Fox's sweeping victory, which occurred on his fifty-eighth birthday, with 44 percent of the popular vote, was hailed as a triumph for democracy. His campaign promises were grand, calling for sweeping changes at all levels of government and economic improvement for the people of Mexico. He vowed to rid corruption, grant more power to state and local governments, and restructure Mexico's federal law enforcement system. He also proposed a number of solutions to the country's economic stagnation and ineffective judicial system, as well as a more progressive immigration policy with the United States.
He even promised to continue to wear jeans once in the presidential palace.
His assurances had wide appeal. But even more attractive was Fox's charismatic personality. Born in Mexico City to wealthy parents, and raised on a sprawling ranch in central Mexico's state of Guanajuato, Fox was a magnetic right-of-center populist who painted himself as an "honest" entrepreneur and "man of the people." Of mixed European roots his father was Irish, his mother Spanish he was at once continental and cavalier, with dark, chiseled features and a massive frame, towering over his countrymen at a lofty six feet five inches.
The former ranchero turned politician rarely wore suits, hitting the campaign trail in casual button-downs, faded jeans, and a flashy cowboy belt with an oversized buckle that bore his name. His down-home cowboy image and recent entry into politics were viewed as an attractive alternative to the long-standing and corrupt political machine of the incumbent PRI party. And many viewed his victory as a turning point for Mexico.
In Juárez, the women's groups were rallying to bring their cause to the attention of the new president. His election to office brought hope to the city's women, who believed that as "an outsider" his administration would bring about change. The situation had grown so critical in Ciudad Juárez that even officials on the U.S. side of the border were calling for a review of the homicide investigations.
Texas State Representative Norma Chávez, a Democrat from El Paso, along with Senators Eliot Shapleigh of Texas and Mary Jane García of New Mexico, was among the U.S. officials now rallying for a binational investigation into the killings. The politicians suspected a cover-up and wanted authorities to solve the case. With Fox now in office, perhaps their appeals would finally be addressed.
Yet not long into his term, Fox's popularity was hurt when he became embroiled in a scandal that resulted in the resignation of one of his key aides over the purchase of expensive towels $400 U.S. for the presidential palace. But he quickly rebounded by shining the national spotlight on immigration reforms such as the Guest Worker Program and amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the United States.
During several very highly publicized meetings with U.S. President George W. Bush, Fox pledged to tighten security at the Mexican border in exchange for more inclusive immigration policies that would allow Mexican citizens to work legally in the United States and help millions of undocumented Mexican workers already living north of the border gain access to green cards and possibly even legal citizenship. But security concerns after the events of September 11, 2001, would all but close the door to any possible advances in that arena.
On the home front, Fox was meeting with staunch opposition to his attempts to clean house and stamp out corruption and would ultimately be criticized for his administration's failure to actively investigate and prosecute corrupt officials for illegal past acts.
Then, just two months into Fox's term, a seventeen-year-old named Lilia Alejandra García Andrade disappeared in Ciudad Juárez without a trace. The young mother was last seen leaving the factory where she worked assembling parts for water massage equipment. It was Valentine's Day 2001, and García had intended to catch the factory-sponsored shuttle bus for home that evening.
The missing girl's mother, Norma Andrade, posted flyers around the city, asking for information that could uncover her daughter's whereabouts. Her postings prompted threats of intimidation from anonymous callers but no news about Lilia.
In theory at least, Lilia should have been safe. Sharif Sharif, members of Los Rebeldes, and the bus drivers and their alleged leader, Víctor Moreno, were all behind bars. Yet young women were continuing to disappear.
Norma told police that the last time she saw her daughter was at 6:00 a.m. on February 14, when the girl was leaving the house for work. For more than one year, the teen had been assembling parts at the downtown factory. Her shift usually ended at 6:00 p.m., and Norma liked to pick her up in the evenings. But the mother had to work late that night at the primary school where she was a teacher; there was a mandatory sexual education course she needed to attend.
Lilia would have to catch the bus. She was still nursing her infant son and needed to get home for his feeding. But she had no money that day and borrowed bus fare from a fellow worker.
Coworkers at Servicios Plásticos y Ensambles, the factory where García was employed, said they last saw the young mother walking in the direction of an abandoned lot near the factory just after dark to get to the bus stop on the other side. This was the route she often walked to catch the bus for home. Many of the factory's employees used the shortcut, even though there were no streetlights illuminating the way.
Lilia's mother said she was instantly alarmed when she learned her daughter had not made it home that night. In addition to her work on the assembly line, Lilia was also a student at a local prep school, where she was in her fourth semester. She was studying to gain entry to a university in hopes of becoming a journalist. She loved to read poetry and play basketball when she had a free moment. But of late her hours were full, caring for her two young children, studying, and working at the factory.
Norma was certain her daughter had met with foul play. Lilia would never dream of going out on the town with so many responsibilities. Frantic, Norma dialed the Unidad de Atención a Víctimas de Delitos Sexuales y Contra la Familia (Unit for the Care of Victims of Sexual Offenses and Offenses Against the Family) to report her daughter missing. But her plea for help received little attention.
Just days earlier, Suly Ponce had publicly assured the city's residents that with Sharif Sharif and several of his alleged associates in jail, the main perpetrators of the serial crimes were off the streets. She boasted that thirty of the fifty-two sexually motivated femicides that had occurred in Juárez since 1998 had been solved under her watch. She also noted that the murder rate of the city's women had declined from March 1999 to February 2001, with just four cases in which the victims fit the earlier profile.
"We're conscious that copycats are going to imitate the same [murder] patterns and we're going to be ready," she insisted. "In very little time, I'll have the pleasure of openly saying that in Ciudad Juárez there is not one sex crime." But just days after Ponce delivered her remarks, Lilia García was missing.
It was only after the young woman's ravaged, tortured, and mutilated body was found wrapped in a blanket on February 21, in the empty lot three hundred yards from the factory, that the story got any real attention. An autopsy revealed she had been dead for about a day and a half and that she had spent at least five days in captivity before her death.
The location of the young woman's body marked a change in the killer's signature. This was the first corpse to be found within the Juárez city limits. Up to this point, all the victims had been recovered from the outlying desert areas.
Criminologist Oscar Maynez saw the shift as significant. It was as if those responsible felt above detection, confident enough to dump the body in a well-traveled part of the city.
According to authorities, Lilia García had been savagely beaten, raped, strangled, and set on fire. The cause of death was determined to be asphyxia by strangulation. Oscar Maynez noted the MO was identical to that of several of the earlier killings. News reports indicated that Garcia's breasts had been mutilated.
Police were alluding to a "copycat" killer on the loose. "The most recent killings of women in Ciudad Juárez are related to a pattern of imitation of criminal conduct," said Chihuahua State Attorney General Arturo González Rascón at a press conference that March.
Suly Ponce, meanwhile, was working to minimize the outcry. She insisted that Lilia García was the first woman to be raped and murdered in that quarter of the city that year. Her claim was not accurate. In fact, the naked body of an unidentified female had been recovered just one week before near where García's body had just been found. Surely Ponce must have been aware of the earlier discovery.
Ponce's offhand response to the latest killing served to further fuel already flared tempers, with local activists again taking to the streets in protest. It was widely believed among them and nongovernmental organizations that Ponce and her special task force were nothing but "a sham," created to give the illusion that state officials were doing something about the murders a place to point to when questions arose from members of the foreign media.
"I believe that a grave danger awaits every woman at every moment and every point of this city," Guillermina González told local journalists in the days after García's body was found. Though she had the stature of a little girl, Guillermina's eyes wore the pain of someone much older. She was a defiant young woman who had stared death in the face at far too young an age. By now her grassroots organization, Voices Without Echo, had its own Web site, which was designed and written by González. The group was also receiving letters of support from around the world.
The discovery of García's body and the fury that followed prompted high-ranking executives in the maquiladora industry to offer a reward of fifteen thousand pesos for information leading to the capture of the killer or killers of the teenage maquila worker. The announcement resulted in a flood of calls to the DA's office mostly false leads from people anxious to collect the reward money.
Irritated by the burden the calls were placing on municipal employees, government officials lashed out at executives of Servicios Plásticos y Ensámbles, García's employer, labeling their decision to publicize a reward as "irresponsible."
One unnamed official even stepped before the cameras to accuse maquiladora executives of using the reward to gain positive publicity for the factory and not as a gesture of goodwill.
The situation hit a crescendo when an already enraged public learned that municipal police had failed to respond to an emergency call to 060 reporting "a rape in progress" in the exact location where Lilia García was last seen, and where her body was later found.
According to the official police log, it was 10:15 p.m. on February 19 when the emergency call came in, exactly five days after García was last seen alive. The caller reported that the rape was being perpetrated by two men in a car. The female victim, the caller said, was naked and crying out for help. Odd as it sounds, it appears that the rapists had taken García back to the same lot from which they'd abducted her five days earlier on February 14, and she was now fighting for her life.
Remarkably, police failed to dispatch a patrol car to the scene. It was not until a second call came into the station that night that a marked unit was finally sent to investigate. But the patrol car did not arrive on the scene until 11:25 p.m., more than one hour after the alert first was phoned in. By then, the location was quiet and the officers simply returned to headquarters.
The emergency switchboard logs at 11:05 p.m. on February 19, the night the call to 060 was placed, simply stated "nothing to report,"
"reporte sin novedad,"
according to Amnesty International USA, the not-for-profit organization that monitors the state of human rights in more than 150 countries. In addition, there is no indication that responding officers ever got out of the patrol car to check the location for any signs of foul play. If they had, they might have found Lilia García's personal belongings.
García's mother, Norma, was outraged when, shortly after her daughter's body was found in February, she learned that the owner of the vacant lot, Chihuahua's ex-governor, had ordered bulldozers to level the property even though clearing the land could destroy potential evidence in her daughter's case.
Critics were livid that authorities had not commenced an investigation into the failure of the 060 emergency switchboard to respond to the initial call for police intervention, and over their inability to explain why it had taken seventy minutes for a patrol car to show up to investigate.
In addition, Amnesty International USA noted that Mexican officials neglected to review the mistakes made in García's case and subsequently denied any link between the emergency call and the abduction and murder of Lilia García even though her body was found in the exact location described in the emergency call. Even with evidence to show that the two incidents were linked, authorities continued to maintain there had been no negligence in the municipal officers' response to the emergency call.
But new information would soon surface, pointing the finger directly at police once again.
* * *
García's murder, and the botched investigation that followed, led to demands for Suly Ponce's resignation. The tough-talking prosecutor proved no match for the women of Juárez. They had finally had enough, and on March 8, 2001, International Women's Day, they organized once again to storm the
