In an interview with Univision in early 2001, Suly Ponce insisted that her office would get to the bottom of the situation, and soon after, the correct corpse was exhumed for retesting. Those results were positive, confirming that it was, in fact, Sagrario González buried in that hilltop cemetery.
But the circumstances surrounding Sagrario's death would remain a mystery. One of the few facts the family knew for certain was that Sagrario, like so many of the murdered girls, had been killed soon after her hours at the factory were changed. That similarity raised questions as to whether certain employees at the city's maquiladoras were behind the murders.
Maquila worker Claudia Ivette González might still be alive if her employers at the Lear Corporation, the Michigan-based auto-interior supplier that operated a plant in Juárez, hadn't turned her away for being four minutes late to work in October 2001. When management refused to let her into the factory, the twenty-year-old assembly-line worker probably started for home on foot. Since she had lost a day's pay, she presumably wouldn't want to waste any of her hard-earned money on bus fare.
A month later her corpse was discovered buried in a field near a busy Juárez intersection. Next to her lay the bodies of seven other young women.
Chapter Nine
Killing Fields
When public pressure begins to grow, the scapegoat materializes.
CRIMINOLOGIST OSCAR MAYNEZ
TENSIONS WERE ALREADY HIGH in Ciudad Juárez in November 2001 when police uncovered the eight decomposing corpses that had been tossed into a weed-infested former cotton field in the heart of the city, not far from the lot in which Lilia García's body was found. The makeshift gravesite was located just a few yards from the intersection of Paseo de la Victoria and Ejército Nacional, across from the headquarters of the offices of the Association of the Maquiladoras, the group that represented many of the city's U.S.-owned export assembly plants.
The horrific discoveries were made over two days, with law enforcement officials recovering three bodies on November 6, and five more, just skeletal remains, the following day.
A construction worker had stumbled upon the first victim, a slender, raven-haired teen whose body had been tossed in a ditch in the barren field, located between two heavily trafficked roadways. Investigators searching the trench for evidence that afternoon were stunned when they came upon the remains of two more young women within feet of the first corpse.
The next morning, a bulldozer was brought in to check the site, and five more bodies were unearthed.
The discoveries marked a turning point in the stream of rapes and murders that had plagued Juárez since 1993. The killers were now dumping bodies in the heart of the busy city, rather than in the desolate desert areas that ringed Juárez. It appeared that the perpetrators no longer feared the police.
Indeed, the placement of the bodies lent even more credence to theories that it was the police themselves who were committing the murders. The choice of location led many to believe that the killer was conveying a message. A majority of the murdered women were factory workers and their bodies had come to rest in a field facing the association of the maquilas that employed them.
Maquiladora worker Claudia Ivette González was among the victims police claimed to have found buried in the sandy field. Newspapers reported that it was still dark when Claudia had left her home early in the morning on October 10. But as fate would have it, she missed the bus that would have gotten her to her job on time. When Claudia reached the factory that morning, the doors to the plant were locked. There is no information on what Claudia did next, only that her corpse was among those dug up in the lonely cotton field.
Lear's director of communications, Andrea Puchalsky, told the online news magazine Salon.com: "We have a policy for tardiness, and she had been tardy many times
. She was not there in time to work her shift." When asked if the company adhered to that same policy with employees in the United States, Puchalsky insisted there was no official policy on the books at any of its facilities. She also declined to comment on whether González was locked out or turned away due to tardiness.
Mexican authorities later determined that Claudia Ivette González was killed in the same fashion as the seven other young women buried near her. Even more startling was that the modus operandi was similar to that in the case of Lilia García, whose mutilated body was found that past February.
Protestors from the city's various nongovernmental agencies descended on the office of the special prosecutor the day after the eight bodies were recovered. Attired all in black, the demonstrators carried a large pink cross they posted on the outside of the government building.
Pausing for a moment, the group lit candles to memorialize the latest victims before proceeding to the office of the new special prosecutor in charge of the investigation of murdered women. Zulema Bolívar was at her desk when demonstrators arrived and hung a poster on her door that read: "Closed for Incompetence."
Hearing the commotion, Bolívar stepped out into the hallway to invite several of the demonstrators inside to talk. But the group refused to single out representatives. They all wanted an opportunity to confront Bolívar.
Bolívar agreed, and found a suitable location to accommodate the crowd. The special prosecutor heard their concerns and expressed sympathy for their losses but shed no light on the status of the investigation. The demonstrators ultimately left the building knowing no more than they did when they arrived.
In the days after the bodies were pulled from the abandoned field, authorities announced that forensic examinations were able to determine that some of the murders were recent. It was established that one murder had occurred just ten to fifteen days earlier, while two others had taken place at least six months before. The bodies were discovered just three meters from each other, and police believed that many of the women were killed in the location where their bodies were recovered. One of the victims was found with her hands tied behind her back.
A pair of shoes belonging to one of the girls was found beneath a bush at the entrance to the field, indicating that the woman had either been forced to remove them before walking to the site of her murder, or had voluntarily taken them off so as not to get them dirty, believing she would live to retrieve them and wear them home.
Authorities claimed that among the dead bodies exhumed from the abandoned field was a nineteen-year-old college student named Guadalupe Luna de la Rosa. Like Ramona Morales's slain neighbor, thirteen-year-old Celia Guadalupe, this girl also went by the nickname "Lupita." Many women in Mexico are named Guadalupe in honor of that country's patron saint, Our Lady of Guadalupe.
A stir had been made when the young girl first went missing the previous year. Unlike many of the victims, Guadalupe was a full-time student, attending the Instituto Tecnológico (Technological Institute) de Ciudad Juárez, and the daughter of a middle-class family that hailed from the border city. She had last been seen on September 30, 2000. She had left home that morning to catch a bus for town, where she intended to meet some friends for an afternoon of shopping. She was then supposed to go to one of the teens' homes to celebrate a friend's birthday.
Word of Lupita's disappearance had sparked fellow students, family, and friends into action. They formed search parties to look for the missing girl and, in the biggest mass public outcry to date, staged a two-thousand-strong demonstration through the streets of Juárez, demanding justice from authorities. Protestors distributed flyers with a photo of the stunningly beautiful young woman and even secured the services of a cadaver dog to aid in a search for her body.
Yet even in such mass numbers, the efforts of the protestors and volunteers had yielded few positive results. A threatening phone call was made to the parents of the missing girl, Epitasio and Celia Luna. The anonymous caller demanded ten thousand dollars from the Luna family to prevent the kidnapping of another of the Lunas' daughters.
Activists claimed that this kind of threat had become a common tool used by law enforcement officers to ward off questioning by family members. Many of the relatives of the missing young girls had reported these kinds of warnings, disguised as words of comfort, from the officers they had gone to for help.
"We didn't have money, we didn't have enemies," a disconsolate Celia Luna told the newspapers. "I never thought this could happen in the middle of the day, on a Saturday."
Guadalupe "Lupita" Luna had lived with her family just fifteen minutes from the office of the
procuraduría
in a cluster of concrete dwellings, where pristine white sheets waved from clotheslines. Hers was a working-class neighborhood with houses that had addresses and plumbing. The homes, for the most part, were neatly kept. Women spent their mornings outside washing clothes or doing chores like sweeping the entrances to the houses. Young children played with each other and the neighborhood dogs in the narrow alleyways that separated the rows of cookie-cutter dwellings.
Lupita Luna had been abducted, apparently, in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon on her way to a friend's house.
Hers was a close-knit community. So when word circulated that the young woman had gone missing, everyone in the neighborhood had joined in the search.
In an interview with Univision, Lupita's mother recalled that her daughter left home at about noon. Her friends waited for her until two p.m. When she didn't arrive, the young girls figured Lupita had changed her mind, so they went shopping without her. Once they returned, they called Lupita's home to see why she had not come over. "I didn't know why," Celia Luna recounted.
Lupita was to take two buses to get to her destination that day the one she normally took to get to school each morning, and a second bus to get to her friend's house. According to police, Lupita did board the first bus. But it was unclear if she had made the connection to the second one.
When Lupita didn't return home by eight o'clock that evening, her mother began to visit the local hospitals to see if maybe the teen had been in an accident. "We went over the entire route she would have followed to get to her friend's house. We went to the department stores, and then we went to the police stations."
Officers told the family that they didn't have any reports of an accident or a kidnapping. It was 3 a.m. when Celia called 060, the police emergency line. She tried to provide officers with a description of her daughter but was told that she would need to come to the police station in person to file a report. When she arrived at the downtown offices of the
procuraduría
the following morning, she was told to come back on Monday at 10 a.m., at which time police would assign two agents to her daughter's case. Celia did as she was told, returning the following day to make the report. It seemed remarkable that with all of the murders, families were still required to wait to file a report.
The heartsick mother carried on for more than one year with no news of her eldest child. She was a working mother, supporting Lupita's thirteen-year-old sister and an elderly mother as well as her young son. Still, she clung to the hope that the young college student would return home at any moment. Even though space was tight, Celia hadn't moved a single item of her daughter's belongings from the bedroom the missing teen had shared with her younger sister, Rosaura. On the dresser were framed pictures of Lupita embracing her baby brother, at her first communion, and posing in the cap and gown she wore to her high school graduation. Celia had made it a point to keep everything as it was when her eldest daughter left home that Saturday, from the stuffed animals lining her bureau to the school notebooks filled with homework assignments for which she had earned A's. Posters of the American pop band Hanson and album covers of well-known Mexican musicians filled the room that looked much like that of any typical teenager in the United States.
A young woman had lived, laughed, studied and dreamed about her future there. Now her family was wondering if she would ever return.
To keep her daughter's story alive, Celia had erected a miniature chapel with Lupita's photo in the front yard of the two-bedroom house. Beside the picture she had placed a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the saint she prayed to each day in hopes of a miracle.
When she heard the radio reports of the bodies being exhumed from the cotton field that November 2001, she immediately dialed police to learn if her daughter had been found among the dead. While she was initially told her daughter was not among the dead, that information would later change. Lupita's remains would indeed be identified as those pulled from the vast open field. Officials said that what remained was little more than bleached bones. But still Celia was not completely convinced. The clothing authorities told her they found on the body didn't match what her daughter was wearing the day she disappeared.
Celia could never have imagined that her eldest child would become one of the city's homicide victims.
"Lupita was mature for her age, yet innocent," the distraught mother told Univision. "She was always happy and loving. She didn't have a mean bone in her."
* * *
On November 21, less than three weeks after the latest grisly discoveries, investigators announced the arrests of two more bus drivers. According to authorities, Javier "Víctor" García Uribe and Gustavo González Meza, both twenty-eight, had confessed to kidnapping, raping, and killing the eight women.
