Interestingly, Ramona Morales, the mother of one of the murdered girls, had spoken of a man in her neighborhood who had been seen driving around taking pictures of young girls. And Sagrario González's family had reported that their daughter's photo was taken by factory personnel just days before she disappeared. Also of note is the fact that in almost all the victims' homes, professional photographs of the slain young women adorned the walls. The portraits, taken to commemorate their fifteenth birthdays, were prominently displayed in ornate frames, capturing the teens in lacy quinceańera dresses with matching veils to mark the special coming-of-age celebrations. The photos, intended to capture a tender moment, were now serving as memorials for the families of the slain young women.
Could the local photographers be somehow involved in the murders? Perhaps they too were providing their negatives to these depraved killers? Anything seemed possible in this lawless border city.
Less than one month after Lastra was taken into custody for allegedly starting the underage prostitution ring, he was released on bail. Lastra vehemently denied the allegations and won his release based on the argument that "he had only kidnapped two young girls, but didn't do anything to them," Adriana Carmona, a lawyer for the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, told CNN.
In an article that appeared in the
Albion Monitor
in January 2005, freelance journalist Kent Paterson reported shocking allegations lodged against the former state police official. According to Paterson, a reporter who had been covering the Juárez murders for some time, the attorney representing the two young women who filed the criminal complaint against Lastra alleged that the police official had been taking minors from Ciudad Juárez to the Chihuahua City campaign headquarters of the PRI. Lawyer Lucha Castro made the allegations at a meeting with the Mexican Chamber of Deputies femicide commission held in December 2004, the article claimed.
The allegations have never been substantiated.
The claims called to mind the eerie circumstances under which twenty-year-old Olga Alicia Pérez had disappeared some years earlier. According to her mother, Irma, the young woman had vanished after attending a political event at the local PAN headquarters in the summer of 1996. Her decomposed remains were later found in Lote Bravo.
Chapter Thirteen
Waiting for Justice
Until there is a serious investigation, any hypothesis is valid.
OSCAR MAYNEZ, CRIMINOLOGIST
BIG-NAME STARS from Hollywood arrived in Ciudad Juárez on Valentine's Day 2004 to join local demonstrators in their demands for justice. Actors Jane Fonda, Sally Field, Salma Hayek, and Christine Lahti, along with Eve Ensler, creator of
The Vagina Monologues,
and U.S. Representatives Hilda Solis of California and Janice Schakowsky of Illinois, united with thousands of protestors as they marched across the international bridge linking Ciudad Juárez with El Paso.
The march was organized by a coalition of Mexican organizations; among them were Esther Chávez's Casa Amiga and the Center for Labor Workshops and Studies. Present as well were representatives from Amnesty International and the V-Day Foundation. Since 1998, V-Day, on Valentine's Day, had been a worldwide event staged in tumultuous countries, including Afghanistan and Croatia, to call attention to violence against women.
Marchers also included two key figures in the investigation, Guadalupe Morfín and María López Urbina.
The fact that the two federal prosecutors were among the demonstrators that day, not only as representatives of the government but also as women taking a stand against violence toward women, was both groundbreaking and courageous. Their participation in the event seemed to signal a turning point in the relationship between government officials and the women they represented.
In the months prior, there had been marked criticism of the arrival of foreigners such as Fonda and other heavy hitters from the United States and other countries shining a spotlight on the plight of women in the city. State officials were charging that local activists, as well as these foreign protestors, were blowing the murders in Ciudad Juárez out of proportion.
The following month, those same two officials tried to put a positive spin on the discovery of yet another murdered woman, whose sexually abused and tortured remains were found on March 10, tossed amid trash on the outskirts of the city.
Soon after the body of Rebeca Contreras was identified, Guadalupe Morfín, the head of President Vicente Fox's new commission, touted the joint police investigation into the Contreras murder as significant because it marked the first time authorities had properly preserved the crime scene. "The difference from earlier cases is that local authorities, with the presence of federal authorities, took care from the first moment to preserve the scene and do a careful handling of the evidence," Morfín told a reporter for CourtTV.com, the Web site operated by the popular cable network, during a telephone interview that April.
That May, authorities tied a pair of narcotraffickers allegedly belonging to the Juárez Cartel to Contreras's death, charging them with the young woman's rape, torture, and murder. While optimistic about the breakthrough investigation, Morfín and other advocates noted that the root of the problem the city's thriving drug trade and corrupt police officials in Ciudad Juárez still needed to be confronted before authorities could appropriately move ahead with the murder investigations.
"There are serious institutional defects in the division of power in our state," Morfín said that spring. "The state government of Chihuahua lacks an ethical system of checks and balances. We need better coordination of federal authorities and to strengthen the lines of cooperation with the civilian society and local authority."
In April 2004, the United Nations released a scathing report, labeling the state's inquiry into the crimes as "tainted by corruption." Of particular concerns to the commission were the pace of the investigation, which was criticized as "slow," and the fabrication of evidence in a number of the homicide cases.
The United Nations committee also criticized Chihuahua officials for their improper handling of the inquiries and suggested that the Mexican government sign a protocol with the United States to conduct a joint investigation into the murders.
Still, the killings of women continued in Chihuahua State amid allegations of political and police corruption. By year's end, authorities were reporting twenty-four femicides in Ciudad Juárez and another eight in Chihuahua City. Of the twenty-four that had occurred in the border city, at least eight had conformed to the earlier profile, according to local activists.
Even more alarming was the fact that the number of femicides in Ciudad Juárez in 2004 was up 58 percent from the previous year. While many in the city hoped the new federal prosecutor would commence an investigation of her own, one year later, her record was no better than the state's.
As part of her role as federal special prosecutor, López Urbina was expected to file periodic reports on her findings. During her investigation, she identified more than 125 former and current state police officers who, she charged, were guilty of torture, abuse of power, and negligence in the investigation of women's murders.
López Urbina requested that authorities in Chihuahua State take immediate disciplinary action against the policemen: she turned over a list of names to state officials. Soon after, she was rotated back to Mexico City, and a replacement, Mireille Roccatti, the former president of Mexico's National Human Rights Commission, was sent to take her place in Ciudad Juárez. Roccatti arrived in Juárez on May 30 but, after only four months, handed in her resignation, taking a new post as a cabinet member for a recently elected public official. Still, Roccatti vowed that her work into the handling of the murder inquiries would be completed by year's end. It was never clear if she intended to finish the job or turn it over to other federal officials for completion. No one was sent to take her place. Instead, the office was dissolved and yet another commission formed.
During her one-year stint, López Urbina had released three separate reports covering a review of 205 of the city's homicide files, comprised of 233 femicides. It is important to note that as special federal prosecutor, López Urbina had no authority to commence an investigation, only to review cases and make recommendations. She found a variety of motives behind the killings, noting that of the 233 homicides she looked at, there was evidence that 84 of the victims had been raped prior to their deaths. In those cases, it was presumed that the crimes were "sexually motivated."
López Urbina noted that of the 205 files she reviewed, 101 had not advanced past the investigative stage. Of those cases, 61 were found not to have a sexual motive.
The remaining 104 had gone to trial, including five in the juvenile justice system.
The report cited that "notorious inactivity and negligence" had led to the "loss of evidence and the inadequate protection of crime scenes."
In her first progress report, López Urbina cited what she termed the most "blatant" failures in 29 cases that were still in the investigatory stages. None of the files showed that the investigators had sought fibers or other forensic clues about the perpetrators; prosecutors had failed to get testimony from key witnesses, such as those who had discovered the bodies; and in some cases, the procedures carried out by investigators were dated before the murders they were investigating had even occurred.
A later report pointed to forensic tests that had been "riddled with grave problems of validity and trustworthiness."
"As a result of these serious deficiencies," López Urbina's final report concluded, "some of the homicide investigations will be practically impossible to solve."
She claimed to have found evidence to presume that 130 Chihuahua justice officials had committed acts of "omission, negligence, malfeasance, or abuse" in their handling of the investigations, and urged state authorities to "prevent impunity for those who acted negligently or were remiss in their duties." She also noted that in a number of the cases, it would be nearly impossible to "capture the killers, given the loss of evidence and inadequate handling of the investigations and the crime scenes."
Surprisingly, López Urbina found no evidence of "irregularities or wrongdoing" in the handling of the 104 cases that had gone to trial a finding that had some raising questions about her investigation.
Based on the findings, some twenty state officials were suspended. But those who lost their jobs were mainly low- to mid-level employees. Glaringly absent were the names of several high-ranking officials who had led the investigations.
López Urbina did, however, name one former state special prosecutor for women's homicides. Zulema Bolívar, who had served in Ciudad Juárez from July 2001 to March 2002, was cited for "negligence."
Bolívar, who was now the assistant director of the Juárez city jail, fired back in November 2004, charging that her former superiors, state attorney general Arturo González and Juárez district attorney José Manuel Ortega, had directed her investigation into the highly controversial cotton field murder case in 2001. During testimony before a federal investigation, Bolívar alleged that, at one point, the two men had even pulled her off the investigation.
It is widely believed that the police "framed" the two bus drivers, Víctor García and Gustavo González Meza.
While Bolívar's allegations pointed to actions greater than negligence on the part of Arturo González and of Ortega, who was now the legal director of the state attorney general's office, neither man was cited in López Urbina's report.
Members of the local press demanded to know if Bolívar's allegations would be pursued. In response, the current attorney general, Patricia González, claimed that legal hurdles barred her from taking any action. For one, she could not commence an investigation unless Bolívar agreed to testify to her allegations at the state level. So far, that had not occurred.
More than twelve of those named by López Urbina in her reports subsequently filed defamation charges against the special prosecutor. The outcome of those filings is not known, as of this printing.
In mid-2005, the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a human rights group based in the U.S. capital, criticized López Urbina's report, suggesting that the data she had used to identify alleged state law enforcement violations was "deficient" and in some cases had even been falsified. The agency pointed to the case of Erica Pérez, whose death was initially ruled a homicide but later determined to be a drug overdose.
And while the special federal prosecutor had been the target of much criticism, she had made several positive contributions during her short time in Ciudad Juárez, founding a DNA bank and victims' registry that now contains the remains of more than one hundred women. An Amber Alert program was also implemented in the months after her departure.
Guadalupe Morfín, meanwhile, the head of Fox's new federal commission to look into the murder investigations in Ciudad Juárez, had won a small victory in early 2004, gaining the transfer of murder suspect Víctor García (the bus driver charged with the eight cotton field murders) from the state prison in Chihuahua City back to Juárez's El Cereso jail. But her subsequent efforts on García's behalf proved unsuccessful.
