García had been among those rounded up in the fall of 1999 during the initial arrest of the city's bus drivers, after members of the Tolteca group implicated him claiming García knew one of the young women they had "sacrificed." He was subsequently released for lack of evidence, but police kept him on the radar and had immediately grabbed him when the eight bodies were discovered.
González, meanwhile, had never been implicated in any of the crimes. Only later would it be revealed that his name came up during the police interrogation of fellow bus driver Víctor García.
In an attempt to link the new suspects to the group already in custody, Fernando Medina, spokesman for the state attorney general's office, told members of the media that the bus drivers did, in fact, have ties to the Toltecas, the first group of bus drivers arrested in connection with the homicides.
Attorney General Rascón claimed García and González had "snorted cocaine, smoked marijuana, and drunk liquor" before setting out in search of their victims. When they spotted a vulnerable woman, they forced her into their van, where they raped and killed her, before dumping her body in the cotton field, he said.
At the time, officials positively identified the murdered young women as Guadalupe Luna de la Rosa, nineteen, a student; Verónica Martínez Hernández, nineteen, a maquiladora worker and student; Bárbara Araceli Martínez Ramos, twenty-one, a maid; María de los Angeles Acosta Ramírez, nineteen, a maquiladora worker and student; María Juliana Reyes Solís, seventeen; Claudia Ivette González Banda, twenty, a maquiladora worker; Esmeralda Herrera Monreal, fifteen, a domestic servant; and Laura Berenice Ramos Monárrez, seventeen, a student.
News reports stated that police got the break in the case that led them to García and González after a witness came forward claiming to have seen one of the suspects dumping a body into the grassy field. The woman, a nurse, reportedly told authorities that the man she saw dumping the body was driving a blue van that night.
Not surprisingly, the
ruteros,
bus drivers, alleged police violence and torture were used to extract their "bogus" confessions.
* * *
On the day that police came for bus driver Víctor García Uribe, known as "the Match," there was a party going on for García's wife, Miriam. It was November 9, 2001, the day after Miriam's actual birthday. But Víctor and his father and sister had pooled their money to throw Miriam a special barbecue at his father's home that day. The family feasted on "good" meat to celebrate the occasion.
After the festivities, Miriam and her husband boarded the bus her husband used to transport the maquila workers to and from their factory jobs and returned to their simple, neatly kept house. Theirs was a modest existence, a home with running water, electricity, and enough money to buy diapers for their new baby.
Miriam had come to Juárez fifteen years before and considered the city her home.
As they pulled up in front of the small, two-bedroom dwelling, Miriam's father appeared from his house next door. Eager to hear about the barbecue, he invited the family over for a snack. Miriam smiled, explaining that they would come another time. They were full from the barbecue and ready to retire for the afternoon.
In an interview, Miriam recalled how, cradling her infant daughter, she had started down the walkway after her husband, when suddenly he turned and asked that she retrieve the diapers and carriage he'd left in the bus.
Within seconds, Miriam said, she heard strange noises coming from inside the house, as if someone was being punched repeatedly. Frantic, she climbed from the bus, falling onto the street with the baby still in her arms. As she struggled to get up, she said, she saw through the front window that at least a dozen men were in her living room viciously beating her husband. He was fighting to place his hands over his face to deflect their repeated blows.
Miriam said the men were laughing as they struck him over and over, threatening to kill Víctor.
Clutching her baby, Miriam started toward the house when suddenly she saw the front door fly open and several men pushed past her, dragging Víctor in their arms. She recalled that they were dressed all in black and wore masks, some ghoulish Halloween-type masks, grotesque with exaggerated features and pretend blood; others had ski masks pulled tightly over their faces to conceal their identities.
Several were clutching long-barreled guns as they dragged Víctor down the walkway to a gold Chevy Suburban waiting at the curb, where a dozen similar vehicles were lined up behind it, sleek and glossy as if they had just been washed and buffed, she said. None of the vehicles had license plates or any identifying tags.
With the baby still in her arms, Miriam said, she raced after the group, demanding that they free her husband at once. She even grabbed at one of the men, pulling back his mask enough to reveal a face scarred by acne. That's when one of the men, she recalled, grabbed onto strands of her hair and began pulling her away from Víctor. She claimed that she was yanked from the vehicle, as she tried to get in next to her husband, and thrown to the ground with the baby still in her arms.
Unable to stop them, Miriam said, she raced to her father's house just next door for help. He was already standing on the sidewalk when, she claimed, gunshots rang out. According to Miriam, the men fired at her father from their vehicles.
Miriam claimed that several neighbors had witnessed the event and, as she did, believed her husband had been abducted.
Unsure what to do, Miriam by her own account commenced a search for her husband, first checking the local police headquarters to see if he had been brought there. She recalled seeing a police shield while struggling with one of the men; it was on his shirt, concealed beneath a black jacket. But members of the municipal police told her that they were not holding Víctor.
Miriam said that when her visit to the local hospitals turned up no clues, she dialed Sergio Dante Almaraz, the criminal attorney whom she and Víctor had retained when her husband was temporarily taken into custody eighteen months earlier with the other shuttle bus drivers. While García was subsequently released for lack of evidence, his name was entered into the district attorney's computerized database of sexual offenders. Since then, police had been pulling him in for questioning every time the body of a dead woman turned up in the city.
Now it appeared they were looking at him once again, the lawyer later said in an interview. Ciudad Juárez was currently in the hands of the PRI party under the direct control of the governor. Local elections were around the corner, and it seemed authorities were anxious to make an arrest in the case. Almaraz said it was only after a tip from an employee at the Department of Investigations that he learned where his client was being held.
Miriam said she was furious with authorities for misleading her about Víctor's whereabouts. She had gone to the
procuraduría
those first days in search of information and had been turned away even as her husband was being held in another part of the same complex. Authorities later claimed that Miriam was not deliberately misled. The
procuraduría
is a large building, and officers in one area are often unaware of what is going on in other parts of the sprawling headquarters, they said.
The response seemed absurd. But there was little that Miriam could do, she recalled. When she was finally permitted to see her husband on November 12, she said, he was ill. He couldn't stand up or walk. He was just lying in agony on a stone bed, running a high fever.
Before she could say anything, Víctor García told of his hours of torture, she recalled. He said police beat and burned him until he could no longer endure the pain and, along with the other bus driver, had confessed to the murders of the eight women found in the cotton field.
Miriam said she later learned that Víctor had been beaten and burned on the anus, testicles, stomach, hand, and face. One of his hands was immobile from having been bound for so long.
"I couldn't take the torture" is what her husband allegedly told her that day.
* * *
At a press conference at the jail soon after their arrest that November, the two bus drivers spoke out about their days-long interrogation. Just like Sharif Sharif, these men had been permitted by the facility's director to come before the press with their story. El Cereso was a city-run facility; members of the state attorney general's office had no jurisdiction over its staff.
Gustavo González, a paunchy twenty-eight-year-old with thick, dark, curly hair and round, full cheeks, looked edgy, slumped in a chair behind the same wooden conference table at which Sharif Sharif had spoken out in the past. He had been limping when he first entered the room, as if he had suffered a painful leg injury. Because of his fleshy build, he had been given the nickname "the Seal."
As he faced reporters, González claimed that police had pointed guns at members of his family when they came to arrest him, an account that sounded a lot like that of the Rebels' alleged leader, Sergio Armendáriz.
During his brief remarks, González claimed he had been taken to a private home after his arrest, where he was beaten and tortured and threatened with the assassination of his mother and his wife if he didn't confess into a tape recorder to the murders of the eight women. He said police also forced him and García to sign some photographs, presumably of the eight young women.
"They told me they were going to kill my entire family if I didn't come out of my house with them," González said, his voice barely audible. "They took down my pants and wet my parts and gave me electrical discharges there with a prod.
"They beat me, burned me with cigarettes, and told me I wasn't going to get out of there, and that they had my dad and my wife." González lifted his shirt to display the wounds, and news photographers snapped the photos, which appeared on the front pages of the city's newspapers the following day.
Suddenly, a flood of tears poured from the man's eyes, accompanied by loud, uncontrollable sobs. Trembling as he faced the cameras, González said, "My wife is pregnant, and they said they were going to take our baby out of her!"
Víctor García, a seemingly stronger, sturdier man, told a similar story. In a quiet voice, he too alleged that he had been beaten repeatedly about the face and body before he was made to pull down his pants. As with González, police allegedly poured water on García's penis and testicles and then prodded them with electrical discharges.
"They held me by the arms and legs and they kept prodding me, down there, in my parts
and I heard people telling me to 'tell the truth.' I asked, 'What truth? What do you want to know?' And they told me to tell them about the women I had killed. I had no knowledge of these women, but they kept on doing it, giving me the electric shocks and beating me. Then they would stop and ask me again."
The painful recollection also brought García to tears. "And finally I couldn't stand it. I wanted them to leave me in peace. They were doing this to me since the Friday afternoon when they picked me up, until the next day, Saturday morning."
The alleged torture had produced the desired effect. The two bus drivers had now become the most recent scapegoats in a rash of arrests that had become known to many in the border city as the proverbial Band-aid for the epidemic.
Yet this time, the citizens of Juárez were asking questions. Few believed the two bus drivers arrested for the murders of the eight young women had committed the crimes. Even members of the victims' families were calling for the men's release. This would mark the first time that the victims and the alleged perpetrators were on the same side against the police.
For one, the families noted that several of the victims had disappeared more than thirteen or fourteen months earlier. Yet within two days of finding their bodies, authorities had the presumed suspects in custody with a mountain of accumulated evidence against them.
Chihuahua State Attorney General Arturo González Rascón and Chihuahua State Deputy Attorney General José Manuel Ortega were in office and overseeing the investigation at the time of the men's arrests. When questioned about how their officers had obtained such evidence, the men divulged that their investigators had been secretly surveilling one of the men for some time.
In other words, they claimed that police had been monitoring Javier "Víctor" García and were hot on his trail, even as he was allegedly murdering the women. The explanation was mind-boggling. How had authorities stood by and allowed the crimes to continue? It made no sense.
Ortega argued that García had opportunities to rape and murder even while under surveillance because police had only been watching García on a part-time basis, not on a twenty-four-hour schedule. Police didn't have the funding to conduct around-the-clock surveillance. Ortega added that they feared if García knew he was being watched, he would change his modus operandi and stop the murders.
The response was startling, and yet officials seemed perfectly comfortable making the ludicrous statement. They even trotted out a videotape of the men's alleged confessions while in police custody. However, later, when reporters wanted to view it first-hand, authorities couldn't produce the videotape. The video had aired on local Juárez television. It showed the two men reciting the details of each of the eight abductions, including the first and last names of their victims, the exact locations where the women were picked up, and descriptions of the garments the women had been wearing, right down to the color of their bras and underwear.
