Fifteen days passed, and only one of her four assailants was under investigation. No semen or DNA samples were collected from any of the accused men or the female guard that María had named something that almost certainly would have happened if such an incident had taken place in the United States. Yet blood work and other tests were performed on María. The defendants were also permitted to continue to work at the jail while the investigation was under way.
In a bold and potentially dangerous move, María told the local press of her plight, bravely appearing in front of television cameras that spring with her husband by her side. Her story grabbed headlines and was the subject of nightly news programs. In response, the four guards were arrested and paraded before the TV news cameras.
For a while, María had hopes that the men who had allegedly raped her would be brought to justice. But it was not to be.
Special Prosecutor Suly Ponce later told Univision that her office had done what it could to ensure a positive outcome. She and members of her staff believed that María was telling the truth, but their hands were tied once the case went to court.
"We put pressure on the judge," Ponce said. "The arrest warrant was issued and was acted upon at once. Unfortunately, that was all we could do to help detain those responsible for the crime."
In the end, a Mexican judge dismissed the charges, citing "lack of evidence," and the officers were set free. Three of them returned to their jobs at the city's jail.
Meanwhile, María and her family received numerous threats. Upon their return home, the Talamanteses recalled, marked patrol cars began cruising through their neighborhood, with officers stopping at various homes, banging on doors and asking questions about María. At night, members of the police department parked their cruisers nearby and shone their headlights at the Talamantes house, she said.
At one point, María's husband traveled to Los Angeles, leaving María and her children home alone in Juárez. That night, María observed a black Lincoln Mercury Marquis with tinted windows pull up outside her house. As the children slept, she said, she watched as someone got out of the car, raised a gun in the air, and fired two shots into the night sky. She thought briefly of calling the police but quickly rejected the idea. To her mind, her tormentors and the police were "one and the same."
According to María, the man was dressed all in black the same description that was provided for the "cowboy" seen waiting next to Silvia Morales at the Juárez bus stop several years earlier.
* * *
Not long after her ordeal, María Talamantes found employment on the assembly line of a local maquiladora. On her first day, she went to lunch at the cafeteria in the factory complex. As she sat eating, she felt as if someone was watching her. Turning around, she recognized one of the officers from the jail standing behind her. He was the same skinny man who had shown her the photo album in the cell near the jail's kitchen. Frightened, she inquired about him the following day and learned from fellow employees that he had come to the factory seeking work as a security guard.
María had never made public her knowledge of the jail-house photo album, the one depicting the young women being beaten, raped, and set ablaze. She said she was simply too scared.
In time, she confided in a local activist named Judith Galarza, head of the Venezuela-based Latin American Federation of Associations for Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (FEDEFAM). Galarza urged her to take her story to Mexican officials in Mexico City, commonly referred to as
el DF,
el Distrito Federal. The activist was fighting for justice for the murdered women of Juárez and was anxious to expose what she believed to be a lack of professionalism on the part of Mexican authorities.
"We have not heard testimony about similar incidents in other places," Galarza said in an interview with a newspaper reporter. "The cases in Juárez are exclusive to the region, which borders the United States and whose main population is made up of campesinos and indigenous people who come from the south. A great number of them are going to work in the maquiladora industry."
María agreed to join Galarza in Mexico City, and there she told her story again, but this time to a much larger audience and one she thought would carry more political clout. She hoped her efforts would bring about justice for the girls she had viewed in the photos.
María later admitted that she had mentioned the photos she had seen to government officials, who had flatly discouraged her from coming forward.
"I was afraid," María recalled in an interview with award-winning documentarian Lourdes Portillo. "Even the
licenciada
[district attorney] said not to say anything!
"I was told, 'We interviewed those cops, and the psychologists interviewed them, and they're dangerous,
están locos!
You should be very afraid.' "
Two years later, in mid-2001, Talamantes was again thrust into the limelight when a television crew tracked her down in Juárez after being asked not to by activist Esther Chávez. María was already struggling to earn enough money to feed her five children after her husband left her, forcing her to fend on her own with the kids.
Esther was worried that any additional emotional demands would throw the woman into a tailspin. She had already come to Chávez seeking help. Like many rape survivors, María was refusing counseling. Still, the crew showed up at María's doorstep insisting she grant them a taped interview on camera about her allegations of gang rape by police, which she did.
The story soon aired. Afterwards, police went to María's house, threw her up against a wall, and severely beat her, according to Chávez. The activist was in Spain on holiday when the incident occurred. Chávez first heard of the alleged attack when a staff member of her recently founded rape crisis center, Casa Amiga, phoned her overseas to say that María de Jesús Talamantes had shown up at the shelter, battered and hysterical. It took more than four hours for the staffers to calm her down, and still she was refusing to speak with a therapist.
Even today, María continues to struggle to keep her family together and contain her anger at authorities for failing to properly punish her alleged rapists.
To compound matters, María felt ashamed over what her children were thinking. Her elder children had begun raising questions about the ordeal, explaining that classmates were saying ugly things about their mother. Not only had the attacks taken their toll emotionally and most certainly had driven her husband, Pedro, away, now they were negatively impacting her children as well.
There are some in the border city who have raised doubts over María's claims of rape and the existence of the grisly photo album she contended the jailers had shown her. In light of all that happened to her, there are also questions as to why she chose to remain in Juárez after all that she endured. But those who raise those questions do not understand the difficult conditions under which the people of Mexico live. Even if María wanted to leave Juárez, where would she go? She was a single mother caring for five children. Much of the country's economy was now in Juárez, as industry in other parts of Mexico had all but dried up. Many of the country's villages and towns were abandoned, with families traveling north in search of work.
Juárez was home, and the only place María's children had ever known.
There, at least, the family had a house, albeit a small one.
Chapter Seven
Whoever Fights Monsters
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, GERMAN PHILOSOPHER
ON MARCH 8, 1999, four profilers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Behavorial Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia, arrived in Ciudad Juárez. The invitation had come after months of discussion between Chihuahua state officials and authorities from the El Paso bureau of the FBI. News reports indicated that then Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo had initiated the visit by first contacting U.S. president Bill Clinton to request the agents in the ongoing homicide investigation.
Outfitted in a brightly colored suit, her carroty red hair neatly styled, Ponce had stepped before the microphones that March to answer questions about the agents' impending arrival. The prosecutor explained that the team would provide investigatory training to members of the Chihuahua state police force and help to create a psychological profile for the serial killers or criminals who might be behind the murders.
During the press conference, Ponce blamed the previous administration for its negligence and mishandling of the investigation and maintained that she and her staff would receive much-needed assistance from the FBI agents in organizing and updating their files.
"It is now possible to do this right," she told the media that day. "To make any more mistakes would be unjust to the families of the victims and society in general."
The city's residents were optimistic. "We wholeheartedly welcome the FBI's help," said local activist Vicky Caraveo Vallina, a lawyer who was also director of Mujeres Por Juárez, or Women for Juárez, an advocacy group she had recently founded to raise public awareness about the murders. "Maybe they will prove what we've been saying all along, the authorities are doing an unsatisfactory job."
Caraveo, who was also the wife of a wealthy local businessman, was outraged over the ongoing killings of the city's poorest young women and had started the nongovernmental group to raise public awareness about the crimes. Attractive and educated, and a member of the city's elite, Caraveo seemed an unlikely advocate to take up the fight for the impoverished victims. Vicky's grandfather was a former official for the state of Chihuahua, and the family had made a name for itself in the banking industry in Mexico.
Young Guillermina González's grassroots organization, Voices Without Echo, was also putting itself on the map. Since members did not have any money to rent a space, the only way to contact them was by calling Guillermina's cell phone. She and her small group of volunteers had been painting bold black crosses against a pink backdrop on the city's utility poles to call attention to the murders. Soon poles in nearly every community bore the sobering symbol. In addition, billboards and posters affixed to the city's public buses preached the words "Be Careful, Watch for Your Life."
Caraveo, González, and other local women were being credited with bringing the injustices perpetrated against the city's women to the forefront. Some felt that if it weren't for them, many of the murders would have simply been swept under the rug by authorities anxious to close cases either because of incompetence or more sinister motives. There was continuing wide speculation that members of the police department were involved in the killings, or were covering up for those responsible.
Remarkably, since January 1999, at least five more women had been murdered in the border city; some news agencies were putting the number as high as ten. Ponce insisted that only one of the murders was sexually motivated. But a review of the files revealed that at least two showed no apparent motive beyond psychosexual rage.
The most disturbing of the crimes was the brutal murder of a twelve-year-old maquila worker named Irma Angélica Rosales Lozano. (Sixteen is the legal age for girls to begin working at the maquiladoras in Mexico.) While local news outlets reported her age as thirteen, she was actually five months shy of her thirteenth birthday when her body was discovered on February 16, in a vacant lot on the southwest side of the city. She had been raped, vaginally and anally, and suffocated with a plastic grocery bag.
An investigation revealed that the killing had occurred in broad daylight, just hours after Angélica's shift ended at the Electrocomponentes de México, a nearby maquiladora where she had worked her usual nine and a half hours on the assembly line testing color-coded wires for new refrigerators.
Earlier that month, Irma had traveled twelve hours by bus from the parched farmlands of Durango; she was staying in Juárez with her older brother Miguel Angel García and his young wife. Her parents were both ill. They had used their savings to buy their only daughter a false ID so that she could find work and send money home to their tiny village, where young girls did not stray far from their mother's watch.
In Juárez, a fake birth certificate usually costs about twenty dollars, the price Miguel García paid a local forger for Irma's ID. It was all that was required to obtain work in one of the now nearly seven hundred maquiladoras. Even with the tens of thousands of workers arriving each year, assembly-line jobs were plentiful, with some factories employing two thousand workers per shift. Banners advertising jobs hung from the modern industrial complexes, boasting amenities including air-conditioning, showers, changing areas, and a cafeteria that served free meals to its staffers.
Suly Ponce had been in office for a little more than three months when Irma's tiny, violated corpse was found tossed in a ditch that February. Like that of Sagrario González, her death had followed an event at work that had resulted in the young girl being forced to commute alone.
Ironically, Irma and her sister-in-law, Yadira, had interviewed at two other factories before finding a workplace that had openings for both of them on the same shift. Electrocomponentes de México had previously been owned by General Electric but had been sold to the International Wire Group of Saint Louis, Missouri. The Juárez-based assembly plant was enormous and employed nearly 2,000 workers.
