Justice Sought in Mexican Femicide Cover-Ups
By Kent Paterson
In the balmy winds of late March, a bare lawn
at the New Mexico State University campus in Las Cruces was transformed into a field of hundreds of pink crosses. Adorned
with handmade clothing and pictures to symbolize the murdered women of Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, Mexico, the crosses were
put up by community members and organizers of the Las Cruces-based Friends of Juarez Women as a kickoff to the three-day J.
Paul Taylor Symposium on Social Justice convened to promote justice for the more than 500 women and girls murdered or disappeared
in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City since 1993.
The event came at a strategic crossroads in the justice
movement: While the Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office (PJGE), long charged with investigating the killings, is paying
more attention to murders related to domestic violence and assisting in efforts to locate some missing women and identify
the remains of unidentified corpses, impunity reigns in the cases of scores of raped and slain women.
“It’s true there are 177 guilty sentences
for the nearly 400 murders,” said Guadalupe Morfin, the head of Mexico’s federal Commission for the Prevention
and Elimination of Violence Against Women, in Ciudad Juarez, “but there is still a layer of impunity in emblematic cases
like the cotton field case.”
Choking back tears, Ciudad Juarez resident Malu Garcia
told a crowd of hundreds gathered in a university auditorium how her then-four-year-old daughter was watching cartoons on
television one day in 2001 only to see the corpse of the child’s beloved 17-year-old aunt, Lilia Alejandra Garcia, suddenly
flashed on the screen. The teenager had been brutally tortured, raped and strangled. According to Malu Garcia, the little
girl suffered an emotional shock. Garcia contended that valuable evidence was lost in her sister's case, despite FBI-generated
leads. Subsequently, she said a suspect personally warned her to shut up or suffer a similar fate as her sister.
"I am always going to stand up, not just because
of Alejandra or because I have a daughter," Garcia vowed, "but because I am a woman and as a woman it pains me all that those
women who have suffered, and I don't want this to continue happening in my country…."
NEW LEGAL ROUTES TO JUSTICE
Sadness, frustration and determination fill the voices
of family members of murdered and missing women who have spent years struggling to find justice for their loved ones. Sacrificing
normal lives, many report threats from anonymous intimidators. Denied justice, some family members and their supporters now
seek legal redress in international forums. In frequently emotional testimonies, family members and women’s advocates
spoke in Las Cruces about lines of investigation that implicate members of law enforcement, organized crime and the business
community.
Waving a paper, Eva Arce said she is confident that
the recent decision of the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American
States to accept the case of her long disappeared daughter, Silvia Arce, is a step forward in her struggle. A jewelry and
food saleswoman, Arce's daughter vanished in March 1998 along with a friend, Griselda Mares.
Undertaking an exhaustive investigation, Eva Arce
pinpointed three officers of Mexico’s former Federal Judicial Police as the likely culprits in the disappearances. Arce
said she later tracked one of the men to a jail in Veracruz, but the suspect has not been charged in the disappearance of
Silvia. The IACHR is likely to issue non-binding recommendations to Mexican authorities in the Arce case, which could then
move to the Inter-American Court for Human Rights if officials do not follow the recommendations. Rulings from the Inter-American
Court are obligatory for member states like Mexico.
Arizona State University Professor William
Simmons urged relatives to consider using an old U.S. law, the Alien Tort Claims Act, as a tool for justice. The law allows
foreign nationals to sue officials from their own countries in U.S. federal courts for violations of the law of nations or
U.S. treaties. The act has been successfully used in the United States against officials from Paraguay and other countries.
Focusing on the torture suffered by women like Lilia
Alejandra Garcia, Professor Simmons said the Mexican government is complicit in sanctioning an internationally prohibited
practice by failing to conduct proper investigations. "So I believe there could be a case in federal courts under the Alien
Tort Claims Act," he added.
In the Mexican court system, the parents of Minerva
Torres, an 18-year-old resident of Chihuahua City who disappeared in 2001 and was found dead in 2003, are pursuing criminal
charges against former Governor Patricio Martinez, ex-State Attorney General Jesus "Chito" Solis and other officials for concealing
their daughter's body. For two years Torres’ corpse was stored in state police headquarters without notifying the victim’s
family.
Torres’ body was discovered in July 2003 on
the Cuernos de la Luna Mountain near state police headquarters, only feet away from the spot where the body of another rape
murder victim, Neyra Azucena Cervantes, was recovered two days earlier. Along with Cervantes and Torres, the bodies of 16-year-old
Paloma Angelica Escobar and another unidentified victim were found at separate times in the same burial ground. At least three
of the victims had attended private computer schools in Chihuahua City. “Like in Ciudad Juarez, we’re talking
about a clandestine cemetery,” said attorney Lucha Castro of the Human Rights Center.
Filed months ago, the case against Martinez and company
is currently in the Chihuahua justice system, but the two former high-level officials have yet to render their testimonies
according to Minerva's father, Francisco Torres. “It seems to me there
is no political will to try the ex-governor,” contended Castro.
TORTURE DENOUNCED
Former prisoners, state officials and even Commissioner
Morfin deplored the use of torture to fabricate murder cases against innocent people, including David Meza, imprisoned for
almost three years for the murder of his cousin, Neyra Azucena Cervantes. Leading off the round of denunciations were Cynthia
Kiecker and Ulises Perzabal, who were tortured by members of the old Chihuahua State Judicial Police and falsely accused of
the 2003 murder of 16-year-old Viviana Rayas in Chihuahua City.
U.S. citizen Kiecker described how the musician-artist
couple eventually settled in Chihuahua City, participated in marches against the disappearances of women, and hung a banner
in protest of the Iraq war. One evening in 2003, their lives were forever disrupted when heavily armed Chihuahua state policemen
burst into the couple’s home and dragged them off to torture sessions at the old state police academy. "Like we were
guerrillas," Perzabal said.
Charged with Rayas' murder, Kiecker and Perzabal
were held in prison for 18 months, suffering the razing of their business before a judge declared them innocent. Quickly the
couple relocated to the United States in fear of their lives. "We lost everything we had in Chihuahua: the house, the store
we had, …" Kiecker said. In riveting fashion, Perzabal demanded the immediate freedom of David Meza, whom the couple
met in prison, and the end of torture in Mexico and the world.
Last summer, the PGJE and the Office of the
Federal Attorney General sent personnel to the United States to conduct tests on Kiecker and Perzabal in order to document
the couple’s tortures under the provisions of the Istanbul Protocol, an international agreement meant to document and
punish torture. Almost one year later, the couple hasn’t seen the results of the tests according to Kiecker.
Oscar Maynez, a former PGJE criminologist who resigned
over a 2001 serial-murder case, warned that new, sophisticated forms of torture are emerging. Citing the case of a 2004 Chihuahua
man who was arrested for murdering a woman, Maynez contended that officers planted semen and hair at the crime scene to implicate
the suspect. "It shows how the training, instead of pushing for a more scientific investigation, is just making the torture
more sophisticated," Maynez said.
Commissioner Morfin said the frame-up of innocents
not only victimizes the wrongly accused suspects, but also represents a “latent danger” for women exposed to killers
still on the loose.
One authoritative voice who was scheduled to speak
in Las Cruces was noticeably absent from the symposium: lawyer Sergio Dante Almaraz, the attorney for Victor Garcia Uribe,
one of two bus drivers arrested for the murders of 8 women found in a Ciudad Juarez cotton field in 2001. Garcia, who was
tortured into rendering a false confession for the murders, was eventually acquitted of the crimes and released from prison
last year. Almaraz however was gunned down last January 26, in broad daylight in downtown Ciudad Juarez. At the time of his
murder Almaraz headed up the Convergence Party in Chihuahua state, a member of the opposition coalition running Andres Manuel
Lopez Obrador for president.
Miguel Almaraz, Dante’s brother, charged
in an interview with Frontera NorteSur that both he and his brother were threatened by Chihuahua state law enforcement officials
just days prior to Dante's murder. Ciudad Juarez lawyers, demanding clarification of the murder, have since been threatened
according to Ciudad Juarez television news reports.
Still, Almaraz's voice rang out clear when a videotaped
interview was presented. In the videotape, Almaraz contended that the bodies of the 8 women showed signs of being refrigerated
until they were dumped in the cotton field. Large, somewhat isolated ranches on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez owned by former
policemen and wealthy individuals boast walk-in coolers, Almaraz said.
REDOUBLING THE SEARCH FOR JUSTICE
If justice has been elusive for known murder victims,
it has been next to impossible for unidentified women found killed in both Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City. Victims’
advocates are now trying to put names on the nameless. In 2004, non-governmental organizations were able to bring the world-recognized
Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) onto the scene. Founded in 1984 and composed of expert anthropologists and forensic
specialists, the team has worked in 30 different countries identifying victims of dirty wars and civil conflicts.
In 2005, an agreement was reached between the EAAF
and the PGJE to allow the team to work on identifying the remains of unknown female murder victims in Chihuahua state. Working
with what it thought was an initial set of 60 separate remains from Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City, the team reduced the
number to 55 because specialists determined that body parts had been mixed together in some instances. According to team co-founder
Mercedes Doretti, the work has so far resulted in the identification of 19 victims. DNA samples drawn by the team are being
processed by the Bole Technology Group in Virginia, the company that worked on identifying 9/11 victims.
The forensic team's work hasn't been easy. In addition
to mish-mashes, body parts have been misplaced and files hidden from investigators. Doretti said the team earlier projected
staying in Ciudad Juarez an additional two or three months this year, but is now unsure of the timeline because of the revelation
that mass graves were used to bury unidentified women until as late as last year, not just until 1995 as had been earlier
reported to the Argentines. Doretti said the EAAF will cast a broad investigative
net to determine victims' identities, searching for leads in regions of Mexico and the U.S. southwest known to be the home
bases or destinations of many border migrants.
Doretti said her team’s request for 10 missing
files prompted the intervention of the PGJE's internal affairs division, which located the records, reportedly archived in
the same PGJE department once headed by fugitive Hector Armando Lastra. The former head of preliminary investigations for
the PGJE in Ciudad Juarez, Lastra is wanted for running a prostitution ring of underage teenagers who shared the profile of
previous rape-murder victims.
In February 2004, Commissioner Morfin’s office
helped one of the minors file a legal complaint against Lastra with the PGJE’s Office of the Special Prosecutor for
Women’s Homicides in Ciudad Juarez, then headed by Angela Talavera. In 2004, Talavera was named by Maria Lopez Urbina,
the ex-federal special prosecutor for women’s homicides, as among of scores of former and current PGJE officials allegedly
responsible for derelictions of duty. According to press accounts, Chihuahua
state judges Catalina Ruiz Pacheco and Armando Jimenez Santoyo later cleared Talavera of any legal wrongdoing.
Evading justice, the Lastra ring catered to
a network of "powerful individuals" and businessmen,” according to Commissioner Morfin. "We continue demanding a thorough
investigation of this case,” she said.
Meanwhile, families and supporters of the women’s
justice movement are moving forward with a variety of campaigns. They include promoting postcard campaigns to President Vicente
Fox; urging the full passage of U.S. Congressional resolutions jointly sponsored by Rep. Hilda Solis (D-California) and Sen.
Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) that request the placement of the women's murders on the official U.S.-Mexico binational agenda; and
following up on the New Mexico Senate memorial approved in support of the women of Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City last year.
Kristel Mucino, the Mexico program assistant for
the non-profit Washington Office on Latin America, said both the Mexican and U.S. governments must redouble their efforts
to curb the violence against women. Mucino recalled how one woman stood up during the symposium to point out how a binational
commission between the U.S. and Mexico exists to investigate stolen cars, but nothing similar exists for the women's issue.
"Everybody wanted more U.S. involvement," Mucino
said. "(Victims’ relatives) distrust the Mexican government so much, they want more U.S. involvement." The Latin American
women's advocate added that "Mexico needs to keep investigating the murders … and hold accountable those in government
to investigate and prosecute these cases."
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Frontera NorteSur (FNS)
Center for Latin American
and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico
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Kent Paterson is editor of Frontera NorteSur, a free,
on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news source. Reprinted with authorization from Frontera NorteSur. FNS can be found at http://frontera.nmsu.edu/.
