[News] Juarez Mothers Demand Justice for their Murdered Daughters

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Juarez Mothers Demand Justice for their Murdered Daughters

May 10, 2008 By Kent Paterson

For more than a decade now, investigators from 
the United Nations, Inter-American Commission for 
Human Rights, Amnesty International, 
International Human Rights Federation, Washington 
Office on Latin America, and even the Mexico 
government's own National Human Rights Commission 
have visited the border and issued reports that 
harshly criticize law enforcement's responses to the brutal killings.



The European Parliament, U.S. Congress, New 
Mexico State Senate, and other entities have 
passed resolutions condemning the femicides. A 
police hotline to receive anonymous tips was 
established across the border from Ciudad Juarez in El Paso, Texas.



Despite the international outcry, scores­perhaps 
hundreds­of murders and disappearances of young 
women remain unsolved. Refusing to let the 
memories of their loved ones die, mothers of 
femicide victims and their supporters are once 
again taking to the streets. On International 
Women's Day 2008, protestors from both sides of 
the border filed past the familiar cross monument 
in honor of murdered women that guards one of the 
entrances to Ciudad Juarez from El Paso at the foot of the Santa Fe Bridge.



"There is not much to celebrate this day, because 
there is a common objective and that's to end 
this climate of impunity and the inefficient 
response of the authorities," Imelda Marrufo, 
director of Ciudad Juarez's Women's Organizations Network, told the press.



"There continues to be a lack of real political 
will to confront the problem in a serious way," 
agreed Humberto Guerrero, case manager for the 
non-governmental Mexican Commission for the 
Defense and Promotion of Human Rights (CMDPDH).



A recent CMDPDH report, Femicides in Chihuahua, 
helps shed additional light on the impunity that 
persists in Ciudad Juarez and other parts of 
Mexico. The report contains an exhaustive 
analysis of Mexico's obligations under numerous 
international human rights agreements and 
detailed reviews of recommendations made by a 
long parade of international and national investigators.



While recognizing official, multi-agency efforts 
to at least acknowledge the murders and 
disappearances of women, the Mexico City-based 
CMDPDH concludes that victims' relatives are 
still locked out of the justice system.



In an interview, Guerrero questioned contentions 
by Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia 
Gonzalez and other Mexican officials that most of 
the Ciudad Juarez murders have been cleared up 
and successfully processed by the justice system. 
Gonzalez's office, the PGJE, has long been 
responsible under Mexican law for investigating and prosecuting the femicides.



In a June 2007 presentation to the European 
Parliament, Gonzalez reported that of 413 murder 
cases in Ciudad Juarez opened by the PGJE from 
Jan. 21, 1993 to May 18, 2007, eight were ruled 
suicides, 264 were resolved, and 139 were still being investigated.



"To begin with, there are doubts about the 
numbers of women reported murdered," Guerrero 
contended, "but we think it is deceptive to enter 
into a numbers game since it diverts attention 
away from the principal problem in these cases, 
which is access to the justice system as well as 
impunity. Besides that, we don't think the lives 
of 50 women are worth more or worth less than the lives of 500 or 1,000."



Other researchers, including El Paso author Diana 
Washington Valdez, who documented murders from 
1993 to 2005 (including 120-130 sex-related 
crimes) for her book Harvest of Women, have 
reported far more murders than the 413 recognized 
by Gonzalez. If killings from the last three 
years are added to Washington's figures, the toll 
of women murdered for all motives in Ciudad Juarez exceeds 500 since 1993.



What Ciudad Juarez sociologist Dr. Julia Monarrez 
calls "organized serial killings," in which as 
many as eight bodies were recovered at once from 
a single location, and other murders highly 
suspected of involving organized crime, stand out 
as unpunished crimes to this day. Drug 
traffickers, gang members, individual serial 
killers, businessmen, and even officers from the 
same agency tasked with investigating the crimes 
have been implicated in different press accounts.



Guadalupe Morfin, President Fox's former femicide 
commissioner for Ciudad Juarez and the current 
special federal prosecutor for crimes against 
women and human trafficking, acknowledged the 
possible involvement of PGJE personnel in the 
femicides in a report she delivered in Los Pinos, 
the Mexican White House, in June 2004. Earlier, 
in November 2003, representatives of Ciudad 
Juarez mothers personally delivered a list of 
possible murder suspects to President Fox in 
Mexico City. Not one was ever arrested.



According to Guerrero, the CMDPDH gave members of 
the administration of Chihuahua Governor Jose 
Reyes Baeza a chance to offer their own comments 
for Femicides in Chihuahua before it was 
published, but the officials did not respond. In 
2007, the human rights attorney met with 
then-Ciudad Juarez Mayor Hector "Teto" Murguia 
and his former public safety chief Marco Antonio 
Torres. The two officials were defensive, 
Guerrero said, demanding to know why Ciudad Juarez was being singled out.



Torres' second-in-command and partner in the 
radio business, Saulo Reyes, was arrested by U.S. 
Immigration and Customs Enforcement in El Paso 
for allegedly smuggling half a ton of marijuana 
into the United States in January of this year. 
Earlier, Torres' department was recognized for 
its anti-crime efforts at a ceremony attended by 
U.S. law enforcement representatives. Since 
Reyes' arrest, scores of Ciudad Juarez policemen 
have died in gangland-style shootings, have quit 
the force before investigations could reach them, 
or have been arrested for drug dealing.



The State's Response



Starting in the mid-1990s, the response to the 
femicides from Chihuahua state and Mexican 
federal law enforcement officials and elected 
officials might be summed up as a multi-layered 
exercise in denial, delay, delusion, dollars, and 
diversion. Numerous "investigations" were 
characterized by the lack of investigation, the 
loss or theft of key evidence and files, the 
mistreatment of victims' relatives, and even the 
hiding of bodies from loved ones.



Reacting to national and international outrage, 
the federal administration of President Fox and 
the state administration of Chihuahua Governor 
Patricio Martinez created new institutions, 
commissions, and bureaucracies to address the 
femicide issue. Beginning in 2003, they spent 
millions of dollars to counsel relatives, 
compensate survivors, and build them new homes, 
hold anti-violence workshops, and conduct 
publicity campaigns warning women not to become victims.



The Femicides in Chihuahua report cites 
government figures that the Federal Preventive 
Police conducted 79,857 revisions of maquiladora 
labor transport buses and interviewed 50,133 
women about security measures from May 2005 to 
August 2006. Considering subsequent scandals over 
widespread irregularities in the bus transport 
system, the statistic cited is a curious one.



Many Commissions, Few Answers



At the federal level, the Commission for the 
Prevention of Violence Against Women in Ciudad 
Juarez was established with recognized human 
rights advocate Guadalupe Morfin as its head. Her 
mission was to coordinate the work of myriad 
government agencies. Viewing the femicides as 
part of a bigger breakdown of the rule of law and 
the social fabric in Ciudad Juarez, Morfin and 
other government officials promoted increased 
services for vulnerable, working-class 
neighborhoods. At one time, rehabilitation of the 
city's Acequia Madre, or main irrigation ditch, 
was identified as a priority. In the view of 
Guerrero and other CMDPDH staff, the programs 
promoted by Morfin's commission and other 
government agencies have not been systematically 
evaluated for reform or follow-up.



Almost in tandem with Morfin's commission, Fox 
created the Special Prosecutor for Women's 
Homicides in Ciudad Juarez as a special unit of 
the Office of the Federal Attorney General (PGR). 
A career PGR lawyer, Maria Lopez Urbina, was 
named as the chief investigator. Previously 
working in Coahuila, a state where sex-related 
women's murders also began escalating in the late 
1990s, Lopez Urbina should have been familiar with the femicide issue.



Victims' relatives were disillusioned when it 
became clear that Lopez was not conducting any 
actual murder investigations but instead limiting 
her work to identifying PGJE employees 
responsible for botching "investigations" and 
obstructing justice. Before she was transferred 
from her post in 2005, Lopez Urbina identified 
170 such officials, according to Guerrero, and 
then turned over their names for prosecution to 
the PGJE­the very agency which Lopez Urbina had 
acknowledged as dropping the ball in the first place.



"The federal authority recognizes that the local 
authority incurred in crimes and had failures," 
Guerrero says, "and simply decides to return the 
majority of investigations to the same local 
authority that is in charge of investigating 
these functionaries and, in theory, of cleaning up these investigations."



None of the PGJE officials named by Lopez Urbina 
served jail time because of statutes of 
limitations, other assorted legal loopholes, and 
suspected cronyism. In a glaring omission, Lopez 
Urbina did not name any high-ranking Chihuahua 
law enforcement or elected officials who held 
authority over their lower-ranking employees.



Maintaining a position that all authorities must 
be held accountable, the parents of Minerva 
Torres, an 18-year-old Chihuahua City resident 
who went missing in 2001 and was later found 
murdered, filed legal charges with the PGJE 
against former Governor Martinez and other former 
high officials for allegedly concealing their 
daughter's body in a state facility for almost 
two years. First opened in 2005, the legal case 
is "practically paralyzed," according to Lucha 
Castro, an attorney with the Chihuahua City-based 
Women's Human Rights Center who is working with the Torres family.



Though Lopez Urbina did not solve a single Ciudad 
Juarez murder, the Fox administration decided to 
expand the scope of her office to include diverse 
crimes of violence against women across Mexico. 
Renamed the Special Prosecutor for Violent Crimes 
against Women (FEVIM) it was headed by Maria 
Elena Perez Duarte, another noted women's advocate.



But it wasn't long before Perez Duarte's office 
was under fire from women's activists for issuing 
lengthy reports but failing to obtain justice in 
crimes like the mass rapes of women prisoners by 
Federal Preventive Police and Mexico State 
policemen in the town of San Salvador Atenco in 
2006. Of 21 Mexico State policemen arrested for 
the Atenco attacks, 15 were exonerated and six 
released on bail. No federal officers were 
brought to justice, despite victims' testimonies. 
In April 2008, the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez 
Human Rights Center of Mexico City took the cases 
of 11 Atenco victims to the Organization of 
American States' Inter-American Human Rights 
Commission (IACHR) in Washington, DC. Victims, 
meanwhile, have reported receiving anonymous threats.



In 2006, current Federal Attorney General Eduardo 
Medina Mora was the director of the federal 
agency responsible for dispatching federal 
policemen to Atenco­the Public Safety Ministry.



The FEVIM distributed a poster of 35 missing 
young girls and women­including some vanished 
persons from outside Ciudad Juarez­for posting in 
National Human Rights Commission offices and 
other public places, but the poster did not 
include many cases from Ciudad Juarez and 
Chihuahua City and has not been updated.



Seeking answers about Ciudad Juarez, Atenco, and 
other cases, the CMDPDH and other groups pressed 
for Duarte and Medina to testify in front of the 
Mexican Congress. The activists' petition, 
however, was short-circuited when Duarte resigned 
in protest of the Mexican Supreme Court's 
decision last December that absolved Puebla state 
officials of any wrong-doing related to the 
highly irregular 2005 arrest of journalist Lydia 
Cacho. Detained in Cancun, Cacho was whisked 
across Mexico incommunicado and threatened with 
rape and death after she published a book that 
exposed a pedophile ring of prominent Mexican and 
U.S. businessmen with important political ties.



Since Duarte's resignation, the FEVIM has been 
expanded once again. Renamed the Special 
Prosecutor for Crimes against Women and of Human 
Trafficking under the Calderon administration, 
its mission now includes investigating the 
trafficking of women and children. Salvaged from 
the political recycle bin, Morfin was recently 
appointed to oversee the new agency. Like Lopez 
Urbina and Duarte before her, Morfin has no real 
prosecutorial powers and can only refer cases to 
other divisions of the PGR for investigation and 
criminal sanction. Meanwhile, amid the criticism 
of women's activists, Morfin's old Ciudad Juarez 
commission has been quietly folded into the National Women's Institute.



On the legislative front, both the Chihuahua 
State Legislature and Mexican Congress, which 
passed a recent law against gender violence, also 
jumped on the increasingly notorious femicide 
cases. Since the late 1990s, several femicide 
commissions, their life span determined by 
Mexico's frequent election schedule, have been 
established, dissolved, and reestablished. A 
commission in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies 
headed by feminist Congresswoman Marcela Lagarde 
issued a long 2006 report that was cast in the 
Mexican media as downplaying the Ciudad Juarez 
killings while emphasizing a larger femicide 
phenomenon afflicting the entire country.



In 2008, the Chihuahua State Legislature launched 
yet another femicide commission after victims' 
mothers publicly pressure lawmakers to act. Human 
rights lawyer Castro said justice advocates will 
expect the new commission to hold hearings, 
review Chihuahua's compliance with national and 
international recommendations, and monitor the 
performance of law enforcement officials.



The Chihuahua initiative is headed by Mexican 
Green Party legislator Maria Avila Serna, who 
also served on Lagarde's commission when she was 
a federal congresswoman several years ago. As a 
younger woman, Avila worked in the office of the 
PGJE that was responsible for investigating the 
Ciudad Juarez femicides in the 1995-96 period; 
human rights activists widely blame the office 
for fabricating scapegoats in the murders and 
employing torture against some suspects. In more 
recent years, Avila lost two male partners in gangland-style shootings.



In the state of Chihuahua current law makes it 
possible to commit a femicide and walk away 
unscathed. A 14-year statute of limitations means 
that many of the earliest femicides cannot be 
successfully prosecuted in state courts that 
still have jurisdiction over the cases. The 
statute of limitations has been a concern to 
justice advocates for years, but Chihuahua 
lawmakers have yet to remedy it. Loss of critical 
time is clearly worrying victims' relatives and 
their supporters. Chihuahua City activist Norma 
Ledesma, whose daughter Paloma Angelica Escobar 
was raped and slain in 2002, said important leads 
were lost within the first day of multiple 
disappearances including her daughter's. A 
16-year-old computer school student, Paloma's 
body was located not far from Chihuahua state police headquarters.



The coordinator of the NGO Justice for Our 
Daughters, Ledesma has noted patterns in the way 
many investigations were botched. In an 
interview, she blamed institutional indifference 
for the reign of impunity. "They're not fools, 
they're not stupid," Ledesma said. "They didn't 
do anything because it didn't interest them." 
Although the PGJE has created a special 
investigative unit headed by Jesus Manuel 
Fernandez to probe the Chihuahua slayings, 
Ledesma said there was no meaningful progress to 
report in the 26 cases handled by her organization.



A similar situation­or worse­prevails on the 
federal level. Ignoring widespread evidence to 
the contrary, the PGR does not officially 
recognize the presence of organized serial 
killings in the Ciudad Juarez murders, instead 
harping on the domestic violence or "crimes of 
passion" theme often mentioned by Chihuahua 
authorities. Since 2006, two PGR reports have 
glossed over the question of serial femicide. The 
PGR's stance meshes with ongoing campaigns by 
some Chihuahua business, media, and political 
leaders to portray their city and state as the 
victim of a "black legend" concocted by 
free-trade hating international union activists, 
unrepentant communists, and other cranks out to 
harm the reputation of a growing, international business center.



It should be noted that miscarriages of justice 
similar to the ones registered in Chihuahua have 
occurred elsewhere in Mexico. Two relevant 
examples are the cases of computer school student 
Olga Lidia Osorio in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, 
who was savagely raped and murdered in 2003, and 
15-year-old Sara Benazir, a Tijuana high school 
student who was thrown from a moving vehicle in 
Tijuana in 2005 and run over by another car. Like 
many of the Chihuahua crimes, a suspect in the 
Benazir crime was quickly identified but managed 
to elude justice; the young man in question is a 
relative of two individuals employed by the Baja California justice system.



Predictable Consequences



At its extreme, mass impunity could be sowing 
conditions in which outsiders are drawn to Ciudad 
Juarez simply because of its reputation as a 
killer's paradise. Last December, for example, a 
U.S. resident allegedly killed a young woman near 
Ruidoso, New Mexico, and then drove her across 
the border to Ciudad Juarez where he lit the 
victim's body on fire. The woman's two-year-old 
son remained in the back seat of the vehicle, and 
was later abandoned by the alleged killer to 
wander alone the late night streets of the border city.



Although Chihuahua and federal authorities claim 
the femicides are a chapter from the past, recent 
disappearances and killings fit a familiar, 
sordid pattern. In e-mails, Marisela Ortiz, the 
spokeswomen for Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, 
another group of relatives of femicide victims, 
alerted the public to the disappearance of three 
teenagers in Ciudad Juarez during January and 
February of this year. One of the missing young 
women, 15-year-old Adriana Sarmiento Enriquez, 
disappeared from a downtown high school also 
attended by at least three other femicide victims in previous years.



On March 10, 2008, two days after International 
Women's Day and a day after seven people were 
killed in a gun battle between Mexican soldiers 
and suspected drug cartel gunmen, a teenager from 
Chihuahua City, Paulina Elizabeth Lujan, 
disappeared and was later found raped and 
murdered in the same manner as more than two 
dozen other young women from the state capital 
between 1999 and 2007, according to media reports 
and non-governmental organizations.



The PGJE has charged two men with the Lujan 
crime, but the mother of one of the suspects was 
recently quoted in the Chihuahua press as 
claiming her son had been physically forced into 
rendering a confession, an all-too familiar 
practice in several other past femicide cases in 
which scapegoats were fabricated.



In two other recent episodes, female remains were 
recovered in the Juarez Valley in early May 2008, 
while another possibly murdered woman was 
discovered outside Chihuahua City only days 
earlier and not far from the spot where 2003 
murder victim Diana Jazmin Garcia was found. 
Murders and disappearances of young women, 
whether in 1993-96, 2001-2003, or 2008, coincided 
with violent upheavals within the ranks of 
organized crime. In both Ciudad Juarez and 
Chihuahua City, the geography of clandestine 
graveyards for both male murder victims of 
organized crime and sexually assaulted women is frequently the same.



The Training and Reform Game



Chihuahua and Mexican federal officials 
frequently blame the pitiful state of previous 
femicide investigations on an early lack of 
resources, sloppy management, poor training, and 
the absence of modern technology like state-of-the-art DNA equipment.



In response, several U.S. law enforcement 
agencies, including the Federal Bureau of 
Investigation, have assisted the PGJE and other 
Mexican law enforcement agencies with crime-scene 
training, media advising, and technical 
assistance in individual murder cases. Among 
other contributors is the New Mexico Office of 
the Attorney General, which has signed agreements 
with the PGJE to provide training and technical 
aid and to collaborate in a cross-border anti-human trafficking program.



Asked earlier this year on New Mexico public 
radio station KUNM if the New Mexico-Chihuahua 
collaboration would encompass the women's 
murders, New Mexico Attorney General Gary King 
replied with a flat no. According to King, 
Patricia Gonzalez told him that the femicides 
were more a matter of domestic violence than of human trafficking.



Arguably, the centerpiece of U.S. aid to the PGJE 
is a $5 million dollar program sponsored by the 
U.S. Agency for International Development 
(USAID). Designed to assist the State of 
Chihuahua in the reform of its legal codes, the 
USAID initiative was outsourced to Management 
Systems International, a private Washington, DC 
foreign aid contractor that runs programs in 
Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries, according 
to the Center for Public Integrity.



"The Chihuahua state government has embraced the 
principles of transparency in its vision of a 
safer community bound by freedom and democracy," 
said U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza, while 
lauding the legal reform process in early 2006.



Guerrero and other human rights activists 
cautiously greeted the initiative, which included 
changes such as oral trials for the first time.



"We didn't see it as a negative thing at the 
beginning," Guerrero said, "but the problem is 
that all this money, all this investment hasn't 
benefited all the instances of cases that 
suffered irregularities, corruption on the part 
of functionaries. (USAID) has not impacted those cases."



The biggest accomplishment of the program was its 
assistance in helping the world-renowned 
Argentine Anthropological Forensic Team identify 
at least 27 bodies of unidentified victims in 
Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City. However, 
release of the team's long-awaited final report, 
which is expected to be critical of some 
Chihuahua state officials, has been delayed.



Surveying the landscape, human rights activists 
stress a disconnect between the stated reform 
goals of the Reyes-Gonzalez administration and 
the impunity in numerous femicides. Regarding the 
PGJE incapable of conducting genuine 
investigations, many relatives and justice 
advocates call for its removal from the field. 
Ciudad Juarez's Nuestras Hijas group urges the 
contracting of professional, outside 
investigators, possibly including foreigners, to 
find missing women. Guerrero stressed that the 
Mexican federal government needs to take full 
charge of the femicide investigations, a step it 
has long balked at doing due to sensibilities 
over states' rights and Mexican "federalism."



Dirty War Parallels



After years of femicides, it is possible to 
compare the Mexican state's response with the Fox 
administration's probe of the 1960s and 1970s 
Dirty War against suspected guerrillas and 
dissidents. Managed by Igancio Carrillo Prieto, 
the four-year Dirty War investigation identified 
military, police, and elected officials who were 
responsible for disappearing and probably executing hundreds of individuals.



High on the list was former President Luis 
Echeverria, who faced charges filed by Carrillo 
Prieto for massacring students in Mexico City. 
The Dirty War prosecutor also pursued cases 
against several other former officials for 
assorted crimes, but Echeverria and company 
managed to escape serious jail time. In the 
interim, a key witness was murdered, files were 
stolen, and probable culprits were reported 
deceased before they could face the legal music. 
Similar events have marred the femicide saga.



Some activists like former Ciudad Juarez resident 
Judith Galarza, current coordinator for FEDEFAM, 
a Caracas-based association of relatives of 
political prisoners and disappeared persons in 
Latin America, contend a direct link exists 
between the Dirty War and the femicides. On a 
recent border visit, Galarza reiterated how 
several former high-ranking Chihuahua state law 
enforcement officials implicated in organized 
crime began their careers as policemen active in 
the Dirty War. Galarza's sister, Leticia, was 
disappeared by Mexican security forces in the late 1970s.



Institutionally, the PGR was the main federal 
agency involved in the femicide and Dirty War 
investigations. Answerable to 
politically-appointed bosses, the Dirty War and 
the women's special prosecutors did not enjoy 
real independence. Indeed, prosecutors labored 
for an agency with a conflict of interest in the 
probes. In both the Ciudad Juarez femicides and 
the Dirty War, police employed by the PGR were 
implicated in human rights atrocities and crimes.



Decades later, thousands of relatives from both 
violent periods still have no real answers about 
why or what happened to their loved ones. Four 
generations of Mexicans have been physically, 
emotionally, or economically affected one way or 
another by the dual slaughters, including the 
grandparents, parents, and siblings of victims, 
the victims themselves, and the orphans left behind.



Mario Alberto Solorazano, CMDPDH legal director, 
said the long string of femicides in Ciudad 
Juarez and Chihuahua City have "terrorized" 
society and subjected to citizens to "institutional violence."



In a 2003 presentation in Mexico, 
internationally-known Spanish Judge Baltasar 
Garzon termed impunity in the femicides a crime 
against humanity that was possible material for 
the International Criminal Court.



Last Chance for Justice?



As the murder case files that were not lost or 
lifted linger in Mexican law enforcement offices, 
victims' relatives from both the Dirty War and 
femicide eras are turning to international human 
rights commissions and courts. Taking Mexico's 
adherence to the 1994 Belem do Para Convention 
and other human rights agreements and treaties 
that protect women from violence as their cue, 
women's rights advocates are trying to set 
precedents for national and international law.



Late last year, the Costa Rica Inter-American 
Court for Human Rights agreed to hear the cases 
of three young women murdered in 2001: Laura 
Berenice Ramos, Claudia Ivete Gonzalez, and 
Esmeralda Brenda Herrera. Together with five 
other victims, the three women were found 
brutally murdered in a Ciudad Juarez cotton field 
in November 2001. Part of the Organization of 
American States system, the court issues 
mandatory resolutions to member states including Mexico.



In Washington, the IACHR, which does not have the 
obligatory power of a court but is the first step 
before taking a case to Costa Rica, is wrapping 
up a six-year review of two cases represented by 
the CMDPDH: Paloma Escobar and a missing woman, 
Silvia Arce, whose 1998 disappearance in Ciudad 
Juarez was linked by her mother to PGR employees. 
In addition to the Escobar and Arce complaints, 
the IACHR is currently considering the case of Minerva Torres.



Solorzano characterized the advancement of the 
Escobar case, in particular, as an important 
development since human rights commissioners 
became interested in the commonalities between 
the Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City killings. In 
practice, Chihuahua state law enforcement has 
long treated the murders in the two cities as 
separate crimes, even though victims disappeared 
and were killed in the same way; some even 
attended different branches of the same privately-owned school.



According to Solorzano, the relatives of Escobar 
and Arce are seeking recommendations from the 
Washington commission to get Mexico City to 
comply with previous ones made by the United 
Nations: complete murder investigations so 
criminals are finally brought to justice; and 
truly investigate law enforcement officials 
responsible for the obstruction of justice. 
Solorzano is confident the OAS-affiliated 
institution's actions will prod Mexico in the 
direction of respecting its international human rights commitments.



"The Mexican state, through its diplomatic corps, 
has a discourse that isn't reflective of its 
actions," Solorzano maintained. "That's why when 
the resolutions are issued, we trust that it will 
no longer just be part of the Mexican 
government's human rights foreign policy 
discourse, but that the implementation of these 
resolutions will become a reality to those 
persons signaled as victims in these cases."



At the grassroots level, Norma Ledesma is one who 
still keeps the faith that a change of direction 
and of history is possible. Admitting she is 
often left feeling like she is up against a 
"monster," Ledesma nevertheless insisted that she 
will keep fighting until she finds out the truth 
about Paloma's killing. "God gave me this 
strength to continue. I owe it to my daughter," 
she said. "We seek justice for our daughters­that's all."



Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist who 
covers the southwestern United States, Mexico, 
and Latin America, and an analyst for the 
Americas Policy Program at 
<http://www.americaspolicy.org/>www.americaspolicy.org.




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