It was not long before the radio host joined the growing list of people receiving death threats from anonymous callers. In an interview, Izaguirre said the situation grew so terrifying that she was forced to relocate across the border to El Paso. Though frightened, she was also furious over what she labeled "the worst case ever of political harassment against journalists in Ciudad Juárez." The talk show host contended that local and state officials had pressured advertisers to pull their ads from her show. Citing a decline in revenue, the radio station subsequently canceled the program.
"The pressure was such that they succeeded in driving us out," she said in an interview with Univision that spring. "I felt such impotence; not only was my freedom of expression curtailed and finally silenced, but at the national level we proclaim that Mexico has a real lack of freedom of expression, and as a result of allowing people to express themselves, I am now out of a job.
"My family was afraid for my life," Izaguirre continued. "And I was afraid myself, for my life and my personal safety. Look what happened to Defense Attorney Escobedo. He got killed by the state police, and after they killed him, they made the statement, 'Yes, we killed him, but we killed him because he was disguised as a killer!' "
In addition to going on a hunger strike herself, Samira Izaguirre had been instrumental in organizing a candlelight vigil held in early December to memorialize the eight victims found in the cotton field. During her radio show,
Calibre 800,
she had asked for donations of 10,000 candles for the event. Remarkably, her request had yielded nearly triple that number: 27,000 candles illuminated the otherwise sterile field like a warm carpet of lights. Eight tall pink crosses were erected that night, bearing the names of the eight young women whose bodies had been found there.
Mourners stood by in silence as the mothers of the dead girls placed bouquets of plastic flowers at the foot of the crosses, which were inscribed in bold black script. One family had carefully formed the shape of a human body with the artificial floral arrangements to memorialize their dead child.
"It was a way of showing the mothers and the families of the victims that the community feels their loss," Izaguirre said of the candlelight vigil. "It was a way of telling them, 'We are with you.' "
The event, which had garnered enormous local and national media attention, culminated with demonstrators, including Izaguirre, carrying an enormous steel cross from the cotton field to the downtown building housing the offices of the state attorney general and state police. There the mourners planted the giant symbol for all to view, a poignant message to state officials not to forget the victims.
Once in El Paso, Izaguirre joined demonstrators and Texas state legislators on March 9, 2002, in a binational protest to demand justice for the slain women of their sister city, Juárez.
Eyebrows were raised that afternoon when one federal official from Mexico City, Deputy Attorney General Jorge Campos Murillo, stood before reporters and charged that some of the murders were the work of a group called Juniors, sons of wealthy Mexican families whose influence and clout were such that authorities were turning a blind eye to their culpability in the killings.
Campos's accusation was stunning. But like so many other possible leads in the case, it went nowhere. In a daring move, Campos contacted officials at the Mexican consulate in El Paso to ask for assistance from the FBI. Soon afterward, he was transferred to another department. After the transfer, Campos refused to answer questions from the press.
Campos was not the only federal official to make allegations. Other federal law enforcement officials said that six people, all prominent men from the JuárezEl Paso region and the Mexican border city of Tijuana, had arranged abductions of Mexican women, who were forced to participate in orgies and then murdered, according to a story that appeared in the
El Paso Times.
The newspaper alleged the suspects were "men who cross the border regularly, are involved in major businesses, are associates of drug cartels and have ties to politicians in President Vicente Fox's administration."
In response to the accusations, a spokesperson for the federal attorney general's office, Gabriela López, told the newspaper, "These cases do not fall under [federal] jurisdiction
the Chihuahua state attorney general's office is handling the cases."
Chihuahua state officials in 2002 acknowledged they were investigating "a high-profile suspect" whom they would not identify because the information was part of "a pending investigation."
* * *
That September, members of the Juárez business community were up in arms over the erection of a giant wooden cross calling attention to the unsolved murders, that had been placed in the downtown area, on the Mexican side of the border, just over the Santa Fe Bridge. In a letter to Major Jesús Delgado of the Juárez Police Department, members of the Association of Business Owners and Professionals of Juárez Avenue, a main shopping street, expressed their displeasure with the message the large symbol was sending, calling it "a horrible image for tourism."
While officials were responding to the complaint, residents learned that two more bodies had been found. Initial reports claimed that one of the victims, Erica Pérez, a twenty-six-year-old mother of two, whose partially clad body was discovered in a vacant field on September 23, had been raped and strangled. Family members of the unemployed maquila worker said Pérez had vanished on the day she went out in search of a job.
The second victim, officials claimed, was an unidentified female whose skeletal remains were found behind a maquiladora plant that same day.
In a bizarre twist, then Attorney General Jesús José Solís Silva quickly revised information released about the circumstances of Pérez's death, insisting that the young woman had died of a drug overdose, not strangulation as had first been reported. The new finding was questioned by a special investigator. Still, it allowed officials to remove Pérez's name from the official femicide roster.
State lawmakers would later come under fire for "downplaying" the murder rate in Ciudad Juárez by omitting the cause of death from official reports and fabricating information to close the cases. In addition, for the first time in the city's memory, the families of victims and the families of the supposed killers were joining to demand an official inquiry into the handling of the investigation into the cotton field murders. Neither party believed the bus drivers were behind the killings, and they were rallying against the authorities.
By the fall of 2002, even activist Esther Chávez was growing weary. By then, she had changed her focus and was no longer leading protest marches and fighting so aggressively for the dead women of Juárez. Instead, she was struggling to keep Casa Amiga, her center for poor and abused women, open and afloat. Like many other nonprofit organizations, Casa Amiga was running out of government funds and was facing the possibility of having to close its doors. In late 2001, the center's funding had been halted after Juárez mayor Gustavo Elizondo's PAN party lost control of the city. The local election had resulted in an annulment, and state officials had appointed a PRI interim mayor. Chávez was on pins and needles waiting and wondering if Casa Amiga would be able to continue on donations only.
In February 2002, two local politicians agreed to postpone any decision on funding for the crisis center, and a subsequent review by members of two local agencies determined that Casa Amiga was receiving too much money from the municipality.
While one PAN city counselor spoke out in favor of Chávez and her important work for the city's women, others were expressing a desire to cut back on the financing.
Still, Chávez remained active, continuing to collect and record data on the murdered girls and advocating for justice for the families. Her latest fight was over a proposed state law in Chihuahua that would reduce the sentence for rape from four years to one year if a man could prove that a woman had provoked him.
The proposed law, Chávez argued, "shows the root problem behind the Ciudad Juárez murders that in a society where men cannot be charged with raping their wives and domestic abuse is rarely prosecuted, authorities simply do not take violence against women seriously enough."
* * *
Several politicians in Juárez renewed their calls for the resignation of Chihuahua attorney general Jesús José Solís Silva after he sought to minimize the significance of the crimes against women there, insisting that local activists and others who had come to Mexico from the United States to advocate for the victims and their families were "blowing the crimes out of proportion."
The political climate grew even worse when authorities announced that DNA results on the eight bodies found in the cotton field that past November did not match seven of the supposed victims. The findings raised new questions about the identities of the women dumped or buried in the overgrown field. The revelation sent shock waves through the city, also raising questions about the case against the two bus drivers being held for the murders.
According to the test results, released by the federal attorney general's office in late October, only the DNA from the family of Verónica Martínez Hernández matched the DNA of the body found in the abandoned field.
In addition to creating uncertainty for the relatives of the other seven women whose families had already buried the bodies given to them by state authorities the negative test results also contradicted the state's case against Gustavo González Meza and Víctor García Uribe, who had supposedly named the women during their confessions. The new development bolstered the men's claims that they had been tortured into admitting to the killings.
Even more troubling was that authorities were now asking members of two families, those of Esmeralda Herrera Monreal and Claudia Ivette González, for additional "data" for more forensic studies in light of "inconclusive" findings in their cases. In an interview with a local Juárez newspaper, Mayela González, the sister of Claudia Ivette, said that while "disturbed" over the recent developments, the family still believed the body they had been presented was, in fact, Claudia Ivette. Mayela noted that dental work, and other physical characteristics, including hair color, ponytail holders, and a curve in the bone of one of the fingers, led them to believe that the body they had buried that past November was, indeed, her sister.
But others remained in doubt and were calling on federal authorities to get to the bottom of what many viewed as ongoing cover-ups and conspiracies at work in the border city.
Officials offered no explanation for the DNA debacle or any justification for their continuing to hold the two men who had allegedly confessed to killing women whose bodies were not even among those recovered from the crime scene. What was clear was that the early warning issued by Oscar Maynez was now coming to fruition: the authorities' case against the bus drivers was not holding up. Nevertheless, they continued to stand behind the flawed theory.
Chapter Twelve
Impunity Reigns
"I realize that Mexico is a leading violator of human rights."
SERGIO DANTE ALMARAZ, ATTORNEY REPRESENTING ACCUSED BUS DRIVER VÍCTOR GARCÍA
TWO SIGNIFICANT MILESTONES in the history of these cases occurred in February 2003 when the attorney for Sharif Sharif appealed his conviction in the Elizabeth Castro case and one of the accused bus drivers linked to the cottonfield eight, Gustavo González Meza, was found dead in his prison cell.
Sharif Sharif's attorney, Irene Blanco, had won the right to appeal citing problems with the evidence used in the lower-court conviction. But the Egyptian's appeal failed and the convicted murderer was sent back to prison. "I am innocent!" Sharif had shouted when the judge upheld the sentence. "I'm afraid. I don't know what's going to become of me." Sharif Sharif did win a small victory, though, when the judge presiding over his appeal agreed to shave ten years off his sentence, reducing it from thirty years to twenty years for the single murder charge. Both the defense and the prosecution promised to appeal the judge's ruling. Furthermore, prosecutors suggested that additional murder charges against Sharif were pending.
Meanwhile, González was discovered dead in his cell at the maximum-security facility in Chihuahua City on February 8, leaving behind a wife, three young children, and the infant girl who was born after his arrest. While authorities listed the official cause of death to be "disseminated vascular coagulation," or cardiac arrest as a result of a blood clot following a hernia operation, news outlets called his death "suspicious."
The attorney Dante Almaraz and members of the González family, including the bus driver's twenty-three-year-old widow, Blanca Guadalupe López de González, raised questions as to who had ordered the surgery be performed. Relatives claimed that no one was contacted prior to the operation, nor had they granted permission for González to be transferred from the prison to the hospital where the operation was allegedly performed. In addition, it seemed irregular that the bus driver would have been left alone in his cell following major surgery, although in an interview with Univision, the twenty-three-year-old Blanca González said she had spoken with her husband after the surgery and he told her, "They've operated on me. I'm out. I'm fine."
Blanca vowed to move "sea and land" to get a second autopsy performed on her husband's body and clear his name. "This is cruel," she told the Juárez newspaper
