Armendáriz's dark eyes narrowed as he recalled the police interrogation that had landed him in jail. "They grabbed my right arm to make me sign a document, a confession," he began. "And what do they know? I'm left-handed! And look, look at this scar on my forehead. They did this to me with a gun butt, because I wouldn't sign!
"Not only that! They cuffed me! I was handcuffed for three days inside the jail!
"I didn't sign and I didn't confess because I didn't do anything. I will not accept a guilt that is not mine."
While his nickname sounded sinister, like a title he had acquired because of his alleged gang activities, Armendáriz insisted it was actually a pet name given to him by his mother when he was a young boy because he was so devilish. He further claimed there wasn't even a gang called Los Rebeldes.
"There's an area, a barrio, a sector of the city where people like to have all kinds of fun," he said. "What's wrong with that? They congregate in that part of the city
. And that's an area where people can have fun.
"In other words, an area where you can go and dance and where you can get anything you want. So how can we call a gang by the name of that area, Los Rebeldes? I don't know who Los Rebeldes are. When they talk about that in here, they talk about those of us who are detained in here. I can't believe anything else, because like I've told the authorities, everything else, including the girls they're accusing me of murdering
is a fabrication!"
Armendáriz swore that he had never met Sharif. But authorities maintained they had proof that the gang leader had committed at least one of the murders. An odontological profile revealed that a bite mark found on the breast of one of the murdered women matched the teeth of Sergio Armendáriz, they said.
"According to the DA's office, the first set of tests on my teeth correspond to the bite marks on the body, to the marks that are on the breast," Armendáriz acknowledged. "But then my attorneys hired a dentist and that dentist's tests indicate the contrary. Then they did further testing and that's what we're waiting for now.
"And once they prove it isn't true, that they aren't my teeth marks, then, with the grace of God, I'll be able to get out.
"Furthermore, the authorities said they had video that showed me murdering a woman, and when we demanded to see that video, they never showed it to us. If they were shooting a video, how come they didn't stop me from committing the crime they thought I was committing before I supposedly murdered her?"
When questioned by members of the media, Mexican officials produced no video and no proof of any meetings taking place at the jail between alleged gang members and their supposed leader, Sharif Sharif, nor did they offer any evidence of financial transactions between the parties.
Still, authorities insisted Armendáriz and the others were behind the killings, and for a time the city was quiet once again.
* * *
The discovery of twenty-five more bodies in 1997 plunged the residents of Juárez into a panic anew and raised even more questions about police claims that Sharif Sharif and the gang members were responsible for all the murders.
Even after authorities claimed to have linked Sharif Sharif and gang leader Sergio Armendáriz to at least two of the killings through bite marks found on the women's breasts, the murders were continuing, leaving open the real possibility that the culprit or culprits were still at large.
Charges had been dropped against five of the ten gang members who had first been taken into custody. Ceniceros, Guermes, Hernández, Olivares, and Fierro had all been freed for lack of evidence. Still, five, including Armendáriz, remained incarcerated at El Cereso for the murders.
As in previous cases, the latest victims were petite and pretty, with long dark hair and full lips. Many worked in the factories and, like the earlier victims, had been snatched from the downtown district in broad daylight. Their bodies exhibited signs of rape and mutilation when they were found rotting in remote locations around the industrial city.
Among the latest fatalities was a twenty-two-year-old mother named Silvia Guadalupe Díaz, who vanished without a trace on March 7, after having gone to a local maquiladora to ask for work.
As with earlier victims, Díaz's disappearance was never investigated by police. Officers disregarded her husband's repeated pleas for help in locating his young bride. Silvia had left him with their three-month-old baby boy and toddler girl when she left that morning in search of a job to help feed her family. Yet authorities didn't appear concerned over the young mother's failure to return home that day, even as corpses continued to pile up like cordwood.
In the days after Díaz's disappearance, the bodies of several more victims were recovered. On March 11, a rancher out riding his horse came upon the skeletal remains of a ten-year-old girl who had been raped, beaten, strangled, and partially buried in a barren stretch of land south of the city.
Three days later, the body of an eleven-year-old girl was discovered in Cerro Bola, the same stretch of desert where the first of the serial killer's victims was found in January 1993. Police said the child had been raped after she was murdered. An autopsy revealed she had been stabbed fifteen times in the neck and chest and died of excessive bleeding.
Then, on March 21, two more young victims were found. One was sixteen, the other eighteen. Both women had been sexually assaulted and dumped in remote areas outside the city. The eighteen-year-old had five puncture wounds on her neck.
On March 29, agricultural workers finally came across the naked and battered body of the twenty-two-year-old mother, Silvia Díaz. Her mutilated remains had been dumped in an irrigation ditch about 820 yards west of the Juárez Porvenir Highway in Lote Bravo. Her undergarments and a uniform, similar to the ones worn by maquila workers, were found nearby. It appeared that Díaz had found work and had been toting the new smock her employers had given her home in preparation for her new job.
According to her mother-in-law, Díaz was last seen at a factory in one of Juárez's many industrial parks. An autopsy revealed she had been raped and strangled. The body showed signs of having been dumped soon after her disappearance on the seventh, left for the coyotes and rats roaming the desert sands.
The new wave of killings sparked more angry protests, with relatives of the murdered women joining local activists in once again demanding justice. That the women of Juárez were organizing and taking a stand against the authorities was groundbreaking. This would mark the first time in Mexican history that women were putting women's issues on the agenda of government.
It was an anomaly that Mexican women were finding jobs by the thousands in these maquiladoras along the border. In the past, they rarely would have considered leaving the home to work. Now these women were an important part of the workforce. They were suddenly out of the home and making a living just like men.
Maquiladora managers were anxious to hire women because they could be paid a lower wage than men. They were also preferred because the managers believed they had superior manual dexterity and were better suited to perform the repetitive and often physically debilitating tasks required of assembly-line workers. Production rates were higher with female employees, they said, because women were able to perform the jobs more effectively and at a quicker pace.
Pioneer women's activist Esther Chávez Cano charged that by employing mostly women, these foreign companies were unwittingly sparking a clash over gender roles in Mexico. Perhaps the murders of the young maquila workers were somehow linked to that conflict.
A slender wisp of a woman, with short auburn hair and rimless eyeglasses, Chávez had long been urging authorities to take aggressive action to track down and apprehend whoever was responsible for the murders. She had even started a local women's group, 8 de Marzo, named for March 8, International Women's Day, to push for more public action against the continuing crimes.
Her interest in the murders dated back to 1993, when she began to notice short news items reporting the killings buried inside the local newspaper, almost like footnotes, and one after the other. The crimes never seemed to capture the front pages, no matter how grisly they were or how many girls were disappearing.
With news of each new homicide, the fiery activist sought to learn as much as she could about the circumstances surrounding the murder. As part of her research, she even went to the crime scenes. Chávez found that many of the girls had been snatched from the downtown area while waiting for a bus; their slight, mutilated bodies were cast into the desert lands encircling the city with little regard. A majority of victims were slender and petite, weighing between ninety and one hundred pounds, with long dark hair, plump lips, and olive complexions.
For the most part, the dead girls were poor and their families had little if any money to track down the culprits or raise awareness of the crimes. With no phones and no means of transportation, relatives of the missing women had to travel for miles on foot just to file a missing person's report or to check for news. Often they were turned away, told to come back in seventy-two hours to speak with an officer. By then it was too late.
Chávez was outraged that in spite of the growing body count, authorities were continuing to blame the victims for bringing on the sexual assaults by walking the streets unescorted in short skirts and shoes with high heels provocative attire that investigators insinuated had led to their murders. She pointed out that a majority of the dead women had been dressed in slacks or blue jeans when they disappeared.
"If you want to rape and kill a woman, there is no better place to do it than in Juárez," Esther wrote in an op-ed column that appeared in the fall of 1995 in the same newspaper in which Dr. Irma Rodríguez published her autopsy findings on the Morales girl.
By mid-1997, Chávez was publicly demanding the resignation of the state police official overseeing the investigations, charging that the department hadn't done its job and that new investigators needed to be brought in on the case. Her request prompted authorities from the Chihuahua State Police Department, who normally were mum about the status of the investigation, to comment publicly.
In June, Julián Calderón Gutiérrez, first commander of the state police, insisted his officers were making solid progress. On June 2, Calderón told the
Las Vegas Sun,
one of a number of newspapers in the United States that were following the wave of murders, "We know many people believe we're not even investigating, but the fact is we have fourteen officers assigned to these cases alone, and we've cleared up a number of them and are progressing on others."
Still, mounting public criticism prompted Chihuahua state attorney general Arturo Chávez Chávez (no relation to activist Esther Chávez) in late 1997 to announce the creation of a new task force to investigate the growing number of murders in Juárez. The Special Task Force for the Investigation of Crimes Against Women (FEDCM) would operate out of the satellite office maintained by the attorney general in Juárez under the direction of a special prosecutor handpicked by Chávez himself.
Not surprisingly, the attorney general was quickly criticized for having waited more than three years to act. Arturo Chávez had been in office since 1994. Yet by the time the task force was formed, more than 170 women had been murdered in Juárez, and the number was continuing to climb.
Critics suggested the new unit was designed to quell citizen unrest before the election process heated up; state elections were to be held in July of 1998. (The municipal government of Juárez and the state government in Chihuahua City were both under PAN rule.) Chávez was also forced to respond to questions about missing evidence and incidents in which journalists and bystanders trampled the crime scenes, leaving empty soda cans and cigarette butts in their wake.
Chapter Four
The Devil Is in Juárez
I was looking for her, but I wasn't looking for her among the dead, I was looking for her alive.
JESúS GONZáLEZ, FATHER OF VICTIM, SAGRARIO GONZáLEZ
EVEN WITH THE ATTORNEY GENERAL'S newly created special task force, the murders of pretty, young Mexican women appeared to continue unabated, with thirty-eight more homicides in 1998 nearly half exhibiting signs of sexual assault and mutilation. Among them was a young factory worker named María Sagrario González Flores.
Like Silvia Morales, this young teen was last seen transferring buses in the center of the city on April 16. Her family maintains she was snatched in broad daylight, either while waiting at the bus transfer site or during her lonely walk home to the desert colonia of Lomas de Poleo, located northwest of the city.
For weeks Paula González Flores had been begging her seventeen-year-old daughter to quit her job at the downtown maquila, where she worked the assembly line, soldering electrical components for Capco Crane & Hoist, a New Englandbased crane manufacturer. Flores became concerned after managers at the plant insisted Sagrario change her shift from the overnight to the early morning, which began promptly at 6 a.m.
What plant managers may have failed to realize was that by changing the young girl's hours, they were putting her in grave danger. Sagrario had been commuting by van to work each day with her father, Jesús, and older sister, Guillermina, who also worked at the plant on the overnight shift but in different departments.
