Morfín filed an application with the court to invoke the Istanbul Protocol. First adopted by the United Nations in 1999, the protocol outlined international guidelines for the assessment of persons who allege torture or maltreatment by members of law enforcement, the military, and others. Morfín arranged interviews with federal officials to verify the bus driver's claims of torture at the hands of members of the state police.
But her application to invoke the Istanbul Protocol in García's case, and a second filing, in which she called for the charges against the bus driver to be dropped for "lack of physical evidence," were ignored by Chihuahua State Justice Javier Pineda Arzola of the Seventh Criminal Court. Instead, on October 13, 2004, just ten days after a new governor took office, Justice Pineda dismissed Morfín's calls for a review of the case. He convicted García of the eight killings and sentenced him to fifty years in prison for the crimes. Conspicuously absent that day was García's alleged accomplice, Gustavo González Meza, who had died in jail under mysterious circumstances the previous year, and González Meza's lawyer, Mario Escobedo Jr., who had been "mistakenly" shot by members of the state police just days before he was expected to file a criminal complaint against the state police department.
Even President Fox had been unsuccessful in his calls for García's release. Soon after the judge sentenced the bus driver for the murders, the Mexican president spoke out, insisting that the evidence against García did not appear to be enough to convict him of the homicides. Yet even Fox could do little to stop the corrupt justice system in Chihuahua State.
Interestingly, Justice Pineda, according to news reports, was married to Patricia González, the then newly installed attorney general of Chihuahua State. Growing discontent among Chihuahuans led to yet another shift in political power that October with voters choosing José Reyes Baeza of the PRI party as the state's new governor. Victims' families and human rights advocates again had hopes his victory would lead to a change in the handling of the murder investigations. Once in office, Baeza named Patricia González, a former judge, to serve under him as state attorney general.
While women's rights activists were, at first, pleased that a woman had been installed in the powerful law enforcement post, there was some concern that Patricia González might not be an independent thinker but rather "part of the system" someone who would have been called upon to overlook certain matters. Time would prove to be her best, or worst, ally.
In late August of 2004, federal officials announced an assistance program for the families of the murdered women in Ciudad Juárez. Authorities selected thirty mothers from a group of forty-seven families whose cases "fit the serial rape/murder profile" to be given houses the following month. The residences would be in a remote desert area on the outskirts of the city. The remaining seventeen families were told they would receive housing by the end of 2004.
In January of 2005, Justice Pineda returned guilty verdicts against six members of Los Rebeldes. The men had been in prison for eight years awaiting trials when the decision to convict was rendered on January 6, 2005. It was a clear violation of the Mexican justice system that the men were allowed to languish for such an extended period of time. A report by the United States Department of State that looked at human rights practices in Mexico in 2005 found gross violations of the Mexican constitution as it applied to the legal rights of detainees.
Under Mexican law a prosecutor may hold a person up to forty-eight hours (ninety-six hours in the case of organized crime) before presenting the suspect to a judge and announcing charges. "The law provides that authorities must sentence an accused person within four months of detention if the alleged crime carries a sentence of less than two years' imprisonment, or within one year if the crime carries a longer sentence; in practice, judicial and police authorities frequently ignored these time limits," the report charged.
The report also noted that Mexican law "prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention, as well as sponsoring or covering up an illegal detention; however, police routinely ignored these provisions.
"Judges continued to allow statements coerced through torture to be used as evidence against the accused, a practice particularly subject to abuse because confessions were primary evidence in nearly all criminal convictions. Members of the non-government agencies (NGOs) declared that judges often gave greater evidentiary value to the first declaration of a defendant, thus providing prosecutors an incentive to obtain an incriminating first confession and making it difficult for defendants to disavow such declarations."
At one time, the six members of Los Rebeldes had been implicated in seventeen of the city's homicides, but little by little, those charges had been scaled back to include just six homicides. The gang members received sentences ranging from twenty-four to forty years in prison for the crimes. Said to be among the cases for which the men were convicted was the murder of Olga Alicia Pérez, the young woman who was last seen attending a meeting of the PAN political party. Police had first attributed her murder to Sharif Sharif but later charged that members of the violent street gang were responsible for her death.
That it took so many years to finally convict these men of the charges against them raised suspicions among members of the city's women's rights groups. "If they were sure these men committed the crimes, why did it take eight years to find them guilty?" asked Esther Chávez. "What worries me is that the government may be trying to say the cases have been solved when there are still so many gaps in the investigations."
Ironically, on the same day the gang members were sentenced, a second judge, Héctor Javier Talamantes of Chihuahua's Fourth Criminal Court, rendered a guilty verdict against the four members of Los Toltecas, who were also facing six counts of murder. Like the Rebels, these men had sat idle in jail for five years before going to trial on the charges. Manuel Guardado, the alleged leader of Los Toltecas, received the stiffest sentence, of 113 years, for the crimes. The three other men received 40 years each for their roles in the slayings.
And still, the murders continued. The number of homicides against women rose from eighteen in 2004 to thirty-one in 2005, according to the special federal commission for the prevention of violence against women in Juárez. Eight of those murders were determined to have been sexually motivated.
At the request of Commissioner Morfín, a team of Argentine forensic scientists came to Juárez in January 2005 to help identify the remains of what were believed to be more than twenty people sharing a common grave in the city's graveyard. The team first gained recognition in the mid-1980s by implementing advanced DNA techniques to learn the identities of victims killed during Argentina's military coup, in which members of the country's armed forces overthrew the government, leading to allegations of human rights violations and war atrocities. The forensic scientists had also assisted U.S. officials to identify victims of the World Trade Center bombing that occurred on September 11, 2001. It was decided that the scientists would work in tandem with state forensic experts but would remain independent of the Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office to ensure their freedom from political pressure.
When the team offered its findings to State Attorney General Patricia González, however, she declined to review the documents. News reports indicated that González's office had stated that the report was not relevant to the state investigation.
In August, the team concluded that many of the bodies they studied had been misidentified, including at least some of the victims found in the abandoned cotton field. The forensic team determined that Guadalupe Luna de la Rosa, Verónica Hernández, and Bárbara Martínez were not among the bodies exhumed from the abandoned field, delivering an emotional blow to the young women's families, who had believed they had buried their murdered children. The questions remained, who were these girls and what would be done to rectify the botched investigation?
It is likely that many of the earlier cases of misidentification may never be sorted out, since it has been documented by federal officials in Mexico, as well as independent foreign organizations, that officials had either lost, mishandled, burned, or intentionally destroyed much of the evidence collected in those cases.
The
Dallas Morning News
reported one example of the gross neglect that has been occurring since the first bodies were plucked from the desert in 1993. Apparently, when one crime scene investigator could no longer endure the putrid smell of the blood-soaked clothing of a ten-year-old murder victim that was being stored in the warehouse where he was assigned, he ordered the garments washed and then deodorized with fabric softener. The officer's action, whether unwitting or intentional, destroyed any possible clues that might have helped authorities solve the crime.
An equally startling occurrence was related to members of Mexico's National Human Rights Commission during an investigation they carried out around that same time. Members of the commission learned that in the winter of 2003, some homeless men had taken shelter in one of the warehouses where a number of the state's case files were being stored. The men had allegedly used the documents to start a fire so they could stay warm. There were even allegations that some of the files had been sold to criminal suspects intent on clearing their names, according to the
Dallas Morning News.
* * *
On March 9, 2005, the Seventh Judge of Juárez City indicted former state prosecutor Suly Ponce on charges of "authority abuse and negligence" during the investigation of 47 cases. That same year, a judge from the First Court found Ponce guilty as charged and ordered her to jail. But penal judge Juan Carlos Carrasco, who ruled to acquit Ponce of all charges, quickly threw out her sentence.
News accounts stated that in addition to Ponce, 150 other state officials cited for negligence by former federal prosecutor Maria López Urbina were later exonerated.
Bus driver Víctor García finally won his freedom in the summer of 2005. On July 14, Judge Rodolfo Acosta overturned García's conviction on the eight cotton field killings, ruling that testimony from a key witness in the case was "unreliable."
Amid much fanfare, Víctor García walked out of the Chihuahua state prison just twenty minutes after the ruling was rendered. While the victory was sweet, it was dampened by the fact that the judge declined to rule on García's claims that he, and his alleged accomplice, Gustavo González Meza, had been tortured into making a videotaped confession of their complicity in the murders. Worse, during his more than three years in prison, García lost his business, his savings, and his wife to another man, according to a story that ran in the
New York Times.
"Imagine it," he told a reporter. "Everywhere she went, people looked at her like she was married to a terrible criminal, when the real criminals were outside. They still are."
In a poignant statement, García later apologized to his slain friend, Gustavo González, for falsely naming him under conditions of extreme torture. One news report contended that the reason García had implicated González was that the day before he was detained by state police, he had been a passenger on a bus driven by González.
Remarkably, it is still unclear whether the public prosecutor's office will appeal the overturned verdict in García's case. Statements by Governor Reyes Baeza suggested that García was still considered a suspect, in part because the federal government's application of the Istanbul Protocol had failed to find evidence that he was tortured.
The year 2006 brought more substantive developments, beginning in January with what can only be described as a gang hit on criminal defense lawyer Sergio Dante Almaraz. Dante Almaraz was the former defense attorney for now released bus driver Víctor García. According to news accounts, on the afternoon of January 25, Dante Almaraz was accompanied by a friend and driving a Chevy Suburban through downtown Juárez when a group of unidentified men fired on the lawyer's vehicle from a dark-colored Ford Expedition with New Mexico license plates. Almaraz's passenger survived the attack, but the lawyer was struck by a bullet and killed that afternoon. Police determined the bullet was fired from either an AK-47 or a nine millimeter weapon but made no arrests in the case.
In recent days, Almaraz, president of the Chihuahua State branch of the alternative Convergence for Democracy Party, or Convergencia, had been involved in an angry and highly publicized dispute with the Juárez district attorney over alleged links to stolen vehicles. Days before his murder, Almaraz announced that if anything should happen to him, members of the public prosecutor's office would be responsible. Others speculated that the lawyer's murder could be linked to his representation of Víctor García. In the days after the shooting, it was reported that three cameras set up on nearby intersections to monitor traffic had not captured any of the incident. Two were reported as being inoperable, and a third was facing the opposite direction at the time of the shooting.
Almaraz's murder prompted the lawyer's brother to call for a tourist boycott of the border city. He later confided that he and other relatives were too scared to cross the border from their home in El Paso to attend Dante's funeral.
Less than six months later, on June 1, news came that Sharif Sharif had died at a state hospital in Chihuahua after having served eleven years of his thirty-year sentence at Chihuahua's Aquiles Serdán prison for the murder of Elizabeth Castro. According to authorities, he had been transported there several days earlier for "digestive problems."
