, 8 and 14 have disappeared and some of these kids have been found dead with signs that their organs were removed. Their abdomens had been cut open and were empty."
This was part of a WhatsApp text message that circulated around the small town of Acatlán in the central Mexican state of Puebla, in August 2018. The message went on to state that the kidnappers were foreigners driving a van. Just a few hours after the message was circulated among residents of Acatlán, two men, 21-year-old Ricardo Flores and 43-year-old Alberto Flores, who did not live in the small town, were seen inside a van parked not too far from a school.
Ricardo had grown up just outside Acatlán but moved to Xalapa, 250km to the northeast, to study law. Alberto had lived for decades in a small community just outside Acatlán. That day, the two men had gone to Acatlán to buy construction supplies to finish work on a concrete block water well back home. But to the community of Acatlán, they were the foreigners who were kidnapping and killing children. And so, they were confronted and physically assaulted.
The police later arrived at the scene and took the men to the police station, where they were placed in a holding cell for their protection. But the enraged mob managed to scale through the walls of the police station and brought the men out. The beating continued. Soon, someone brought a can of petrol, and it was poured all over both of them as they lay injured and bleeding.
They were set alight. As they burnt to death, scores of people took out their cellphones to record the gruesome scenes. The videos soon went viral. But even before the fire had stopped, the police had confirmed that the two were innocent. Before the week had ended, it would be revealed that the WhatsApp message had been a hoax. Not a single child had been kidnapped or killed in Acatlán. Ricardo and Alberto had been brutally killed for nothing.
A week ago, 43-year-old Mbodazwe Elvis Nyathi was beaten to within an inch of his life and then set alight and killed in Diepsloot. Nyathi and his family, hearing an angry mob knocking at the home of his neighbour demanding identity documents, had tried to hide.
But he was spotted and when he ran out in panic, his fate was sealed. Nyathi’s primal instinct to flee in the face of danger was construed as an admission that he was involved in criminal activities. He was accused of having a gun which they claimed he was using in his commission of crime in the area.
The angry mob was determined to make him suffer, not only because he was allegedly a criminal, but because he was an immigrant from Zimbabwe. And suffer he did. Before his cruel death, he was forced to witness the violent beating of his wife. That, and someone setting him on fire, would be the last images he would ever see.
A gun was never found in Nyathi’s house. It has become clear that he was a man making an honest living as a gardener.
But an angry mob, fuelled by hatred towards foreign nationals, determined to make them pay for the failures of our own government and operating on incorrect information, murdered him. Four children lost their father, the sole breadwinner in the family. Whether Nyathi was in the country illegally, his killers, like those of Ricardo and Alberto, are the real criminals.
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