Although she had held posts as a university professor, public defender, and local magistrate, Ponce had never worked as a prosecutor. But her lack of prosecutorial experience didn't concern Rascón, who praised his new director as a talented professional. However, the office she was expected to run was hardly up to the times. The small, stark white room with the brightly painted blue door was minimally equipped with a simple metal desk, two nondescript office chairs, a typewriter, and a telephone.
Standing in the doorway that first day, puffing on a cigarette, Ponce wondered if her new position had been created as a public relations exercise to give people the illusion that something was being done. If so, that would change soon after her name went on the office door.
Almost immediately, Ponce demanded a bigger office space, state-of-the-art computers, and an updated phone system. She also wielded authority over the crime scenes, denying admission to bystanders and news reporters who had once been given unfettered access right up to the point of repositioning the body of a homicide victim in order to capture a sensational photo for the following day's paper.
Under Ponce's direction, crime scenes were to be cordoned off and preserved.
Ponce theorized that of the 180 femicides that had occurred in Juárez since 1993, 30 percent, or 55 of the crimes, were of a sexual nature. The rest, she claimed, were violent homicides such as random killings or executions unrelated to the serial murders that officials had linked to Sharif Sharif and the gang members.
Ponce's presence, and her belief that Sharif Sharif was responsible for at least some of the murders, made the Egyptian's defense even more difficult.
In Mexico, unlike the United States, a person is considered guilty or "probably responsible" until proven innocent. It is up to the defense attorney to disprove charges brought by the prosecution, and up to a judge, not a jury, to determine a person's guilt or innocence.
Ponce was aware that Sharif Sharif and his attorney, Irene Blanco, had been successful in having five of the six murder charges lodged against him thrown out by a judge earlier in the year for lack of evidence. Still, one charge remained the murder of maquila worker Elizabeth Castro. And although the evidence in that case seemed to point in another direction, authorities remained unwilling to set Sharif free.
For months the Egyptian had been demanding a meeting with Ponce's superior, Governor Patricio Martínez. Martínez, however, was not interested in meeting with Sharif, who had also requested to sit down with Oscar Maynez, the state's forensic expert, and several local activists, including Esther Chávez. The Egyptian wanted to speak with Maynez about his own findings, which he had gleaned from an investigation he had commenced from his jail cell.
According to the criminologist, Shariff was of the belief that the son of a local cantina owner was behind some of the murders, claiming the man, Armando Martínez, had cut the throat of one of the dancers who worked at his father's establishment. Sharif was insisting that the cantina was linked to the drug-trafficking trade in Juárez, and that the murdered dancer fit the victim profile to a tee, Maynez said. Sharif's source was a police official named Víctor Valenzuela Rivera, who would later testify before state legislators and journalists that he was at the Safari Club, a local bar frequented by police and narcotraffickers. There, Valenzuela Rivera claimed to have overheard Armando Martínez joking about the murders and assuring the men that they were "protected" by government officials and police.
The stunning declarations were not without bloody consequences. When Sharif's attorney, Irene Blanco, insisted that police investigate the accusations against Martínez, her own family came under fire. Blanco told local Juárez newspapers that she received a death threat from an anonymous male caller who said "they were going to hit me where it most hurts." The day after she made the statement, unidentified gunmen traveling in a gray van fired on her young adult son as he drove along La Raza Street in downtown Juárez.
News accounts reported that three of the more than ten bullets that were fired that day impacted the young man's body, and were it not for the fact that he continued driving to a local hospital, he would have died of his injuries, doctors said. One bullet penetrated his stomach, another hit him in the leg, and a third struck his arm.
"I never thought they would be daring enough to do something to my family," Irene Blanco confided to a news source. "For my own good, I have to decide whether to continue with this case. I have a daughter to take care of as well."
According to Blanco, the attack on her son occurred at 1:30 p.m., and by 3 p.m. Suly Ponce was before the media, explaining that the shooting was "due to a confrontation between narcotraffickers." "Not one agent went to the hospital to speak to my son," Blanco recalled. "And yet two hours after the shooting of my son, the DA is stating in a press conference that it was a settling of debt between narcos, and that furthermore, I was going to take advantage of the situation, because the incident favored Sharif.
"It is evident that the state law is broken here and this is the type of investigation that is carried out in Chihuahua."
Blanco ultimately chose to relocate to another part of Mexico, but she continued to represent Sharif from her new environs.
In his one-on-one interview with Univision, Sharif had suggested that someone with power was behind the murders and was being protected by a person or persons in a position of authority. He insisted that at least one high-ranking police officer was involved, as well as two powerful drug lords and perhaps one or more businessmen from El Paso who commuted daily into Juárez. When asked if he could reveal the names of those individuals, Sharif vowed he would go public when he gained his freedom. Apparently, he was too afraid of repercussions.
While he was a two-time convicted sex offender, Sharif's claims were not without merit. In 1998, the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights (CMDPDH), an independent human rights group based in Cuauhtémoc, reviewed the state police files and published a scathing report criticizing irregularities in the homicide investigation.
They found that some of the files lacked photographs of corpses or DNA tests to help in identification; others were mistaken as to where a body was found. In a number of cases, they reported, victims had even been misidentified.
One state official with firsthand knowledge of Sharif's case revealed that the Egyptian's repeated requests to review the DNA evidence in the case of Elizabeth Castro were denied by state officials, even as they prepared for trial in the homicide case. In addition, no family member was ever shown Castro's body for identification purposes. The parents simply accepted the police's word that the body was, in fact, that of their daughter. "There is a mother out there who will never know what happened to her child," Oscar Maynez said of Castro's case.
When questioned, state officials could not explain why police had almost immediately transported Castro's body to a state facility in Veracruz, some two hundred miles from Juárez, where it was inaccessible to family members. They also couldn't explain why the results of the autopsy performed on the body had described a woman whose height, physical characteristics, and clothing did not match Castro's. They were also at a loss as to why the body was in a state of decomposition consistent with someone who had been dead for at least a month or more. Castro had been missing only four days when the body authorities were claiming to be hers was found.
Nevertheless, Ponce stood by on March 29, 1999, as a Mexican judge found Sharif Sharif guilty of Castro's murder and sentenced him to thirty years in prison for the crime.
It is not clear who ordered that Sharif Sharif be transferred that same day from his jail cell at El Cereso to the state penitentiary in Chihuahua City, where he was placed in solitary confinement, no longer free to walk the facility or speak to reporters, although news accounts reported that state police were behind the command. While tighter security was the official reason given, there very well might have been another reason for the quick transfer. Perhaps the chemist was receiving too much publicity outside Mexico and officials were anxious to silence him. Once sentenced, Sharif was not even allowed to see his defense attorney. Irene Blanco was instructed she would have to wait nine months before visiting her client.
Interestingly, Sharif's transfer came soon after his one-on-one interview with Univision aired on March 3, 1999 in the United States, Mexico, Central America, and several Latin American countries.
During the interview, he pointed out that several of the bodies had been found near the Pemex installation, the Mexican petroleum company, and alluded to the possibility that one of the murderers could be an American businessman employed there who was crossing into Juárez each day from his home in El Paso. Sharif insisted that during his own investigation into the murders, he claimed to have identified a handful of victims whose bodies had turned up on properties owned by Pemex or vacant lots nearby. He also suggested that members of the Mexican police could be involved in the murders, either as willing participants or as paid protectors of the culprit or culprits.
According to news accounts, at least one of the homicides was linked to a member of the municipal police.
Perhaps government officials wanted to stop the Egyptian from raising questions about its ongoing investigation. Or perhaps it was because he was the linchpin of their case, the alleged architect of the killings, and officials needed the public to believe in his guilt.
While at El Cereso, Sharif had been afforded the use of a fax machine, a cell phone, and a computer. He had also earned the right to carry a key to his jail cell. The warden at the maximum-security jail, Abelardo González, rewarded good behavior with privileges such as keys that allowed inmates to protect their personal belongings while they were not in their cells.
During his incarceration at El Cereso, Sharif had talked with the prison warden of his border crossings while living in Midland, Texas. "He drove across from El Paso to come here to have a good time, yes. He himself has admitted it, that he's kind of a bohemian type, without any ties, who just wants to have a good time.
"He would then have encounters with some of the young women and everyone knows he likes the young women,
las jovencitas."
The warden smiled. "So that was enough for him to be accused of the murder of one of them."
* * *
Suly Ponce offered her perspective on the case during an in-depth interview conducted in February 1999, just four months after she assumed the role of the director of the special task force in charge of women's homicides.
While some had speculated that the victims were held for days, Ponce said that she believed that in the cases of the sexually motivated homicides, the murders typically took place on the same day as the abductions or one or two days later.
"Everything indicates that it happens in rapid succession, the kidnapping and rape and murder," she said. "The killers probably take them [the victims] to an abandoned place which they have designated, and there they rape them and ultimately kill them."
Ponce claimed that what disturbed her most about the murders was the lack of professionalism on the part of the police and other members of the previous administration in the way in which they handled the families of the victims.
"The government authorities would say that many of the victims worked in local nightspots, and so it followed that something bad would happen to them," Ponce explained. "The families didn't accept this, that a woman is destined to die a violent death just because she works in a nightclub."
Authorities were now working to develop that sense of trust, although Ponce admitted that her team of investigators was no closer to solving many of the homicides. Her reason was both startling and troublesome. According to Ponce, the investigations had stalled because relatives of the victims were uncooperative. Fearing that a thorough interrogation might expose their daughters' private lives, they had withheld information that could be crucial to solving the case, she said.
Ponce confidently went on to suggest her office was on top of the investigation. Her demeanor changed, however, when she was confronted with a videotape shot the previous day by a member of the Univision crew in which law enforcement personnel could be seen walking through an active crime scene and potentially destroying evidence. The tape also showed that investigators had left behind possible evidence, including a bloody blanket. Ponce seemed taken aback by the video and made it clear that she intended to improve the quality of the department. Though she'd only been in office for four months, she assured the news crew that she'd already started to implement changes, including several new security measures to deter the perpetrators. Among them was the posting of police units around the maquiladoras during hours when the women were changing shifts and the recruiting of taxi drivers to take female workers home, especially the very young ones who were most at risk.
In addition, Ponce said she had urged the women of Juárez to avoid putting themselves at risk. She recommended they not walk alone through abandoned, desolate places. If they had to, they should find a way of not going by themselves. She also warned that hitching a ride with a stranger could result in a possible rape or worse, and advised that young working women take a bus or a taxi whenever possible.
