A Young Life Cut Short...Arturo Jose Iniguez's Promise Snuffed Out In God-Awful Matamoros, Mexico...Questions Abound...

By PATRICK ALCATRAZ
Editor

HARLINGEN, Texas - Stress, it is said, can force a strong-willed man to his knees. America's hurry-up society applies its pressures from all angles, family and job included. It is not rare to see seemingly smart people do the unthinkable, like commit suicide.

That, for now, is what some believe brought an end to 26-year-old Arturo Jose Iniguez's life this past weekend. But who knows? His strange death in Matamoros has a wagonload of unanswered questions - enough to float a hundred episodes of Law & Order. The young assistant district attorney working misdeamenor cases for Cameron County D.A. Armando Villalobos had much to live for, his parents, his wife and his very young daughter. Yet, he is dead.

And Villalobos, the employer who likely knows more about what happened than he has let on, is being coy about the stunning death. Initially, he issued a vague statement about the death, not noting anything specific, but indicating that Iniguez had met his end across the Rio Grande from Brownsville. Then came word from his grieving mother that he had died in a car accident; that only to be followed by Villalobos releasing additional info related to the finding of animal sedatives at the scene of Iniguez's last day on Earth.

Autopsies are forthcoming and it won't be until then that a cause of death will be established.

It strikes me that a grown man interested in killing himself would likely go after other narcotics that would do the job. Animal sedatives? That has to be as rare as someone wanting to use a weapon to kill themselves to reach for a machine gun. Plus, animal sedatives are for animals, presumably much stronger than those used by Human Beings.

We won't go silly speculating, but this has the feel of a murder, the sedatives being there only after someone planted them in the car and conveniently tossed the container just outside Iniguez's vehicle. But, then, that would feed another line of thought - that the young lawyer met foul play, something Villalobos says is not part of his thinking. So, you grab the pills from the animal sedative bottle and push them into your mouth and then toss the bottle outside? Nah, that's not believable. Villalobos says the container's lid was found inside the car, so why not the container? If Iniguez was after suicice, he'd want to do it in silence. A tossed container would have made noise and likely brought attention he'd not want.

"We are not aware of any stress factors outside of the common expected factors of being employed in a high volume work environment, married life, raising children, and starting a career with enormous school debt," the district attorney said in his press release.

That last part is odd. There are millions of Americans who paid for college with student loans. Not many of then are killing themselves. Plus, we're sure Iniguez was being well-paid and had a future that would have allowed him to seek - and get - bank loans to pay-off his debt. You just don't off yourself at age 26 over a few bills. Hell, that's a good age to be, an age when you've set sail a career and fully believe things will only get better with every year of experience you get under your belt.

So, no, we do not believe Iniguez killed himself.

A plethora of other possibilities do surface, including the unthinkable that could come from errant relationships, with loose women or hard men. It happens too often along the Texas-Mexico border, to bad and good people. We only hope that D.A. Villalobos is faithful to the truth.

The press is not his concern, and shouldn't be, but the young lawyer's surviving family needs facts, not the obscene posturing of an aspiring politician...

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