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 Editorials | At Issue | September 2005 
Mexican Courts Lacking Justice
 Ginger Thompson - NYTimes
Victor Javier Garcia still has a dozen marks across his abdomen and genitals from the burning cigarettes the police used to torture him into falsely confessing to being a serial killer.
It made no difference to a lower court judge that the DNA tests on the bodies identified as his victims did not match the names of the women he was accused of killing. Or that a forensics expert testified that he had been ordered by his superiors to plant false evidence. Or even that witnesses retracted their testimony, saying the police had threatened them into making false statements.
Garcia was sentenced to 50 years anyway.
The State Supreme Court of Chihuahua threw the case out in June and set Garcia free, but only after three and a half years in prison during which he lost his business, his savings and his wife to another man.
Troubling as it is, Garcia's case is not an isolated one. International observers, human rights workers and federal authorities say it illustrates a disturbing pattern of malfeasance by state law enforcement authorities responsible for investigating Mexico's most gruesome murder mystery: the deaths of more than 350 women in this border area over the last decade, including at least 90 raped and killed in similar ways.
Whether through incompetence, corruption or a lurid connection to the killings, the bungling and cover-ups are so extensive, federal investigators say, that the police and other officials have themselves become suspected of links to the crimes.
"Why did the authorities go to such lengths to fabricate cases?" said Guadalupe Morfin, President Vicente Fox's special envoy to Ciudad Juarez.
Senior officials appointed by Fox two years ago to review the cases have charged that state authorities deliberately failed to do thier jobs.
played down killings, failed to start searches for missing women in time to rescue them, covered up or falsified crucial evidence, and tortured suspects into confessions.
Their actions, the officials said, were meant not only to fend off a public relations nightmare as international pressure grew, but also to protect those many suspect of actually being behind the killings, including corrupt police officials, powerful drug traffickers and other organized gangs. |
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