Mothers in Mexico protest women's murders and disappearances

Guest feature

May 13, 2013

Reprinted with permission by FNS
Courtesy photo by Cimac Noticias

Mothers in Juarez Renew International Campaign

By Kent Paterson
FNS

JUAREZ, MEXICO  - - In the sister cities of Juarez, Chihuahua and El Paso, Texas, Mother’s Day 2013 had a prolonged calendar life because of cross-border family ties, work schedules and commercial promotions. An international fusion made for a long weekend of parties, sales events and musical tributes extending from the days immediately leading up to the Mexican holiday of May 10 to the U.S. celebration on May 12.

 Perla Reyes and Carmen Castillo were two mothers who weren’t celebrating, though. 

These two Juarez women joined other moms from the new organization Madres y Familias Unidas por Nuestras Hijas (Mothers and Families United for our Daugthers) and their supporters in plastering downtown Juarez with more than 1,500 posters of disappeared or murdered young women, including Monica Liliana Delgado Castillo, found dead in the Valle de Juarez (Juarez Valley) in early 2011, and Jocelyn Calderon Reyes, missing since late last year.

Relatives of the missing suspect their loved ones have fallen prey to human traffickers.

“Many people have things to celebrate in their homes,  but there are mothers in this city who have nothing to celebrate,” Imelda Marrufo, coordinator of the Women’s Roundtable of Ciudad Juarez, said as she took a break from the postering.

Marrufo and fellow activists fanned out into the bustling blocks surrounding the downtown Cathedral and the dusty redevelopment project enveloping the zone.

Soon, passerby saw the photos of Janeth Paola Soto Betancourth, Cinthia Jocabeth Castaneda Alvarado, Diana Rocio Ramirez Hernandez, Maria Guadalupe Perez Montes, Jocelyn Calderon Reyes, Maria de la Luz Hernandez Cardona, Idali Juache Laguna, Griselda Murua Lopez, Silvia Arce, and Monica Janeth Alanis Esparza. The poster of a smiling Monica Liliana Delgado, the only one in the particular group whose fate has been officially determined, read: “A Warrior Never Dies.”

Except for 29-year-old Silvia Arce who disappeared back in 1998, all the individuals on the posters vanished from 2008 to 2012, when they were between 13 to 19 years of age.  All went missing during the Great Violence, a time when the city was crawling with soldiers, federal police and assorted gunmen. Ironically, many of the missing were born during the years when the disappearance and killing of women in Juarez first became an international issue.

Ricardo Alanis, father of university student Monica Janeth Alanis, who was 18 when she disappeared in March 2009, said there were “no leads, no indications” of what might have transpired with his daughter.  Last month, Alanis and his wife Olga Esparza were honored by El Paso’s Annunciation House for their persistent activism.  Alanis insisted that a lack of “political interest” prevails in clarifying the fates of his daughter and other disappeared persons.

Quoted on Mother’s Day by the state prosecutor’s office, Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission President Jose Luis Armendariz said the top state law enforcement agency was making advances in investigating women’s disappearances by means of a new investigatory protocol. “We recognize there are problems,” Armendariz said,  “but let’s all participate more so (disappearances) don’t occur.” 

Marrufo credited the current administration of the prosecutor’s office for showing improvements over its predecessors on the gender justice front, but faulted the state agency for coming up short in the “high-risk” disappearances like the ones publicized by Mothers and Families United.  She said the state should have specialized units to probe the unresolved cases. “We think the prosecutor’s office should have better trained teams,” Marrufo added.

The posters displayed by Mothers and Families United represent only a small fraction of disappeared girls and women in Juarez. While the group covered walls, street lamp posts and telephone boots with pictures of relatives,  another group of mothers of the missing and their supporters initiated a 24-hour vigil outside the border offices of the Chihuahua state prosecutor’s office.

Marrufo said her organization knew of 190 women and girls missing in the city since the late 1990s, but acknowledged the number could be short since disappearances began mounting after 1993 if not sooner.

Age, appearance, family and social background, and the location of disappearance form striking parallels between the post-2008 disappeared and their counterparts from earlier years. Many were last reportedly in the city’s downtown core. 

Teenager Jocelyn Calderon went missing in the middle of the afternoon on Dec. 30, 2012, while she was presumably headed to the Cathedral to meet a friend. Mother Perla Reyes said the young girl had since been reported seen in different parts of the city, but the information could not be confirmed by relatives.

“We don’t know if it’s true or not,” Reyes told FNS. “My kids are afraid. They cry a lot. My mother is sick. These are hard blows which have affected the entire family.”  The Juarez resident appealed for help from U.S. neighbors in solving women’s disappearances.

The story of Monica Guillen Delgado Castillo is hauntingly similar to other young female murder victims from 10 years ago or more. Both Monica and her mom Carmen Castillo were newcomers to Juarez, drawn to the border city from their native state of Durango by a lack of money and the need for work.

Fresh out of high school but unable to pay for college, Monica Delgado had spent only four months in the city when she vanished on Oct. 18, 2010, while presumably catching a downtown bus.  According to mom, Monica had a boyfriend but otherwise maintained a very limited social life and spent a lot of time at home.

For a spell, Monica worked on the downtown streets recruiting students for a private English and computer school. According to Castillo, the authorities claimed they later recovered Monica’s body from the rural Valle de Juarez (about 35 miles southeast of the city) on Jan. 20, 2011.  Yet the 17-year-old was not immediately identified and instead interred in a common grave.

After months of pressing state authorities about her daughter’s whereabouts, Castillo said officials finally informed her in September 2011 that Monica had been found dead months earlier.

“I don’t believe in the state prosecutor’s office now. They don’t do things right,”  Castillo said. “I only believe in divine justice.”
  
The background to Monica Delgado’s disappearance and reported murder is déjà vu from years ago. The Durango transplant worked for a private school with a business model akin to the old ECCO computer school, where numerous femicide victims from both Chihuahua City and Juarez studied or worked between 2000 and 2003.

The slayings of the ECCO-linked victims were followed by glaring investigatory irregularities, the official concealment of bodies, the mistaken identification of corpses, and the fabrication of scapegoats.

Female murder victims with some sort of connection to ECCO were typically disappeared for weeks or months before being found in clusters of multiple homicide victims in and around Juarez and Chihuahua City.  More recently, the multiple remains of girls and young women who vanished from Juarez, especially the downtown area, were found in the Valle de Juarez. Like the contemporary Valle de Juarez cases, the murders from more than a decade ago linger in impunity. 

Carmen Castillo said she did not know of the common school background of previous victims until after Monica’s disappearance. 

Together with other local and national groups, Mothers and Families United and the Ciudad Juarez Women’s Roundtable demand decisive governmental actions to prevent disappearances from happening in the first place; adequate investigations of pending cases; and greater federal involvement in the issue, among other measures. 

The Juarez Mother’s Day action was part of a national effort held in coordination with women’s and human rights organizations active in Chihuahua City, Guadalajara, Culiacan and Tecate.  

The civil society groups laid out common goals of educating the public about gender violence, re-publicizing the issue of disappeared women and femicide in Juarez, and pressuring the authorities to address similar situations across the Mexican republic. A statement issued by the participating organizations declared the campaign will reach 18  nations in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and North America.

Although Juarez became notorious decades ago for murdered and missing young women,  information distributed by Mothers and Families United and allied groups documented how the issue is a national one. For example, a bulletin issued by the new justice campaign reported 1,184 cases of missing women in the state of Jalisco, home to Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city.

Contrary to the national pattern in which men are the clear majority at 60 percent of the nearly 26,000 cases of disappeared people listed on the National Registry System of Missing or Disappeared Persons, the authors noted that women represent 53 percent of all disappeared cases in Jalisco. 

“Undoubtedly, this is one more indication of gender violence in the state of Jalisco,”  the bulletin contended.

In their bulletin, the campaign’s members recalled that Mexico is under an obligatory sentence from the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights to prevent, investigate and sanction violence against women.

“This is the first simultaneous action of different actions at the same time,”  Marrufo said of the renewed justice campaign in Juarez and other Mexican cities. “Every mother and father wants to know what happened to their daughters and have them back at home. This is urgent.”

Frontera NorteSur: on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico, United States
For a free electronic subscription
email:fnsnews@nmsu.edu

Mothers protest in Mexico City (CIMAC)

Feds bust New York-Mexico international sex-trafficking ring

Officials announce shocking details of sex-trafficking  allegations

(U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) news release uploaded by Kelly McKenzie)

NEW YORK (May 1, 2013) — More than a dozen members of an alleged international sex trafficking ring were taken into custody April 30 to face charges for sex trafficking. The arrests are a result of an investigation by ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).
A criminal complaint unsealed April 30 charged 13 defendants with sex trafficking; interstate transportation for prostitution; use of interstate facilities to promote a prostitution enterprise; obstruction of justice; possession of child pornography; and illegal reentry after deportation. The group allegedly exploited dozens of women, some of whom were trafficked from Mexico to New York and forced to engage in prostitution.
Two defendants, Isaias Flores-Mendez, 40, and David Vasquez-Medina, 28, were already in federal custody on charges of illegal reentry after deportation. Another defendant, Carlos Garcia-De La Rosa, 32, was already in custody on state charges and will be transferred to federal custody. One defendant, Juana Lucas-Sanchez, 36, was arrested Tuesday afternoon in Delaware. One of the defendants charged in the complaint, Panfilo Flores-Mendez, 39, remains at large.
In connection with Tuesday’s arrests, HSI executed search warrants on six locations, including four brothels in Yonkers, Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, and Queens.
“The arrests today move the United States closer to blockading the repugnant sex trafficking corridor that organizations like the one allegedly operated by Isaias Flores-Mendez and his cohorts use to smuggle innocent victims between Tenancingo, Mexico and New York City,” said James T. Hayes Jr., special agent in charge of HSI New York. “HSI will vigorously target and prosecute leaders and members of sex trafficking organizations who seek to prey on the innocence and trust of young women and children in order to enslave them for profit and devote all necessary resources to rescuing victims of sex trafficking and exploitation.” (Editor's note: Tenancingo is in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala, which U.S. and Mexican officials described as a notorious sex-trafficking center dominated by generations of families.)
“With promises of a better life, the members of this alleged sex trafficking and prostitution ring lured their unsuspecting victims to the United States and then consigned them to a living hell – forcing them to become sex slaves living in abhorrent conditions, and using threats, verbal abuse, and violence – sexual and otherwise – when they resisted and even sometimes when they didn’t,” said Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. “With their arrests Tuesday, the barbaric conduct in which these defendants allegedly engaged in order to make a profit has now been put to a stop, and they will be prosecuted for their alleged crimes and the women they enslaved will be able to put their lives back together.”
According to the allegations in the complaint filed in Manhattan federal court:
Since at least 2008, nine of the defendants charged in the complaint have been engaged in a criminal prostitution and sex trafficking enterprise. The enterprise is part of a larger network of sex traffickers who generally operate between Tenancingo, Mexico, and New York, among other places. The typical pattern and practice of this network is to lure women to the United States by, among other things, engaging them in romantic relationships and promising a better life in New York. After the women are smuggled from Mexico to New York, they are forced to begin working as prostitutes against their will under abhorrent conditions.
The victims are often beaten, threatened with physical harm to them and their family members, sexually assaulted, and verbally abused. In a typical day, a Mexican sex trafficking victim in New York has sexual intercourse with 20 to 30 customers. Each customer usually pays $30-$35 for 15 minutes of sex.
Of that $30-$35, $15 typically goes to either the driver who transported the woman to the client or to the residential brothel where the woman worked. The other $15 goes to the victim, who is then typically forced to give all of it to the trafficker. Traffickers typically provide their victims with condoms and birth control pills. In some cases, if a victim is suspected of being pregnant, her trafficker makes her take a drug to induce a miscarriage.
In September 2006, a woman (“Victim-1”) living in Mexico with her young child was smuggled into the United States and brought to Queens, New York, by Isaias Flores-Mendez, and Bonifacio Flores-Mendez. Once in New York, Victim-1 was made to sleep on the floor with her child. Thereafter, Isaias Flores-Mendez, Bonifacio Flores-Mendez, and Juana Lucas-Sanchez used threats, verbal abuse, and violence to force her to engage in prostitution against her will. For example, on one occasion, when Victim-1 refused to work as a prostitute, Isaias Flores-Mendez pushed her and her young child outside on a cold winter night, locked the door, and refused to let her back in.
On other occasions, he beat her. Victim-1 was forced to engage in prostitution against her will on a daily basis, often servicing more than 20 customers per day in brothels located in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Yonkers, New York as well as in Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. On one occasion, when Isaias Flores-Mendez, Bonifacio Flores-Mendez, and Juana Lucas-Sanchez suspected that Victim-1 was pregnant, they forced her to take medication to induce a miscarriage. Isaias Flores-Mendez took all of the money Victim-1 earned.
In late 2006 or early 2007, David Vazquez-Medina told his then-girlfriend (“Victim-2”) that she should work as a prostitute and that the women he drove to brothels and to customers’ residences to engage in prostitution made 200 dollars or more a day. Victim-2 refused. Vazquez-Medina pressured Victim-2 to work as a prostitute, and when she did not immediately comply, he became angry and verbally abusive. As a result, Victim-2 relented to his demands. After approximately two weeks, Victim-2 pleaded with Vazquez-Medina to let her get other jobs to make money, and to stop making her work as a prostitute. Vazquez-Medina beat her, threatened to take her child, and told her she had no choice.
For approximately two years, Victim-2 worked as a prostitute against her will, and Vazquez-Medina kept the proceeds. On some occasions, he drove Victim-2 to farms in New Jersey where she had sex with approximately 25 men per day. On other occasions, Vazquez-Medina made arrangements for her to work in other states. Over time, Vazquez-Medina had Victim-2 make her own work arrangements and he called the locations where she worked to track how much money she earned so he could ensure that she was turning all of the proceeds over to him.
The participants in this criminal business enterprise served different functions, operating brothels, manning the brothels, driving victims to brothels and to customers’ residences for the purpose of engaging in prostitution, dispatching drivers, passing out "chica" cards – small cards that are handed out on the street to solicit customers for the enterprise – and recruiting and overseeing the women who work, or are forced to work, as prostitutes. In connection with this prostitution-sex trafficking enterprise, in April 2013, Bonifacio Flores-Mendez enticed at least one woman to travel from New Jersey to New York for the purpose of prostitution.
In October and November 2012, Bonifacio Flores-Mendez and Miguel Angel Che-Veliz, working under the direction of Isaias Flores-Mendez, found and destroyed GPS tracking devices, which law enforcement agents had placed on vehicles used by members of the prostitution-sex trafficking enterprise.
One member of the prostitution-sex trafficking enterprise, Carlos Garcia-De La Rosa, was also charged with possession of child pornography, which he allegedly caused to be produced by a 14-year-old girl with whom he was engaged in a sexual relationship. Two members of the prostitution-sex trafficking enterprise were also charged with illegal re-entry after deportation.
The prosecution of this case is being overseen by the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Organized Crime Unit. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Amanda Kramer and Rebecca Mermelstein are in charge of the prosecution.
Human trafficking is one of the most heinous crimes that HSI investigates. In its worst manifestation, human trafficking is akin to modern-day slavery. HSI relies on tips from the public to dismantle these organizations. Trafficking victims are often hidden in plain sight, voiceless and scared.
To report suspicious human trafficking activity contact the ICE HSI Tip Line at 1-866-347-2423 or report tips online at www.ice.gov/tips. Anonymous calls are accepted.