CHIHUAHUA, Chih. (apro).–Maria was deprived of her freedom more than three years ago. During her captivity, she was the victim of sexual abuse and afterwards, her captors forced her to have sexual relations with members of an organized crime group that “liked her looks.”

One day, in a moment of carelessness by her kidnappers, she fled from the place where she was being held captive and rejoined her family. Days later, the woman received a threatening message on her cell phone. Her captors warned her that if she did not return, they would go for her sister and all her family.

Afraid, the woman went back to her victimizers.  To this day, her whereabouts are unknown. She never mentioned the place where she had been held.

In the same border area in Chihuahua, another woman managed to escape the nightmare that she was subjected to for months and denounced her partner, the leader of a criminal organization involved in human trafficking.

There were adolescent and adult females, she later claimed. She was in charge of feeding them, but could no longer tolerate the abusive treatment. She said that each of the kidnapped or recruited women was forced to have between 30 to 40 sexual encounters a day.

Like Maria, she went to the Human Rights Center for Women (Cedehm: Centro de Derechos Humanos de las Mujeres), where they provided support. Her case was referred to the Special Prosecutions Unit for Crimes of Violence Against Women and Human Trafficking (Fevimtra: Fiscalia Especial para Delitos de Violencia contra Mujeres y Trata de Personas. After that, she never went back to her birthplace.

In August, 2011, two sisters were deprived of their freedom in San Juanito, Bocoyna municipality. Weeks later, it was discovered that members of the crime organization “La Linea” took them to a “concentration camp” to exploit them. He parents filed a complaint for their disappearance.

Norma Ledesma Ortega, (photo at left her daughter directly below) president of the association Justice for Our Daughters (Justicia para Nuestras Hijas), took the case of Nancy and Daisy Caraveo, originally from Bahuichivo and employees of the town’s Conasupo. After a month, the case file was untouched.

Ledesma demanded the search of an area that a criminal — under arrest for another crime — indicated was the place where the sisters (20 and 26 years old) had been buried.

Ledesma Ortega warned authorities that crime groups based in the mountains had built “concentration camps” where they had several women from that area captive.

“They are recruiting them,” she warned, while they were looking for Nancy and Daisy. They found the women’s voter’s certificates in a warehouse along with weapons and other items.

Before cases of human trafficking became known in this capital city, that hell had been going on for some time in Ciudad Juarez. Two years before the war against drugs promoted by Felipe Calderon started, the former deputy chief of Ciudad Juarez Criminal Investigations Department, Hector Armando Lastra Munoz, was accused of operating a network that sexually exploited minors.

Guadalupe Mortin Otero, in charge of prevention and eradication of violence against women in that locality, asked for a thorough investigation.

In March of 2004, First Penal Judge Arnulfo Arellanes, ordered Lastra Munoz incarcerated for the crimes of prostitution and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. A few hours later, the deputy chief, also the operations coordinator for 159 Public Ministry agents commissioned in Ciudad Juarez, left the Cereso prison (Cereso: Centro de Readaptacion Social) after posting bond set by the court in the amount of 300,000 pesos (approximately $24,000.00).

Lastra Munoz declared himself innocent when he gave his preliminary statement before Judge Arnulfo Arellanes, and claimed not to know the four young girls involved in the case. In addition, he asked for conditional release.

He claimed that the statements given by Mayra Janneth Mejia Romero against him were fantasy, and stated that he had known her for four months. In addition, he claimed that she was the one who introduced Karla Alexandra Vargas Ortiz to him as her cousin and he claimed not to know the other two minors who accused him of hiring them for prostitution purposes.

Entombed in a clear plastic trash bag, a nude femicide victim is disposed at a Chihuahua dump

He also said he is a lawyer and that he would  represent himself because he was innocent of the charges against him, and accused the State Attorney General of creating a “smoke screen, due to the fact that the agency was in the middle of a scandal as a result of police officers being involved in drug trafficking and in at least 12 homicides.

According to the Cedehm, the Lastra case showed the symbiosis between organized crime groups and the police agencies that provide protection for them.
On the former official’s person, “they found a catalog (sic) of politicians and narcos. It was evident proof of abuse of authority and of the existence of human trafficking,” points out Luz Estela Castro Rodriguez, the director of Cedehm, in an interview.
“In a patriarchal culture, all crimes against women increase, it is easier to subdue them,” she adds.
The problem is that, despite the evidence, mainly in Ciudad Juarez and other border cities, there are no investigations into human trafficking. It was only two years ago that authorities began to recognize the existence of the crime, but until today, not a single case has been investigated, much less anybody sent to trial or prison.
On March 28, 2008, authorities from all three levels of government announced the start of the Chihuahua Joint Operation to “dismantle networks and logistics of organized crime.”
More than 10,000 Army and Federal Police troopers arrived in Juarez. Months later, more federal police forces arrived in the capital and mountain municipalities like Bocoyna, Guadalupe y Calvo, and Madera, among others.
In the first four months of the operation, there were 33 abductions (“levantones”), according to the Commission of Solidarity and Defense of Human Rights (Cosyddhac: Comision de Solidaridad y Defensa de los Derechos Humanos).
In the face of an increase in complaints brought against the military before the State Commission on Human Rights, on April 18, 2008, the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena: Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional) issued a communique alerting the public of the existence of a “false army” financed by drug traffickers operating in the state, for the purpose of disparaging the Armed Forces.
Five years later, Castro Rodriguez asks: “How many armed men were there, or are there now, in the state? There’s a policy of simulation. The strategy that the authorities have is only marketing to say that everything’s all right. One must recognize that , to begin with, where there’s weapons and drugs, there’s human trafficking, and there are already cases filed with  Fevintra.” She points out that when the 10,000 men were sent to Juarez, they arrived at a time when the society already saw women as disposable, in a maquiladora (assembly plant) sector with operating policies that were not appropriate for them.
“They sent them (the soldiers) out to hunt and forced disappearances also increased, but to this day those are invisible phenomena,” she claims.
The same thing happened in the mountains and in other cities in the state. “It’s terrible, because if the sicarios (gunmen) like a woman, they take her without a worry. There’s a great deal of forced sexual prostitution; it increased because communities live with crime. Since last year, priest Javier “El Pato” Avila, has charged that there’s a gang of adolescents and young men in Bocoyna engaged in molesting and sexually abusing indigenous people when they walk the long trails of the Tarahumara Mountains.The complaint against the authorities, once again, is the impunity, exclaims the prelate, because all they do is say that violence has decreased when it is not true. “No matter how much they cluck, it’s just clucking, like chickens that have laid eggs,” he underlines.Norma Ledesma Ortega, the president of the association Justice for Our Daughters, says she has clear indications that from 2009 to 2011, organized crime groups used the Valle de Juarez to bury dozens of young women. The disappearances of adolescent and young women continued during 2012, most of them in downtown Juarez. And just in January, 2013, the Committee of Mothers of disappeared young women noted 14 cases.
Authorities have not investigated, or at least they haven’t given the results to family members, who most of the time become the investigators due to the absence of information. According to Justice for Our Daughters, the investigation to punish those responsible should focus on organized crime and human trafficking, including the complicity of government officials.
“The Department of Justice has been indifferent to this hypothesis and has refused to perform an effective investigation. The recent cases of those girls who were found in the Valle de Juarez remain unpunished,” notes Ledesma.              (David Meza)

She adds: “Case files from ten years ago, in the case of the state capital, and from up to twenty years ago in the case of Juarez, one can assume today, had the characteristics of human trafficking violations. We did not have awareness before, we were not prepared as parents to demand that authorities investigate the crimes as human trafficking cases. All they did was question the immediate families of the victims. They knew what it was about; we didn’t, and they did nothing.”
They took the mothers of the first four women who disappeared in Chihuahua (the capital) to Piedras Negras (Coahuila) or to Nuevo Casas Grandes, telling them that (the girls) were together and had run away voluntarily, but that was not true, recalls Ledesma. “Authorities look for girls who run away, not girls who are taken away. If the crime of human trafficking is increasing, it must be because police agencies are involved,” she declares.

Numbers war

For Jose Luis Armendariz Gonzalez, the president of the State Commission on Human Rights, the subject of disappeared persons is crucial and complex, because there is a numbers war going on and, therefore, it is difficult to come up with a diagnosis and more difficult yet to eliminate the problem.
The official numbers from the Office of the State Attorney General, according to page number UIFGE-I-028-2013094932012 of the Infomex System, show that in 2012, 255 women were murdered, 10 of them less than 11 years old. Throughout the state, there are 526 disappearance reports open, 219 of them involving women. Despite that, last January, prosecutor Jauregui Venegas assured us that there are only 120 cases of disappeared women being investigated.
Regarding the skeletal remains of disappeared women that have been found, in March of 2011, in a meeting with authorities from the three levels of government and with civilian organizations, the Fevimtra stated that there were in the Medical Examiner’s Office (Semefo: Servicio Medico Forense) the remains of 143 unidentified female persons.
This past January 16, the director of Investigative Services of the Office of State Attorney General, Daniel Ricardo Jaramillo Vela, disclosed that they have secured 59 genetic profiles from around the state that are unidentified. Days later, prosecutor Carlos Manuel Salas stated that they actually have only 44 genetic profiles.
Jaramillo Vela reported that the remains found between January and February of 2011 had 24 elements that pertained to 11 women: seven (remains) have already been delivered, two were delivered and rejected by their families, and two more are inconsistent with the data bases of families who are looking for women in the state.
The bodies rejected by the two families are those of Maria Guadalupe Perez Montes, who disappeared on January 31, 2009, when she was 17 years old, and Idali Jauche Laguna, who disappeared on February 23, 2010. When the bodies were delivered to the two families in April, 2011, they asked for a second opinion and demanded that the remains be sent to a specialized laboratory because they did not believe the authorities.
Almost a year later, and under pressure from a group of mothers who marched from Juarez to the capital, Jaramillo announced that they sent samples of bones found in Arroyo Naranjo to the Bode Technology 15 laboratory.
With respect to the remains not yet identified, he said that because this involved Juarez, a transient border area, they have to request cooperation from other states or countries to determine whether they belong to women who disappeared there.

According to Infomex, the North Zone Attorney General’s office, to which Juarez belongs, had 101 women reported missing from 1995 to the middle of January, 2013. In 2012 alone, he indicated, 17 disappeared, the majority of them in downtown Juarez, according to newspaper archives.
He pointed out that the majority of the disappearances in the zone (60) took place between 2008 and 2012. To those cases, one must add the 17 bodies found in the Juarez Valley from 2009 to 2011, which were delivered to their families more than two years after they were found.
That is the case with Adriana Sarmiento Enriquez, who disappeared on January 18, 2008, when she was 15 years old. She was found in the Valle de Juarez  in November of 2009, and was delivered to her family two years later, in 2011….continues on next page The West Zone Attorney General’s office has reports of 58 disappeared women, 47 of them between 2008 and 2012. The majority of them (20) are from last year and the municipalities that reported the most cases are Cuauhtemoc, Guerrero, Bocoyna, Madera and Carichi. The ages of the disappeared women are from eight to 48 years of age.
The South Zone Attorney General’s office reports 11 cases from 2007 to 2012, five of them from last year, and the majority from Parral, Guachochi and Jimenez. The ages of the disappeared females range from three to 62 years old.

Pretense and harassment, the answer to the march

On January 15, a group of four family mothers, accompanied by legal representative Francisca Galvan, began a march from Juarez to the city of Chihuahua to demand a public audience with the governor, Cesar Horacio Duarte Jaquez. They were asking to be told how many more skeletal remains there were in the Semefo (office of medical examiner) and asked for their identification to be expedited. They also demanded an investigation of the cases that showed characteristics of human trafficking or organized crime and, in addition, they demanded the dismissal of government officials who had committed irregularities or who had been negligent.
The prosecutor as well as the governor responded through the media that the skeletal remains that are still at the Semefo are inconsistent with the genetic profiles of the disappeared women from the families who are claiming them.
“We have been conducting an investigation in which many of the cases are from ten or more years ago, and they want to pressure (the government) into inventing things, and my government will never do that,” said Duarte in response to media questions.
When the marchers reached the capital, the governor was not there. They chose to return and pushed for Duarte to meet with them in Ciudad Juarez. When the public hearing was scheduled, the mothers who took part in the march were not allowed access.
After four days, forced by the pressure, Duarte attended the meeting with the mothers from the march.There, they reproached him for the lies they have been systematically told and for the nonexistent investigation of their daughters’ cases.
The one who questioned the governor most was Karla Castaneda, the mother of Cinthia Jocabeth Alvarado Castaneda. After the meeting, Karla Castaneda reported harassment and threats by municipal and state officers, who searched her home without a court order.
Because of the risk that those actions represent, she requested political asylum in the United States, which was granted this past February 13. She left with her four children.

Initiative cut short

In the local Congress, there has been a legislative proposal for two years now to create a special prosecutions unit and a state law on human trafficking. The proposal was supported by the National Action Party (PAN: Partido Accion Nacional) faction.
Subsequently, another initiative was introduced by the governor, which proposed amending some provisions in state law to define human trafficking as a criminal offense and the creation of of two congressional commissions to follow up on the matter. This proposal was approved by the Congressional plenum the last week in January.
PAN congressman Raul Garcia Ruiz, who introduced the first legislative proposal, pointed out that for the majority party in Congress (the PRI), the governor’s orders take priority, “they do whatever he wants, and we’re left with trying to do whatever we can to push the matter forward,” he said.
He explained that the legislation that was approved does not provide, for example, for the persons who investigate these crimes to have prosecutorial powers. With a prosecutions unit, he added, they would have had to have a Public Ministry and a specialized police force, which is not contemplated by the enacted legislation.
The legislator stated that during the meetings he held on the legislative proposal, he discovered that, “there is no reliable official diagnostic on point, — by civilian social organizations, by academic institutions or from authorities –, focused on the problem as such.”
He added that authorities have avoided the subject for decades and “have barely managed to institute tenuous reactive, not proactive, measures.”
He points out: “In the State of Chihuahua, officially, the existence of human trafficking as a public security issue is not recognized, nor (is it recognized) as a phenomenon or product of organized crime, although we suffer its effects to a considerable degree.”
He used as an example the cases of women who disappeared in downtown Juarez. “From a simple a priori observation, it can be deduced from the circumstances of method, time and form under which these disappearances occur, that they obey clear organized crime strategies, and may have different causes: prostitution, drug trafficking, immigration.”
However, due to the way they are investigated, it’s not possible to find their link with these criminal activities.
The PAN legislator explained that the investigating authorities lacks the statutory tools to investigate this kind of crime, and it appears that the executive authority, he says, lacks the political will to provide them with such legal instruments.
The reforms that were approved add as a criminal offense the statutory definition of human trafficking, as well as the creation of two special Congressional commissions, one local and the other national, to follow up on the cases. Meanwhile, impunity prevails.      NOTE: An element that is rarely spoken about is the men who are wrongfully convicted  incurring long sentences for femicide murders they had nothing to do with.  In the top photo collage is a 16 year old student who disappeared named Neyra.  Her cousin, David Meza, was 1500 miles away when this occurred in the southern state of Chiapas.  Upon hearing his cousin was gone he raced to Chihuahua to help in her search.  Shortly after his arrival he was picked up by police, brutally tortured into confessing, arrested and imprisoned.