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<h1><b>Juarez Mothers Demand Justice for their Murdered
Daughters</b></h1><font size=3>May 10, 2008 By <b>Kent Paterson</b>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
"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. <br><br>
<br><br>
"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). <br><br>
<br><br>
A recent CMDPDH report, <i>Femicides in Chihuahua</i>, 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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
"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."
<br><br>
<br><br>
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 <i>Harvest of Women</i>, 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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
According to Guerrero, the CMDPDH gave members of the administration of
Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza a chance to offer their own comments
for <i>Femicides in Chihuahua</i> 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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
<br><br>
The State's Response <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
The <i>Femicides in Chihuahua</i> 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. <br><br>
<br><br>
Many Commissions, Few Answers <br><br>
<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
"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." <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
Predictable Consequences <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
The Training and Reform Game <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
"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. <br><br>
<br><br>
Guerrero and other human rights activists cautiously greeted the
initiative, which included changes such as oral trials for the first
time. <br><br>
<br><br>
"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." <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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." <br><br>
<br><br>
Dirty War Parallels <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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."
<br><br>
<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
<br><br>
Last Chance for Justice? <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
"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." <br><br>
<br><br>
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." <br><br>
<br><br>
<i>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
<a href="http://www.americaspolicy.org/">www.americaspolicy.org</a>.<br>
<br>
<br><br>
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