Mexico had no civil or criminal code to bring penalties for crimes related to family violence and rape. In fact, charges could only be brought if the woman could show bruises fifteen days after the alleged attack had occurred.
Esther's suggestion to put the unit in a separate part of the building was initially met with skepticism from the men in authority, who failed to see how providing a safe haven to report a domestic crime would make a difference. But much to their surprise, once a place was provided, women began to show up in numbers too large to ignore. That there was no glaring sign to direct the victims to the special domestic crimes division, but rather a series of arrows taped to the floor of the lobby to indicate where they needed to go, allowed them to retain some privacy as they arrived to report the violations.
Having a separate area in the rear of the building also meant that women were no longer required to report their abuse in a room full of male police officers taking reports from victims of petty crimes such as robberies and thefts.
Still, the families coming to headquarters to report their daughters missing were being directed to the window in the main lobby of the Procuraduría General.
Those cases were still not deemed personal or pressing.
In fact, authorities were still mocking the efforts of local activists such as Chávez, and others who had followed her lead, organizing in protest against the way government officials were handling the investigation into the homicides. It had been Esther's early criticisms that triggered others such as Vicky Caraveo Vallina to join the fight.
In time, hundreds of the city's women would stage silent vigils at police headquarters and band together for monthly searches of the desert to look for the bodies of the missing girls.
One of the first searches took place just one month after Guillermina González's group, Voices Without Echo, was formed.
Coordinating the monthly search efforts was complicated, as many of the participants did not own cars, and needed to arrange carpools and other transportation. To avoid the heat, volunteers met at sunrise to begin trolling the empty lands on the outskirts of Juárez. By 9:30 a.m., it was already too hot to conduct the two- and three-hour expeditions.
Volunteers paired off to comb the barren lands encircling the city. Using long wooden sticks, they picked through heaps of trash and turned over the sand, hoping to find a single clue or piece of potential evidence. To cool the searchers off, the González family brought a cooler of cold drinks packed in the rear of their van.
In August of 1999, members of the state law enforcement agency agreed to join the volunteers on a desert search. Guillermina González and the others were excited that officials from the attorney general's office (formally known as the Procuraduría General de Justicia del Estado de Chihuahua, PGJE) were finally taking their cause seriously. But the group was quickly disappointed when it became clear that no one from the government agency intended to participate in the search. Instead, as the members of Voices Without Echo and the other searchers stood waiting, a handful of local law enforcement agents suddenly appeared. They were reportedly drunk and began harassing Guillermina and the other volunteers, demanding to know why the group was hanging around in the middle of nowhere.
Using her cell phone, Guillermina promptly dialed 060, the city's emergency line, and reported a DWI in progress. But no action was taken against the officers.
* * *
Dr. Eduardo Muriel, a well-respected criminologist from Mexico City, was invited to Ciudad Juárez in the winter of 1999 by State of Chihuahua Attorney General Arturo González Rascón. Dr. Muriel was one of three experts who volunteered to work in tandem with González Rascón to pursue other leads such as the possibility that the crimes were related to a religious sect or the increasingly lucrative industry of organ trafficking.
Unlike the FBI investigators, much fanfare surrounded the arrival of Dr. Muriel and his team.
The veteran scientist arrived in Juárez during the time that María Talamantes was first stepping before TV cameras to tell her story of alleged gang rape by police. Muriel told reporters he believed that Talamantes was most likely telling the truth. He said he too had had several disturbing interactions with authorities during his brief time in the city. The criminologist recalled a famous, and similar, case that had occurred several years earlier in El Pedregal, in San Ángel, a very exclusive section of Mexico City.
Dr. Muriel said the raping of women by police is not uncommon, but rarely happens to the women of the country's elite class. In that incident, police officers had reportedly raped two women from a very high class of Mexican society. "This sort of thing happens and is kept under wraps because they shush the girls by virtue of their uniforms," Dr. Muriel said.
Attorney General González Rascón publicly introduced Muriel and his team before the media, a gesture he hoped would ensure cooperation from journalists and local authorities. But right from the start, Dr. Muriel claims he was met with resistance. He charged that members of the district attorney's office continually denied him access to their files and that Special Prosecutor Suly Ponce provided no help.
In fact, just one week after he agreed to work on the case, the veteran criminologist handed in his resignation. He cited inappropriate behavior on the part of the district attorney's office and his contempt for local authorities who had allegedly placed hidden cameras in the offices he and his colleagues had been using.
"We had absolutely no support from the DA, and furthermore, they were acting very inappropriately towards our team," Dr. Muriel told Univision in an interview days after his resignation. "They began to film us and tape-record our conversations inside their government office."
Ponce's office "didn't want us to go to the forensics lab, and didn't want to give us any leads or point us to any other witnesses or give us any additional information," Dr. Muriel said.
"They [the DA's office] should have left their more problematic cases to us and offered us those files. First of all, to see if they contained all the proper information, as is customary with criminal files. But not only that, there were a lot of women who were yet to be identified. We could have at least tried, or started to try, to put together a lot of the information."
Dr. Muriel claimed that during his short stint in Juárez, he had not been permitted to go anywhere near any of the crime scenes with one exception. The criminologist explained that an opportunity finally arose one afternoon when he was in Ponce's office and overheard a phone call summoning her to a crime scene. Aware that she did not have transportation that day, he offered to drive her to the location.
"When we got there, the murder scene was already fenced in, for the purposes of preserving the scene," Dr. Muriel recalled.
"They mark off the scene to keep people from walking through, yet everyone from the DA's office comes and goes," Dr. Muriel said. "And I ask myself, 'What do they think their shoes are made of? Do they walk on air?' Even if only one person is walking through the crime scene, that's enough to contaminate it.
"Now, what if you have ten people walking through it?" he continued. "If you want to preserve a crime scene, it has to be done right from the beginning; from the very second the body is found. But they wait until they've been notified by police, after they've stepped all over everything."
Dr. Muriel charged that his team was refused access to the crime scene, forensics lab results, and the witnesses questioned in the case.
Muriel said he and his team subsequently commenced their own investigation. He noted that the case was very unusual because the woman had been murdered in a different fashion than in previous cases.
The investigative team learned that the victim, a young female factory worker, had arrived for work at the same time as a man considered to be a suspect in the case. The two worked the same shift, and on the same assembly line. The day the woman disappeared, the victim and the suspect had left the factory at the same time.
Through interviews, Dr. Muriel learned that the male employee phoned his sister-in-law, falsely telling her that he had been fired from his factory job a lie he concocted to provide himself an alibi for his "early" departure. In fact, he did not leave the building that day but instead joined the woman on the assembly line and arranged to leave work at the same time she did. The girl was later found murdered.
"So we arrive at the
procuraduría,
the DA's office, with this accumulation of material, and when we get there, they have already arrested the man, and another friend of his. They already had them there. So I told them, 'Good work! You've already got him!' And the DA [Suly Ponce] looks at me utterly surprised and says, 'Who?' "
Dr. Muriel said he was stunned by the lack of communication between police and the prosecutor's office.
"To tell you the truth, the people who work in the DA's office, unfortunately, have a very limited knowledge of criminology," Muriel calmly observed. "So when someone comes along who knows a bit more than they do, I think they feel pressured."
He noted that as many as fifteen officers routinely respond to a crime scene, when the number should be just two a lab tech and a crime scene photographer. Remarkably, key players such as Irma Rodríguez, the medical examiner, are denied access until members of the district attorney's office give them permission to begin their investigations.
"They are not limited by knowledge," Dr. Muriel said. "They are limited by the DA."
In response to questions, Dr. Muriel said he had come to believe that there might be some sort of cover-up going on in Juárez. "We have come to suspect that there could be people involved even from the ranks of the maquilas themselves, but it would be too presumptuous on my part to make a definitive statement at this point when everything is circumstantial."
He also expressed outrage that members of the prosecutor's office would surreptitiously set up a camera to videotape his work. "To tape us, everything we were doing, without our permission and then against our will," he said disgustedly. "And to record what we were saying. I find this offensive, and I find that it constitutes an enormous lack of professional ethics.
"But it didn't stop there. We moved to another office, not only to try to evade the invasion of privacy but to avoid any sort of confrontation, and they did it again! That was the final offense," he said.
Dr. Muriel said he was convinced that officials from the district attorney's office wanted his team to abandon its investigation. He also said he believed that Sharif Sharif and Sergio Armendáriz were merely scapegoats for the murders.
"I think they were [scapegoats] from the very beginning, from the moment they were arrested," he said. "I intended to go and speak with them and I tried to get the authorization to do so, but the police were the first ones who opposed it."
Countless letters and repeated phone calls to the district attorney for the state of Chihuahua asking for comment on Dr. Muriel's access to information and his allegations that members of the state district attorney's office had secretly videotaped the team's investigation were ignored. It was not until the Mexican consul in Miami was contacted and warned that Univision intended to air the story with or without a response that any action was taken. When officials from the Miami consulate found someone who would agree to an interview with the network, it was too late to include in time for the broadcast. Instead, a written statement was faxed to the network, and edited into the story.
It read, in part: "During the course of our investigation we have not found any police involvement in the cases of the crimes against women in Ciudad Juárez. We also wish to state that the independent investigators, headed by Dr. Eduardo Muriel, abandoned the investigation and resigned because they weren't able to obtain the desired results."
It made little sense that Dr. Muriel, who had been invited by the attorney general of Chihuahua to help investigate the murders, had been provided only limited access to the case files, when the team of FBI profilers from the bureau's Behavorial Analysis Unit at Quantico, Virginia, claimed to have been given broad access during their five-day visit to the border city that past spring. In an interview with a local Juárez reporter, Suly Ponce responded to Dr. Muriel's criticism of her office: "These criminologists had been in Ciudad Juárez since January 23, with all expenses paid by the state, and had made no effort whatsoever to open investigations as they publicly promised they would."
What was going on behind the scenes? Was there a cover-up or just complete incompetence? Or was it both?
Chapter Eight
A Ray of Hope
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, BRITISH NOVELIST AND FEMINIST
THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO elected a new president in the summer of 2000, defeating the ruling party's Francisco Labastida by a wide margin and ousting the political party that had ruled the country for seventy years. With the installation of Vicente Fox Quesada of the PAN party came the hope that government corruption would finally come to an end.
