| | |  Editorials | Issues 
Mom Fights Mexico's Injustice System
 Dudley Althaus - San Antonio Express-News
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April 21, 2010
| | The spot where the bodies of Irma Monreal's daughter, Esmeralda, and seven other teens were found is marked by crosses. (Julian Cardona/Houston Chronicle) | |
Ciudad Juárez, Mexico — From her mountainside neighborhood of dirt streets and cramped concrete houses, Irma Monreal can scan the sparkling lights of the city beyond.
Monreal arrived penniless to this city across from El Paso, toiling in its industrial bowels for 20 years. She scratched out a new life for herself and seven children. But that life now shoulders an unquenchable pain.
Tucked amid the lights below, an irrigation ditch slices bone-dry through a fallow cotton field. Three pink wooden crosses cling to the trench's weed-choked lip. They mark the spots where searchers recovered the defiled bodies of eight teenage girls and young women.
One of those girls was Monreal's daughter, Esmeralda, 15.
Tortured and murdered in 2001, Esmeralda is among the nearly 500 teenagers and young women — factory workers, shop clerks, prostitutes — who have been killed here since 1993. Hundreds more have vanished.
For years, Mexican authorities have promised an end to the slaughter and the disappearances. The killings have been the topic of movies, books, countless articles and protest marches.
Under intense public pressure, police have investigated and arrested some suspects.
But planted or trampled evidence and ever-shifting conspiracy theories have ruined many police cases. Some of the men arrested were framed outright or tortured into confessions, according to records reviewed by the Houston Chronicle.
Since January, about 50 more girls and young women have been killed in Juárez, according to estimates, and nearly 100 have gone missing in the past two years.
Some of the women were forced into sex trafficking rings or prostitution; others were kidnapped and sexually assaulted. In some cases, the killers were lovers or husbands.
The violence against women is fed by the same lawlessness that pervades the city as a whole. The cartels' drug-fueled wars have raised daily body counts to double digits.
“How many years has this been going on? Why didn't they change the way they investigate everything?” asks Monreal, 49, whose daughter Esmeralda was raped, tortured and murdered, her mutilated body discarded in a cotton field along with those of seven other young women.
Barely a month passes without the discovery of another body.
With the odds of justice all but nil, few survivors press for vengeance. But Monreal did.
Enraged by shoddy investigations, Monreal and the mothers of the two girls found alongside Esmeralda pressed their case all the way to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica, a body to which the Mexican and most hemispheric governments are subject.
In a harshly worded judgment, the court in December found Mexico's state and federal governments woefully negligent in preventing violence against Juárez's women and in not seriously investigating the cotton field crimes.
After reviewing hundreds of pages of records, justices ruled that state and federal officials' disinterest in pursuing justice for the murders appears to have permitted the perpetuation of the violence against the women.
That attitude, one justice wrote, violated the government's obligation “to establish general policies of public order that protect the population from criminal violence.”
The court ordered the Chihuahua state government by year's end to reopen investigations into the cotton field and other murders, to find and punish officials who botched the cases in the past and to build a monument to Juárez's murdered women.
Critics of the government applaud the court's sentence as a damning assessment of a Mexican justice system in which they say most crimes go unpunished. And for the first time, the court opened to public scrutiny claims that the government was indifferent to reports woman had gone missing and did not take measures “to find the victims alive.”
Chihuahua Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez argues, however, that most of the more brazen cases of women's killings in Juárez took place under previous state administrations — and most of the investigative wrongs have since been righted.
Scores of investigators and prosecutors have been fired or prosecuted for negligence or abuses regarding the cases, Gonzalez told the Chronicle in an e-mail in reference to the court's ruling. Methods of investigation have dramatically improved, she said.
Prosecutors over the past five years have won 117 murder convictions, some from the 1990s and early 2000s, she said, and two-thirds of the cases have been solved.
“The detection, filing and development of reports of violence have been improved,” Gonzalez said. “The state has given protection to victims of violence as well as economic and psychological support.”
Many don't believe it.
“We rebuild the system or nothing will improve,” said Alicia Elena Perez, who served two years as the federal government's special prosecutor for crimes against women before resigning in frustration in 2007. “Our culture in general is one of abuse of power. Violence against women is just part of this dynamic.”
Perez and others said the same legal failings — which they say could have been fixed in pursuing justice for murdered women — have nourished the gangland epidemic ripping through much of Mexico.
“The lack of law is feeding the violence,” said Oscar Maynez, 44, a former Ciudad Juárez criminologist who resigned when pressured to plant evidence on the two men arrested in the murders of Esmeralda and others.
“Ciudad Juárez is a warning of what is going to happen, what is already happening, all over Mexico,” Maynez said. “The corruption, the impunity, is what feeds the violence — not the other way around.”
Irma Monreal was working the 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. shift at a factory on the day her daughter was taken. Esmeralda, who had just started a job cleaning houses, hadn't come home by the time her mother left for work. She still wasn't home when Monreal returned the next morning.
“I knew immediately that something was wrong and went to the police,” Monreal said. “They told me to bring them evidence that something had happened to her. They told me she had probably gone off with a boy.”
Esmeralda's partly nude body, with her hands tied behind her back, was found in the cotton field's irrigation ditch eight days later, along with those of the two other women. Her body had been mutilated and was badly decomposed.
The Inter-American Court found Esmeralda and the two other girls had disappeared separately and had been held in captivity before being murdered. All three likely were raped and tortured by their captors for an unknown number of days, the court said.
“The treatment they experienced during the time they remained kidnapped before their death caused them, at the very least, severe mental suffering,” the court stated in its ruling, adding that Mexican officials deprived Esmeralda and the others of “the rights to life, personal integrity and personal liberty.”
Encouraged not to view Esmeralda's body, Monreal identified her daughter by the clothes police said she was wearing, including her socks. But even as she buried her daughter, positive identification had not been conclusive — not until four years later, when an Argentine forensics crew confirmed the murdered girl's identity with DNA testing.
The mutilated body of Laura Berenice Ramos, 17, a third-year high school student, also was found that day; she hadn't been heard from since calling a friend to say she was heading to a Saturday night party.
The third woman was Claudia Ivette Gonzalez, 20, who on the day she vanished had been sent home from her factory job after arriving two minutes late. She had been tortured too.
Soon, searchers recovered the remains of five more women in another corner of the field. They had been dead much longer.
Within three days of the discovery of Esmeralda and the two other bodies, police charged two bus drivers in the crimes. The men later claimed to have been tortured into confessing.
One of the drivers died in prison. The other was released after a Supreme Court in Chihuahua revoked his conviction, calling it “arbitrary” and suggesting the confessions were coerced.
Another man, a Juárez street gang member who had migrated illegally to Denver, was arrested in 2006 and charged with some of the killings. He remains in prison, but David Peña, one of the lawyers who represented the mothers before the Inter-American Court, and others claim there is no concrete evidence against him.
In its ruling the court cited a United Nations investigation that blasted the “inefficiency, incompetency, indifference, insensitivity and negligence of the police who investigated these cases.”
“They've sent (the) message that there isn't the capacity to investigate crimes nor to punish the guilty,” Peña said of investigators and prosecutors. “We believe they were covering up for the real guilty parties. The actual guilty ones remain free.”
Though the Inter-American Court ordered the investigations reopened, those who've examined the case files and evidence say they are in such disarray as to be useless.
“There is no valid evidence to take to court today,” Perez said. “We're not going to find those responsible for the murders.”
“They destroyed evidence from the beginning,” Monreal said of the investigators. “They wasted time, lost clues.
“They have to change everything about the way they investigate, the way they treat people and these cases.”
Josephina Gonzalez, the mother of victim Claudia Yvette, told the court: “I have daughters, and I am afraid that it could happen again because the authorities are doing nothing.”
After a series of anonymous threats, Gonzalez sought refuge in the United States and was granted asylum. She now lives in Texas. |
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