Chihuahua City May Have Juarez-Type Murder String
by Tessie Borden
Republic Mexico City Bureau
Jul. 20, 2003 12:00 AM
MEXICO CITY - The murders of young women that for a decade afflicted the border city of Juarez have spread south to Chihuahua City, activists say.
Advocates of victims' relatives in the renowned case say the perpetrators may have moved to fresh ground to avoid the crush of attention and police presence the murders have generated in Juarez. Since 1993, 276 women in Juarez, which shares the border with El Paso, have been kidnapped and murdered. Some have been missing for years, while the decaying remains of many others have been found, often with signs of sex abuse or mutilation, in the outskirts of the city.
Activists believe more than one-third of the Juarez murders have the characteristics of serial killings.
Women's rights activists in Juarez publicized the case so much that in recent years the Mexican attorney general and the FBI have offered the state investigators help in solving the crimes.
Now, the activists say similar disappearances and murders have been occurring in Chihuahua City, 233 miles south of Juarez, since at least 2000, although investigators aren't so quick to link the cities.
"This is causing these bands of people who are dedicated to abusing women to move to Chihuahua where there is less risk," said Adriana Carmona of the Mexico City-based Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, which is representing the families of some of the victims.
Carmona and other victim-advocates have little confidence in how state prosecutors are handling the case in either city. They say investigators ignore possible leads and follow an assembly-line approach.
"They begin with the assumption that these girls left their homes voluntarily," Carmona said. "This means they are leaving out important lines of investigation."
The activists have identified 15 cases of disappeared women in Chihuahua City that resemble the Juarez cases. Six of the victims have been found dead, including the body of Neyra Azucena Cervantes, found Monday, two months after she was reported missing.
Manuel Esparza Navarrete, spokesman for the Chihuahua Prosecutor's Office in Juarez that is leading the case, refused to comment on specific lines of investigation, but he said each is being followed until it is proven or discarded.
He disputed Carmona's numbers, saying he knows of only three or four cases of murdered women in Chihuahua, and, so far, investigators don't believe they have any link to the Juarez murders, primarily because forensic experts have concluded that sex abuse was either not involved or not the cause of death.
Passersby found Cervantes' body in a rugged outskirt of the city called Cerro Prieto this week. Cervantes' family had reported her missing May 13, and she was last seen in the center of town. Cervantes, 19, was found not far from where the remains of another woman, Paloma Escobar, were found in March 2002. Escobar was missing for about a year, said her mother, Norma Ledesma.
Carmona says state investigators are deliberately ignoring facts common to cases in both cities that could provide promising leads.
For example, 15 of the cases involve students at Ecco, a computing school that had centers in both cities but has since closed them.
Ecco is newly in the spotlight because both Cervantes and Escobar attended classes there. Ledesma said that, though Ecco closed, it reopened under another name, Computacion ERA. Ecco's Web site shows no locations in Chihuahua state, although an official said the company used to have a Chihuahua location.
Carmona said that when they asked investigators about the school, they got angry refusals to consider it.
Ledesma said her daughter was last seen at the school on the day she disappeared, in a car belonging to one of the insructors, apparently drugged or asleep.
After officials refused to ask the school for information about the instructor, she made the request herself but was told he had left the school.
Ledesma has joined forces with other mothers of disappeared women in Chihuahua and formed an advocacy group, Justice for Our Daughters. It stays in communication with similar groups from Juarez that form the network "Ni Una Mas" (Not One More).
No one believes that all the murders and disappearances are the work of one person. Many are the result of domestic violence, and suspects have been arrested and tried. But Chavez Cano said 97 of the unsolved cases may be the work of one person or a group of people who are serial murderers. And now, she fears they are working in Chihuahua, as well.
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