Amexica by Ed Vulliamy

Author:Ed Vulliamy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

They stand silent and spectral in the light of dusk: a rose-colored hue in the sky reflecting the color with which eight upright crosses are painted. They were placed in what was once a cotton field, now a dumping ground for old tires, chemical drums, and stinking flotsam and jetsam. On the crosses, by contrast, sweet, fresh flowers are attached. Names are painted in careful script: Claudia Yvette, Brenda, Bárbara, Desconocida (unidentified), Laura Bernice, Lupita, Esmeralda, Verónica. They are the names of eight women whose mutilated bodies were found here on November 21, 2001. The land is exposed, at a busy road junction; rows of windows on the upper stories of houses in a walled community overlook the site. No one wanted to see, or tell about, whoever left these cadavers.

Yellow police tape is still strung out along the ditch behind the crosses, and there’s another cadaver, that of a dog. The stench of rotting rubbish fills the air along with the evensong of birds and hum of traffic. But whatever message those who dumped the bodies wanted to deliver, there is one from those who erected these crosses: they do not only mark and mourn, they stare, hush as death itself, in accusation, straight across the scrappy land, to the cylindrical offices of the Asociación de Maquiladoras—the factories’ employers’ federation. In the evening, the pink paint becomes luminous, reflecting the light of the building and that of the twilight sky. During another dusk, on Mexico’s Day of the Dead in November 2002, women from the movement for justice gathered here in tribute “not just to the eight, but to all the dead women,” as Marisela Ortiz said. Two torches were lit and planted in the ground. A cross made in stones was carved into the dirt and surrounded by candles. Flowers were strewn and the Requiem Mass said by two priests: “Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace …” “It is,” says Marisela, “a funeral rite, a dignified burial for all of them.”

After years of little headway, the prosecutor, Arturo González, held a sudden press conference, declaring that he had cracked the case. Within five days of the “cotton field” discovery, two bus drivers were arrested, Víctor Javier García Uribe and Gustavo González Meza, and charged with all eight murders. Confessions to rape, killing, and dumping the bodies were quickly secured, videotaped, and shown to the press, with a suspense-movie-style sound track. The drivers said they had been tortured; the authorities retorted that the wounds were “self-inflicted.” The drivers retained counsel, Sergio Dante Almaraz and Mario Escobedo, ready to prove the procurement of invalid confessions under duress. On the night of February 5, 2002, Escobedo found his car being tailed by the police. He was on the cell phone to his father as the shooting started; the old man heard his son being murdered by a burst of automatic fire. The police insisted that Escobedo had been mistaken for a dangerous fugitive and had shot first at the officers’ car.

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