Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Such a climate sends a message to the killers every day: You can get away with anything, even a crime on this scale. But where such a climate breeds cynicism and hopelessness among people who live and work here, it has also provoked an incipient revolt.
On her radio show "Grueso Calibre" ("Large Caliber"), popular host Samira Izaguirre frequently aired the views of guests who were critical of how authorities handled the murders. When Attorney General Rascon accused the two bus drivers of the cotton field murders in November 2001, Izaguirre hosted the drivers' wives on her show. After that interview, advertisements began appearing in local newspapers smearing Izaguirre with claims that she frequented strip clubs and was romantically involved with one of the bus drivers. News media on both sides of the border have reported that the receipt for the ad was signed by government officials who paid for it.
Then, in February, when Izaguirre started organizing a vigil and announced a hunger strike on her show on Radio Canon, she was fired. Fearing for her safety, she moved across the border to El Paso.
Others, too, have discovered that pressing the complaint too forcefully brings reprisal. Marisela Ortiz, co-director of Nuestras Hijas Regreso a Casa (Our Daughters Back Home), a legal support group for victims' parents, was a frequent guest on "Grueso Calibre." Like Izaguirre, Ortiz has focused her resources on drawing attention to government and police incompetence in the slain women's cases. And she says that, like Izaguirre, she has faced ever-increasing danger.
In Nuestras Hijas' office in central Juarez, located inside a small one-story row house with a "For Rent" sign out front, Ortiz described the shadow of terror that has stalked her since she began pressuring the authorities.
She claims she was threatened by ex-Chihuahua District Attorney Arturo Gonzalez Rascon. "Rascon came all the way to Juarez [from Chihuahua City] to tell me not to involve myself in all the cases," she tells Salon. "Then I got a message on my phone saying: 'You have daughters that are alive. Take care of them.'" Rascon, in an earlier story by the Associated Press, denied the allegation.
Last May, Ortiz says, she was pursued by men in a black pickup truck who tried to kidnap her. She believes the attempt was orchestrated by Rascon's office since it occurred only a day before she had planned to travel to El Paso for a meeting with the FBI and Texas state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, who is calling for a bi-national investigation into the murders.
Victims' parents who came to Nuestras Hijas for help in finding their missing daughters also say they have been threatened. Mario Lee Lopez and his wife, Soledad Aguilar, lost their daughter, Cecilia Covarrubias. She was kidnapped in 1995 along with their granddaughter, who was two months old. By now their granddaughter would be 7, and Lopez and Aguilar's own investigation has led them to believe that she is alive and living in the custody of a well-connected local family.
To an outsider it is a desperate story, all but impossible to prove. Lopez accuses Ponce of coordinating the coverup of the kidnappings and murder; again, Ponce denies the charge. And she was adamant that government officials have harassed no one. "I didn't have any knowledge of threats against anybody," she said. "On the contrary, we support the families and they are encouraged to be intimately involved in the investigations."
Lopez recalls an incident in which he had gone to Juarez's judicial building to press his granddaughter's case and did not exactly find the kind of support Ponce mentioned. While leaving the court, Lopez says, he was confronted by a high-ranking minister who warned that if he didn't drop the investigation, he would be tortured with electric shock devices.
"But it's too late to stop now," Lopez adds with a wistful smile.
Despite the campaign against Izaguirre, or perhaps because of it, the vigil took place as scheduled in March. It was an unprecedented show of solidarity, with thousands of people gathered in the cotton field where Gonzalez and the seven others were found in an irrigation ditch. There are still tatters of yellow police tape there, and candleholders left from the vigil are strewn over the site. Eight red crosses mark the spot where the bodies were found.
However, city officials have no plans to memorialize the site as Juarez's residents have. In fact, according to a Sept. 4 article in El Diario, the site is now being used as a dumping ground for Juarez's Department of Parks and Gardens.
