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Latest Juarez Slaying By BARBARA VAZQUEZ http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/w-sa/2004/mar/10/031003119.html March 10, 2004 at 15:10:42 PST CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) - The partially clad body of a woman was found in the desert Wednesday outside Ciudad Juarez, where hundreds of young women and girls have been murdered over the past decade. A truck driver discovered the body along a desert road in Anapra, a poor, desert neighborhood where many of the bodies have been found over the past decade, said Manuel Esparza of the government's special prosecutor's office for crimes against women. The attorney general's office estimates that 258 women have been killed since 1993 in Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million across from El Paso, Texas. A report last week by London-based Amnesty International put the number at 407. The woman's body was found with her pants pulled down, her blouse covering her head and was wearing no underwear, just as more than 100 of the victims have been found. The bodies of three young rape victims were discovered in the same area last year, Esparza said. Esparza said authorities were still trying to determine the cause of death. El Paso investigators joined Mexican federal and state authorities at the scene. Paula Flores was among dozens of residents who watched investigators at the site. Her 17-year-old daughter Maria Sagrario Gonzalez was kidnapped and killed in 1998. "It's sad," she said. "The cases don't stop, they continue." National and international human rights groups and many of the victims' relatives blame police corruption and incompetence for allowing the murders to continue. They say police have tampered with evidence, tortured suspects and forced confessions from them. Hundreds of police in Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located, have been fired over the past few years for corruption. On Tuesday, the head of the local office of the federal attorney general's office said his agency was investigating Chihuahua state police chief Vicente Gonzalez. The announcement came a day after the state attorney general, Jesus Solis, resigned following a scandal over the arrest of 13 of his agents who are suspected of ties to drug traffickers and to a dozen bodies discovered buried at a house. Four other agents are fugitives. One is accused of being a hit man and another is being tried on charges of trying to set up a prostitution ring that included adolescents. He is out on bail. Solis said he resigned because he needed time to fight the "groundless accusations." |
16 October 2004 BY MARK STEVENSON http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/w-sa/2004/oct/26/102606096.html MEXICO CITY (AP) - Some police may have been accomplices in a decade-long string of women's slayings in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, a federal official said, citing the case of an ex-officer who recruited young girls to a prostitution ring. Criminal investigations should be launched against 51 local law enforcement officials - in addition to 49 others previously targeted - for abuses and allegedly mishandling cases, according to a report presented Monday by Maria Lopez Urbina, the top federal investigator in the case. Guadalupe Morfin, the special commissioner for the prevention of violence against women in Juarez, said she believes a newly appointed prosecutor in Chihuahua state, where Juarez is located, may ultimately expose the "total collapse" of local law enforcement in the case. Morfin said the most serious indication of that breakdown involves a high-ranking former state police officer who has been accused by two underage girls of recruiting them into a prostitution ring. Women's activists have long implicated such a ring in the almost 100 sexually motivated killings in Juarez since 1993, whose victims - young, slender women - were sexually abused, strangled and dumped in the desert. "This is one case that worries me extremely," Morfin said. According to the two girls' testimony, the officer "exploited them sexually and then offered them into a ring serving businessmen and powerful local figures." "It is worrisome that this kind of complicity could have come from within the state justice department itself," Morfin said, noting other state police have been accused of kidnapping and protecting drug gangs in recent cases. The responsibility for investigating past misdeeds by Chihuahua state police has now fallen to Patricia Gonzalez Rodriguez, appointed as Chihuahua's first female attorney general on Oct. 13. She made her first public appearance at Monday's news conference, alongside Morfin and other federal officials assigned to the case. Morfin said Gonzalez Rodriguez has demonstrated her willingness to prosecutor former police officials. But the new prosecutor faces some serious challenges: In one recent case, state police told relatives of a victim they had found the girl's skeletal remains when apparently they had switched her skull for that of another corpse to fit the police theory on the cause of death. While Gonzalez Rodriguez did not make any public statement, federal special prosecutor Urbina said she had confidence in her. What is lacking, all sides acknowledged, is trust between victims' relatives, prosecutors and rights activists. A teary-eyed Norma Andrade - whose 17-year-old daughter, Liliana Garcia Andrade, was found murdered in Juarez in February 2001 - called a report on the killings submitted by Lopez Urbina "pure garbage." "The lack of justice continues, and these (murders) will continue as long as that is the case," said Andrade, who leads a group of victims' relatives. Lopez Urbina, in turn, harshly criticized foreign and domestic activist groups, saying "the lack of clarity and subjectivity of some non-governmental groups and foreign visitors is one of the biggest factors that have complicated solving the problems in Ciudad Juarez." Major Legal Reforms March 10, 2004 at 11:30:42 PST MEXICO CITY - AP http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/w-sa/2004/mar/10/031002568.html President Vicente Fox said Wednesday that he will send Congress proposals for major changes in Mexico's justice system. The plan would unify federal police agencies, transform the attorney general's office into a chief prosecutor's office and open the way for public, oral trials. Under the current system, trials are based largely on documents and formal declarations, often behind closed doors. Speaking to a forum on security and justice, Fox said he would also propose writing the presumption of innocence into Mexico's constitution. Fox said Mexico's justice system needs "to guarantee Mexicans an efficient system of public security" along with "a modern system of penal justice." "Mexicans see that there are crimes that go unpunished and at the same time there are people who suffer punishments that they do not deserve," Fox said. He said the proposed reforms would be presented during the new congressional session starting March 15. Mexico has a variety of federal police agencies. Some cover highways and border duties while others work under the attorney general fighting drugs and organized crime. The agencies have struggled to root out corruption and to improve officer training. Mexican police tend to do far less investigative work than their U.S. counterparts. |
11 Bodies Dug Up Near U.S. - - Mexico Border CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) 27 January, 2004 Police have dug up 11 bodies in the backyard of a house in Juarez, a Mexican border city, in what they called the latest evidence of a growing drug battle being waged along the U.S.-Mexico frontier. Several victims had been strangled or suffocated, Vasconcelos said. Mexican investigators said the property appeared to be a safe house for Humberto Santillan Tabares, who was arrested Jan. 15 [2004] across the border in El Paso, Texas. Mexican authorities identified Santillan as one of the chief lieutenants of Vicente Carrillo, alleged to be one of Mexico's major drug traffickers. Leticia Zamarripa, a spokeswoman with the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, confirmed that Santillan was arrested in El Paso with more than 10 pounds of cocaine, although she said his first name was listed as Heriberto. A Mexican man who lived in the house where 11 bodies were discovered told police he helped kill and bury victims in his backyard at the behest of drug smugglers - and he thinks there are still more dead to be found, a prosecutor said Wednesday. |
13 Mexican Cops Linked to Drug Killings CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) 29 January, 2004 Thirteen Mexican state police have been arrested in the killings of 11 people found buried around a safe house for drug traffickers near the U.S. border, a federal official said Thursday. The 11 victims apparently were bound, gagged and suffocated or shot by suspected drug traffickers, then buried in shallow graves at a house in Ciudad Juarez connected to the Vicente Carrillo drug gang. Federal Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha also said at least four other officers, including a state commander, were on the run. The commander, Miguel Angel Loya, has not shown up for work since Monday, said state police spokesman Mauro Conde. The officers were arrested in northern Mexico and brought to Mexico City. State officials have tried to purge the police ranks of corruption, firing some 300 officers in the last two years. Santiago Vasconcelos said police were investigating how many state police had been helping the drug cartel, adding there was an "extreme breakdown" of the region's law enforcement. The arrests expose a Mexican police force long believed to be inept and corrupt. For a decade, hundreds of slayings have gone unsolved, particularly those involving a string of young women killed in a similar manner. |
Murder Innocent Man On 12 February 2002; Page A01, Mary Jordan of the Washington Post Foreign Service reported on a murder in Juarez Mexico. The following is based on her report together with information gathered from other sources. Comments: The ugly truth is... the Juarez police, were carrying out an execution order. Who gave the order? The answer to that question must be... the chief of the Juarez police. Question remains... who gives the Juarez police chief his orders??? The deepest of sympathy for the parents, family and friends of the victim, Mario Cesar Escobedo Anaya are expressed here. Aside from his involvement in a legal case, his only crime was that he was an out-spoken critic of the Juarez Police. There is no mistake here, Mario Cesar Escobedo Anaya was murdered by the Mexican authorities and no one will do anything about it. How about you? Will you help do something to put an end to the lawlessness of the Juarez police and other lawless Mexican authorities? How about the president of Mexico, will he put an end to the murderous drug gang running Juarez? Very doubtful since the New World Order boys own the President of Mexico - - any president of Mexico. Ask yourself why Bush and other U.S. politicians are so protective of Mexico? |
By Mark Stevenson February 7, 2002 MEXICO CITY – Activists denounced what they called a "climate of repression" in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez Thursday, after police shot to death a lawyer who was working on a politically sensitive murder case. They claim that the Chihuahua state government, embarrassed by its inability to stop a string of 76 rape-murders committed here since 1993, has engaged in a campaign to silence criticism of its investigation. Chihuahua state police said they mistook lawyer Mario Escobedo, 29, for a wanted fugitive when they followed his van and tried to pull him over late Tuesday. They said Escobedo fired two shots at the officers, who then riddled his vehicle with bullets. Escobedo died at the scene. State Attorney General Jose Silva told a news conference that "we regret the death of this person, who, out of confusion or error, did not stop when told to do so." "This has all the signs of being a crime aimed at executing a lawyer for his work in exposing the illicit means that state police use to extract confessions," said Chihuahua Sen. Javier Corral Jurado. But the victim's father, Mario Escobedo Sr., told local media that he blamed the state police for his son's death, and said his son had received telephone calls threatening to kill him unless he gave up the case, in which his client is one of two suspects in the most recent eight murders. Escobedo claimed his client was tortured into confessing to the murder of eight women whose bodies were discovered in Ciudad Juarez in November. Days before his death, Escobedo had announced he would file a criminal complaint against state officials for allegedly kidnapping and torturing his client. Residents of Ciudad Juarez are frustrated by police investigations that quickly round up suspects and base their cases against them on confessions rather than physical evidence. After each round of arrests, the rape murders – which have targeted young women – have continued unabated. Sergio Dante Almaraz, who represents the other suspect arrested in November, said he has also received telephone death threats telling him to give up his defense work. Source: AP - http://www.uniontrib.com/news/mexico/20020207-2003-mexico-lawyerkilled.html |