Mexico Week In Review: 06.04-06.10

[cisdc]

Mexico Week In Review: 06.04-06.10
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Published since 1994, 'Mexico Week In Review' is a service of the
Committee of Indigenous Solidarity (CIS).  CIS is a Washington, D.C.
based activist group committed to the ongoing struggles of Indigenous
peoples in the Americas.  CIS is actively supporting the struggles
of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico while simultaneously combating
related structures of oppression within our own communities.

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"Para Todos, Todo; Para Nosotros Nada"
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19 MEXICAN SOLDIERS JAILED IN DEATHS

Nineteen Mexican soldiers were sent to a military prison after troops 
allegedly killed two women and three children whose vehicle failed to 
stop at an army checkpoint, the Defense Department said. The shooting 
in the Pacific state of Sinaloa is the latest case of suspected abuse 
by soldiers deployed by President Felipe Calderon in a national 
offensive against powerful drug cartels. The family was traveling to 
a funeral when they were ordered to stop at the checkpoint near the 
village of La Joya, according to local media. When they failed to 
stop, soldiers reportedly opened fire on the van. Police identified 
the dead as Alicia Esparza Parra, 17; Griselda Galaviz Barraza, 25, 
and Galaviz Barraza's children Joniel, 7; Griselda, 4, and Juana, 2. 
Three other civilians in the van were wounded.

Mexico's Defense Department said in a news release that three 
officers and 16 enlisted personnel were being held at a prison in the 
city of Mazatlan pending an investigation by military and civilian 
authorities into the killings. Sinaloa Gov. Jesus Aguilar lamented 
the shooting, but said the army will remain in the state "to 
safeguard the security of its citizens."

Calderon has sent more than 24,000 soldiers and federal police to 
battle heavily armed drug gangs blamed for more than 1,000 deaths 
this year, including dozens of victims who have been decapitated and 
had their heads displayed in public places. Drug gunmen have also hit 
the military, ambushing and killing five soldiers in coordinated 
attack last month in Calderon's mountainous home state of Michoacan. 
In the days following the ambush, soldiers were alleged to have held 
four teenage girls from a nearby village hostage as they beat and 
raped them, according to the government-run National Human Rights 
Commission. The Defense Department said it will cooperate in an 
investigation into that incident. Last week, soldiers shot dead a 
27-year old man after he refused to stop at a military checkpoint 
near the border city of Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo, Texas, 
police said.

Source: Associated Press: 06/04
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CARDINAL FACES GRILLING ON PRIEST ABUSE

Cardinal Norberto Rivera, Mexico's most senior Roman Catholic 
clergyman, will be questioned by lawyers and may have to appear in a 
U.S. court over accusations he protected a priest wanted for sexually 
abusing children, Rivera's spokesman said. Rivera, who was considered 
an outsider candidate to succeed Pope John Paul II, will be 
questioned in Mexico City in coming weeks, spokesman Hugo Valdemar 
said. Rivera may have to appear in a Los Angeles court to defend 
himself against accusations he conspired to protect the priest, who 
is wanted for raping dozens of children in the United States and 
Mexico.

In September, lawyers for former altar boy Joaquin Aguilar Mendez, 
who says he was raped by Father Nicolas Aguilar in Mexico in 1994, 
named Rivera along with Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles in a 
U.S. civil lawsuit. The suit accuses the cardinals of obstructing 
justice, negligence and conspiracy to help the priest escape. Rivera 
denies the accusations and says the Los Angeles court has no 
jurisdiction over him. Lawyers for the plaintiff say that by 
questioning Rivera in Mexico they can prove the court has the right 
to hear the case.

Rivera is accused of sending Father Nicolas Aguilar to Los Angeles to 
avoid an abuse scandal in Mexico. Mahony is accused of allowing the 
priest to flee back to Mexico after a U.S. warrant was issued for his 
arrest. In a sworn affidavit, Rivera said he had used secret church 
code in a letter to tell Mahony that Father Aguilar was homosexual, 
but that he had no knowledge of the pedophilia accusations. Mahony 
denies having ever received such a letter.

Jeff Anderson, an attorney for plaintiff Aguilar Mendez, called 
Rivera's declaration "extraordinary." "Either one or both of them is 
lying. It is the first time that cardinals under oath have pointed 
the finger at one another," he said. Valdemar said Anderson and the 
Survivor's Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, which helped 
bring the lawsuit, were "immoral" and trying to destroy the Catholic 
Church. Valdemar said if the court decided it had jurisdiction, 
Rivera would be happy to give evidence in Los Angeles. "We would not 
have a problem with going to the court because we have evidence that 
proves the cardinal's innocence," he said.

The U.S. Catholic Church has been tarnished by a pedophile priest 
scandal that erupted in Boston in 2002 and spread to dioceses across 
the nation. The church has spent millions of dollars to settle 
lawsuits stemming from the scandal.

Source: Reuters: 06/05
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VIOLENCE AFFECTS MOST WOMEN

As many as 67 percent of Mexican women over 15 years of age have been 
victims of some kind of violence, the National Poll on Dynamics of 
Home Relations revealed. Though violence against Mexican women has 
decreased in recent years, it is still very high, with manifestations 
in the community, family, schools, workplaces, and couple relations, 
the president of the National Statistics, geography, and Informatics 
Institute, Gilberto Calvillo, stated.

The states of Jalisco, Mexico, and the Federal District record the 
highest number of female victims of violence, at 78 percent, while 
Chiapas (48.2 percent) and Zacatecas (56.5) report the lowest 
figures. To face that problem, he stated, it is imperative to bring 
forward a legislative process from the national to state levels, and 
implement public prevention policies, support the victims, and punish 
the people responsible.

Source: Prensa Latina: 06/06
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SPECIAL REPORT:
ARE MEXICAN FEMICIDE CASES BEING GLOSSED OVER?

Nearly six years after the discovery of eight murdered young women in 
a Ciudad Juarez cotton field stunned the world, growing doubts 
surround Mexican authorities' accounts of the crimes. Two previous 
cases against alleged murderers unraveled amid revelations of 
tortured suspects, fabricated evidence, bizarre stories of organ 
trafficking, misidentified victims, the murders of two defense 
attorneys, and the suspicious death of one suspect. Now the Chihuahua 
Office of the State Attorney General (PGJE), the agency charged with 
the investigating the crimes, is moving ahead with legal charges 
against the third round of suspects in the cotton field case. In an 
interview with Frontera NorteSur, Chihuahua State Attorney General 
Patricia Gonzalez contended that three young men from Ciudad Juarez, 
Francisco Granados, Alejandro Delgado and Edgar Alvarez, embarked on 
a drug and alcohol-splashed killing spree of young women that began 
in the 1990s.

While holding that satanic worship could have been a motive in the 
slayings, Gonzalez denied that the ECCO computer school, which some 
family members of victims from both Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City 
suspect of involvement in femicide, had anything to do with the 
Ciudad Juarez crimes. "This case is more related to street-level drug 
dealing," Gonzalez said. "These young men worked for an individual 
who distributed drugs in small quantities in a sector of Ciudad 
Juarez." Gonzalez declined to name the shadowy drug dealer, adding 
that authorities are attempting to detain two more suspects in the 
crimes. Past PGJE spokespersons, including former Special Prosecutor 
Suly Ponce, denied that drug dealing had anything to do with the 
women's murders.

Gonzalez charged that the current suspects randomly offered rides to 
young women on the street, sexually attacking and then stabbing their 
victims to death before dumping the bodies in the cotton field 
located across the street from the headquarters of Ciudad Juarez's 
Maquiladora Civil Association.  Situated in the city's so-called 
"Golden Zone," the cotton field sits in a heavily transited area. In 
addition to the 2001 cotton field murders, Gonzalez's office is 
linking the latest suspects to the Lote Bravo, Lomas de Poleo, and 
Cristo Negro serial murders that ravaged Ciudad Juarez from 1995 to 
2003. All three suspects named by Gonzalez were teenagers at the time 
of the 1995 Lote Bravo killings. A PGJE power point presentation 
about the case against Alvarez and his friends includes the names of 
1995 murder victims Olga Alicia Carrillo Perez and Silvia Elena 
Rivera Morales as among the possible victims of the suspects. 
Initially, the PGJE tied the late Egyptian national Abdel Latif 
Sharif Sharif to the Carrillo and Morales murders. Asked if the 
inclusion of the names of Carrillo and Morales in the PGJE's 
investigation meant that Sharif was innocent of the crimes, Gonzalez 
said that because Sharif's case was before her time she had no 
knowledge of his alleged victims. Maintaining his innocence, Sharif 
died in a Chihuahua City prison last year while serving a 1995 
sentence for the murder of Elizabeth Castro in a conviction critics 
have challenged.

At a public presentation sponsored by the Santa Fe Rape Crisis and 
Trauma Treatment Center, held in New Mexico's capital city on 
Mother's Day weekend of 2007, Gonzalez credited various US agencies, 
including the FBI, for permitting her current murder investigation to 
proceed. At the time of Edgar Alvarez's arrest in Colorado last 
summer, Tony Garza, the Bush Administration's ambassador to Mexico, 
announced a major step forward in resolving the eight murders, and 
Alvarez was quickly deported to Mexico. Granados, who is jailed on an 
immigration law violation in the United States, gave a tape-recorded 
confession to the Texas Rangers last year that led to Alvarez and 
Delgado. Gonzalez attempted to play a portion of the confession to 
the Santa Fe audience but the audio failed to deliver. "The important 
thing for us is that this is an investigation that flows from the 
investigation that North American authorities also are directly 
realizing," Gonzalez later said in an interview. "No type of pressure 
existed. We're working the technical and scientific evidence. Jose 
Francisco Granados' home produced physical evidence of women's 
clothing, and other implements including purses, women's shoes, [and] 
cosmetics. All this is being processed in our forensic laboratory. We 
even managed to obtain a genetic profile from the Cristo Negro site 
that we will compare with the genetic profiles of Francisco Granados, 
Edgar Cruz, Alejandro, and the other two individuals whose detention 
is pending."

Critics Slam the PGJE's Case

The PGJE's account of the cotton field killing is strikingly similar 
to the same department's original but later discredited version of 
how bus drivers Victor Garcia and Gustavo Gonzalez allegedly killed 
the women. In the original case, Garcia and Gonzalez were accused of 
randomly kidnapping women, raping their victims and then beating them 
to death with bats. Both men were allegedly high when they committed 
the crimes, though toxicology tests contradicted the state's 
assertions. The basic difference in the latest PGJE case is that the 
alleged perpetrators supposedly used knives to kill their victims.

Sally Meisenhelder, an organizer for the Las Cruces-based Friends of 
Juarez Women, a non-governmental organization that has worked closely 
with victims' families, doesn't give credence to the PGJE's latest 
case.  "It's the same old stuff, and now there is whole new set of 
scapegoats," Meisenhelder said. Other knowledgeable sources strongly 
disputed the PGJE's claims of how the murder victims found in the 
cotton field were killed. "The official position is absurd," 
contended Mexican criminologist Oscar Maynez, who headed the PGJE 
department that supervised the 2001 examinations of the eight 
victims.  According to Maynez, the decomposed nature of the bodies, 
many of them just bones, made determining the cause of death 
difficult. While investigators found no evidence of stab marks on 
bones of victims, Maynez told Frontera NorteSur that they detected 
signs that some of the victims could have been strangled to death, a 
pattern in scores of other killings. An upcoming report from the 
highly respected Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which has 
spent nearly two years examining the remains of Ciudad Juarez and 
Chihuahua City femicide victims, is expected to draw similar 
conclusions.

Maynez quickly dismissed Attorney General Gonzalez's contention that 
the lack of identifiable stab wounds in the corpses was caused by the 
way the presumably substance-impaired killers cut into sensitive 
organs like the heart.  "They are saying that these people are better 
than surgeons," Maynez said. "The (fabrication) of scapegoats is 
becoming more sophisticated. They are trying to feed the evidence 
into the story." Maynez discounted the possibility that Alvarez and 
his street buddies, who reportedly struggled with drug, emotional, 
job and marriage problems, had the capacity to hide, transport and 
then dump numerous bodies over an eight-year period without being 
detected. "You are talking about 16-year-old kids, who had no money 
and were consuming drugs, killing women and somehow [they] didn't get 
caught," he said. "I'm sure they weren't involved in the cotton field 
murders." The former PGJE official added, "US officials have to look 
closely at this case and not take my word for granted. This is very 
serious. Behind the murders is a very organized, resourceful 
structure."

The PGJE's case shows other signs of coming apart. Media reports 
place key suspect Alvarez in Colorado during many of the women's 
disappearances and murders attributed to the migrant. Last February, 
"protected witness" Alejandro Delgado publicly recanted. Delgado 
charged that he was physically manhandled, isolated and threatened by 
Chihuahua state police officers. In statements to Ciudad Juarez 
reporters, Delgado declared that Granados and Alvarez were both 
innocent, and that he made up the murder story under pressure from 
Chihuahua state policemen who had isolated him away from his home. 
Almost immediately after making his denunciation, Delgado was 
arrested by the PGJE and charged with murdering 16-year-old Silvia 
Gabriela Laguna Cruz in 1998. A judge quickly threw out the charge as 
baseless.

Gonzalez denied that Delgado was forcibly isolated or slapped with a 
trumped-up charge for complaining to the press. "Alejandro Delgado 
said that he was really afraid of Edgar Alvarez's family and that he 
wanted to be protected," Gonzalez said. "He was with us a protected 
witness until his wife got mad and wanted him to go home. In our 
opinion, Edgar Cruz's defense picked (Delgado) once he got home to 
get Edgar Cruz off the hook." Then there is the matter of Francisco 
Granados' sanity. The allegedly repentant mass murderer reportedly 
engaged in unusual behaviors like talking to the devil ever since he 
was a teenager. While acknowledging that Granados could be lying, 
Gonzalez affirmed that authorities are conducting tests to determine 
the truthfulness of the suspect's statements. Still, Gonzalez was 
confident that, until now, corresponding evidence has established the 
"reliability of this man."

Questions hang over the authorities' version of the alleged 
randomness of how the victims were selected. Three of the cotton 
field victims had some sort of relationship with the privately-owned 
ECCO computer school in Ciudad Juarez, as did several other femicide 
victims in Chihuahua City to the south, an intercity "coincidence" 
that has not publicly come up at all in the cases against Granados, 
Alvarez and Delgado. Patricia Cervantes, the mother of Neyra Azucena 
Cervantes, a 2003 Chihuahua City murder victim who worked and studied 
at the successor institution of ECCO, said in an interview that she 
has not been questioned by the PGJE about any possible connections 
between her daughter's murder and the cotton field case. Cervantes 
expressed surprise at the state's current case, adding that she has 
not seen any news of the prosecutions in the Chihuahua City media. If 
the official version of the cotton field crimes is correct, it means 
that numerous victims who came into contact with ECCO, a minuscule 
educational institution operating in a population pool of more than 2 
million persons in two different places, somehow wound up in the 
clutches of serial killers in different places and at different times 
from early 2001 to early 2003. Several years ago, ECCO spokesmen 
denied any involvement in crimes to the border-region news media.

Pinning the murders on Alvarez and company closes the door on other 
possible suspects in the serial killings, including police officers. 
A 2003 US State Department cable about the Cristo Negro slayings, 
obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by Keith Yearman, an 
assistant professor of geography at DuPage University in Illinois, 
noted the lingering suspicions of official complicity in the 
femicide. "Authorities report they are following several 
investigation leads, including one of possible police involvement in 
the disappearances, but no progress has been reported," stated the 
cable. Yearman, who is waiting to receive documents from the FBI, 
said that a similar request for documents from the US Central 
Intelligence Agency related to the cotton field case and other 
women's slayings in Ciudad Juarez was turned down on national 
security grounds.

US Support Shores Up the PGJE

Claiming no party affiliation, Patricia Gonzalez was elected to her 
post in a 2004 multi-partisan vote by the Chihuahua State 
Legislature. The former judge has enjoyed a good rapport with sectors 
of the women's and human rights communities. At the Santa Fe forum, 
Maria Pilar Sanchez, director of Ciudad Juarez's Casa Amiga rape 
crisis center, praised Chihuahua's state attorney general for "doing 
things" and bringing "transparency" to the scene. Gonzalez's office 
is undertaking an ambitious legal and police training reform program 
in Chihuahua, planning, for example, to institute oral trials for the 
first time. However, the legal case against the cotton field suspects 
is proceeding in the traditional fashion of written statements 
constituting the weight of evidence. Gonzalez's legal reform efforts 
are encountering resistance from members of the old legal 
establishment who are criticizing both the speed and character of the 
reforms.

In Santa Fe, Gonzalez insisted that she is purging the PGJE of bad 
elements, but charged that her campaign is complicated by persistent 
corruption in the Federal Agency of Investigations, Federal 
Preventive Police, and Ciudad Juarez Municipal Police. Gonzalez 
confirmed to Frontera NorteSur that she has received death threats, 
specifically in connection to the investigation of men's homicides, 
but has not suffered "any threats" in relation to the femicide probes.

US support is a cornerstone of Gonzalez's efforts. A US$5 million 
grant from the US Agency for International Development is 
underwriting much of the reform project. The Washington, D.C.-based 
firm Management Systems International (MSI) manages the grant. 
According to the non-profit Center for Public Integrity, MSI is a 
privately owned foreign aid contractor that runs programs in Iraq, 
Afghanistan, and other nations. Only days after Edgar Alvarez was 
deported to Mexico last year, Ambassador Garza appeared in Ciudad 
Juarez, where he praised Attorney General Gonzalez and Chihuahua 
Governor Jose Reyes Baeza for opening a new forensic laboratory and 
"implementing a new criminal justice system that is transparent and 
fair, that protects human rights." Ambassador Garza's words 
contrasted with the US State Department's internal discourse just a 
few years earlier. The State Department cables obtained by Yearman 
reveal that US authorities were fully aware of multiple episodes of 
torture, corruption and killings attributed to PGJE personnel.

Assisted by the USAID funding, US border states are contributing to 
the PGJE's makeover. Gonzalez's office, for example, has signed a 
training and legal cooperation agreement with the New Mexico Office 
of the Attorney General. In the run-up to the Santa Fe forum, the New 
Mexico AG's office released a press statement noting the gravity and 
cross-border significance of the femicide. So far, the New 
Mexico-Chihuahua agreement doesn't include joint field 
investigations. New Mexico Assistant Attorney General Maria 
Sanchez-Gagne told Frontera NorteSur that no one from her office, to 
the best of her knowledge, is involved in the cotton field 
investigation. Sanchez-Gagne would not comment on past incidents of 
violence and criminality involving PGJE agents, but defended the 
cross-border reform program underway between New Mexico and 
Chihuahua. "What I do know is that Chihuahua is moving forward to 
change its criminal justice system," Sanchez-Gagne said. "They are 
the first state to do this in Mexico, and we are applauding them and 
assisting them to make this a more secure city and state."

A Border Femicide End Game?

Convictions of Edgar Alvarez and his friends in the cotton field case 
and other women's murders could well mark the end game in many of the 
Ciudad Juarez femicide [investigations]. High stakes exist for the 
PGJE, Patricia Gonzalez, Mexican human rights guarantees, and US 
Mexico policy, not to mention the accused suspects, victims' families 
and society in general. On the international level, non-governmental 
human rights organizations, the European Union, the United Nations, 
the United States Congress, and the Inter-American Commission on 
Human Rights (IACHR) have all clamored to one degree or another for 
justice. In the United States, the murders are likely to get renewed 
attention when the movie Bordertown, which stars Jennifer Lopez and 
Antonio Banderas, is released to commercial theaters later this year.

According to attorney Adriana Carmona of the Chihuahua City-based 
Women's Human Rights Center, relatives of seven Ciudad Juarez and 
Chihuahua City femicide victims are pursuing cases against the 
Mexican government for human rights violations in the IACHR. While 
the IACHR's recommendations are purely advisory, lawyers for victims' 
families are studying the possibility of taking the cases to the next 
level, to the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court for Human Rights, 
which issues obligatory orders to member countries, including Mexico. 
Four of the IACHR cases involve women that Alvarez and crew are 
officially suspected of killing, but convictions of the current 
suspects could help block or slow international legal action. If the 
critics are on the mark, convictions of Alvarez and his old buddies 
will mean that the real killers of women would once again go 
unpunished.

Already, Mexican law guarantees impunity in a growing number of the 
femicide cases. As the Washington Post noted in a recent article, 
Mexican law has a 14-year statute of limitations on murder. The 
newspaper mentioned several murders from 1993 whose prosecution time 
has passed.  On a campaign stop in Ciudad Juarez last year, 
then-presidential candidate Felipe Calderon vowed to end impunity in 
the women's killings. Meanwhile, sectors of the Mexican government, 
media and industry are taking steps to wipe the memory of the cotton 
field and other serial crimes, still legally unsolved, from the 
public consciousness.  Ciudad Juarez's identity as an industrial 
border magnet that constantly draws new people to the city even as 
older residents leave for the United States helps facilitate erasure.

Recently, the Office of the Federal Attorney General quietly withdrew 
police officers it had long assigned to guard the cotton field. 
Yearman finds irony in the pending relocation of the US Consulate to 
a site close to the cotton field in Ciudad Juarez's "Golden Zone." 
The relocation promises a bonanza for new businesses like hotels that 
serve thousands of visa-seekers. "The (cotton field) is going to be 
plowed over so we can expand the US diplomatic presence in Mexico," 
Yearman observed.

Source: Frontera NorteSur (FNS) Center for Latin American and Border 
Studies New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico 
http://www.mexidata.info/id1383.html: 05/28

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The above articles were originally published and copyrighted by the 
listed sources. These articles are offered for educational purposes 
which CIS maintains is  'fair use' of copyrighted material as 
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

end: Mexico Week In Review: 06.04-06.10
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