MEXICO CITY, MEXICO – The first time that Júlio César Hernández Ballinas hit his wife, Mariana Lima Buendía, was just three weeks after they got married. The reason: he didn’t like how she had prepared the meat and orange juice.
Lima Buendía called her parents and asked them to come get her, says her mother, Irinea Buendía, 60. The mother says that she and her husband, Lauro Lima, 82, rushed immediately to their daughter’s aid.
“‘He told me that if I report it, with that bat that is there he is going to give me nothing but one to the head and he is going to put me in the cistern because he had already put two or three women there,’” Buendía recalls her daughter told her when they arrived.
After that, the abuse didn’t stop. Neither did the support of her parents, who asked their daughter to abandon her aggressor. Buendía says that she and her husband were afraid that one day, their son-in-law would keep his word and murder their daughter.
“I don’t know if he had her threatened,” the mother says. “I don’t know how my daughter managed to go back with him because she left him four times and always for the same reason: because he hit her, because she was nothing to him, that she didn’t know how to do wash, she didn’t know how to iron, she didn’t know how to make anything to eat, she didn’t know how to sweep.”
One day, Lima Buendía got tired of the beatings, her mother says. She left she and her husband's home outside of Mexico City and went to live with her parents in the neighboring municipality. Buendía says her daughter told her she had had enough and was ready to leave her husband.
Her parents expressed support and made plans for the following day to buy new clothes and to contact a lawyer in order to find a job for their daughter, who had studied law.
The 29-year-old left her parents’ house at noon in order to file a complaint of violence against her husband. Buendía says her daughter, who worked in the local Public Ministry’s Center of Justice, didn’t think that the ministry would do anything. She also hadn’t reported her husband sooner because he worked for the center’s judicial police. But she finally decided that she wanted to make a record of the violence.
Later, she returned to her home to talk with her husband and to collect her belongings. She promised her parents that she would be back by dinnertime.
“That was the last time I saw her alive,” her mother says sadly.
Their daughter’s husband called her parents the next day to tell them that their daughter had committed suicide, a story Buendía and her husband say they never believed. Instead, Buendía alleges that he killed their daughter – not only because of his previous acts of violence against her but also because of several errors and inconsistencies in the investigation of the case.
Buendía says that authorities never investigated their daughter’s husband, despite his history of violence. They ruled her death as a suicide, even though there were various incongruencies in the husband’s story, according to Buendía and Rodolfo Domínguez, the defense lawyer on the case.
For example, they said that the cord Lima Buendía’s husband said she had hanged herself with wouldn’t have been strong enough to support her weight. Plus, there was nothing in the room where it allegedly occurred from which she could have hanged herself. There were also bruises on her body and scratches on her throat but no marks from the cord on her neck.
Domínguez says that police should have investigated other possibilities for her death.
“The protocols of investigation demand posing all the possible hypotheses in order to prove them or to reject them,” he says. “In the investigation, they didn’t pose a hypothesis other than suicide.”
Buendía and Domínguez say there were also errors and omissions during the investigation: delays of four months for photos of the body and 10 months for the results of the blood test; the disappearance of the cord and reappearance of it 11 months later; a suggestion that Lima Buendía's blood alcohol content was high even though the examiner’s report included no evidence of this; and the date of Hernández Ballinas’ statement that was one day before the alleged suicide.
The copy of the police investigation records obtained by Global Press Institute confirm these details.
Since the day Lima Buendía’s parents recovered their daughter’s body two years ago in June 2010, they have been fighting for justice. Buendía says she has no faith in the local authorities.
“They have all ignored what is happening,” she says. “I am very angry. And I don’t know if I am more angry with him or with the authorities, who have covered up as far as they have wanted. That is the fury that I have.”
And Lima Buendía’s case is not unique in Mexico state.
Civil society organizations in Mexico state accuse the government of failing to investigate violent homicides of women as femicides, a call the government ignores, saying the issue does not involve the organizations. Research indicates that the danger of femicides in Mexico state, the most populous of Mexico’s 31 states, is higher because of social imbalances provoked by changing gender roles. Civil society organizations attribute government inaction to a culture of violence against women. There are federal, state and local laws and offices against gender violence, but activists say they result in few convictions.
More than 1,000 violent deaths of women occurred in the state of Mexico between 2005 and 2010, 89 percent of which are unresolved, according to Observatorio Ciudadano Nacional del Feminicidio, a network of more than 40 human rights and women’s organizations dedicated to documenting the cases of femicide in the country. The observatory defines femicide, or “feminicide,” as the homicide of women because of their sex.
Together with the Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos, a civil human rights organization, the observatory demanded an investigation into these cases as femicide rather than regular homicides. They sent the petition to the Sistema Nacional para Prevenir, Atender, Sancionar y Erradicar la Violencia contra las Mujeres, a governmental body that comprises more than 40 public agencies.
But the authorities in charge of the Sistema Nacional para Prevenir, Atender, Sancionar y Erradicar la Violencia contra las Mujeres neglected to address the petition. Instead, they alleged that the organizations were trying to politicize the issue to hurt the image of Enrique Peña Nieto, then the Mexico state governor, during his campaign for presidency, says María de la Luz Estrada Mendoza of the Observatorio Ciudadano Nacional del Feminicidio.
The Federal Electoral Tribunal confirmed the former governor on Friday as the winner of the July presidential election after competitor Andrés Manuel López Obrador challenged the results. Peña Nieto represents Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which ruled the country for more than 70 consecutive years until the 2000 elections.
After the rejection of their petition, the civil society organizations appealed to a judge earlier this year. The judge ordered the authorities to analyze the merits of the organizations’ request.
But the authorities resisted. The Consejo Estatal de la Mujer y Bienestar Social, the state governmental body charged with the protection of women, challenged the judge’s order on the grounds that the murders did not directly affect the organizations so they didn’t have judicial interest in asking for the investigation.
Estrada Mendoza says that the authorities have been looking out for their own political interests instead of the safety of women in the state.
“It is very sad that the Sistema, being able to help, is on the defensive,” she says.
She accuses the state of not only declining to investigate the femicides, but also of trying to hide what is happening.
“When you don’t investigate, don’t help on time," she says, "they keep replicating it, and they keep making a chain.”
Multiple requests to speak with María Mercedes Colin, executive member of the Consejo Estatal de la Mujer y Bienestar Social, were not answered.
The press office of the Comisión Nacional para Prevenir y Erradicar la Violencia contra las Mujeres, part of the Sistema Nacional para Prevenir, Atender, Sancionar y Erradicar la Violencia contra las Mujeres, responded by email: “There is not a reason to negate or to not negate an alert of gender because it’s done through voting by many authorities.”
The observatory is not the only group that has warned about femicides in the state.
Nelson Arteaga Botello, a professor and researcher from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, published a study in 2009 on the topic along with fellow university profressor and researcher Jimena Valdés Figueroa.
Arteaga Botello, who has his doctorate in sociology, says they found a pattern in the murders in Mexico state: They regularly occured in poor, marginalized sectors. Perpetrators were usually close to the victim – a spouse, friend or family member. The murders followed victims' demands for more autonomy as women – leaving their partners, taking charge of their own money, deciding to have or not to have sex.
Nearly half of the murdered women were between ages 11 and 30, according to data collected by the observatory. In nearly 60 percent of cases, judicial authorities were not able to identify the perpetrator or motive of the homicides. In 30 percent of cases in which the aggressor was identified, it was the victim’s significant other.
Research by both Arteaga Botello and the observatory noted that many perpetrators inflicted pain on the victims’ breasts – particularly their nipples – and genitals. Estrada Mendoza adds that the acts of physical violence don’t only occur during the homicide but also afterward. Some perpetrators mutilate, burn or slit the throats of women posthumously.
A high percentage are also beaten in the head until they die. In general, the bodies aren’t found where the homicides were committed. Perpetrators often dump them in public – in roads or drains – naked or half-naked to exhibit their feminine physiques and to humiliate the corpses.
Arteaga Botello, a specialist in social violence, attributes the femicides to a combination of social imbalances, provoked by the repositioning of gender roles here.
“That’s why it usually occurs in societies with accelerated processes of modernization and social inequality,” he says, “where traditional roles of men and women are disrupted as women acquire more autonomy, while the men are losing and simultaneously they lose their capacity of control opposite their partners and opposite their traditional spheres of power.”
Arteaga Botello says that although violence against women is not limited to the lower social classes, there is a relation between marginalization and femicide.
Research by the observatory supports his claim, as 54 percent of suspected femicide in Mexico state were concentrated in 10 municipalities, the majority of which have high levels of marginalization. These include Chimalhuacán, where Lima Buendía lived.
Mexico state has the highest level of women older than 15 who have suffered acts of violence by an intimate partner in the country, according to a survey by two government institutions, Instituto Nacional de las Mujeres and Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía.
But many of these cases go unreported because violence against women is considered normal, says Verónica Abreu, who has worked for five years for Visión Mundial, a civil society organization in Ecatepec, the municipality where the most femicides in the state have occurred.
From a chair in the Visión Mundial office, Paula Zúñiga, 63, recounts the violence her daughter, Ana María, suffered. Her husband beat her when she refused to open the door to him at their home in Tulpetlac, a village in Ecatepec, when he returned from the United States four years after abandoning her.
Furious, her daughter’s husband began to kick the door, Zúñiga says. When she half-opened the door to tell him to stop, he pushed it open, entered the house and began to hit her. He dragged her down the stairs, kicked her and whipped her against the stones of the street.
In spite of the blows, the girl survived, although she suffers the consequences of them and now has nervous gastritis. Her husband fled and never returned. But for Zúñiga, the pain hasn’t ended for her daughter, now 28.
“The truth, yes, it hurts me,” Zúñiga says. “Because one says, ‘I look for help – but where?’”
Because Visión Mundial focuses on children, it sought to refer these cases to the appropriate public authorities. But the workers found that these didn’t exist, Abreu says.
“We ran into a wall,” she says, “because we are promoting the human rights of the women, and when we asked for help, the response of the authority was null.”
There is a law in Mexico to protect women from femicide violence called Ley General de Acceso a las Mujeres a una Vida Libre de Violencia. But Abreu calls it “letra muerta” because she says that authorities continue to see violence agaisnt women as something normal with no effective mechanism to enforce the law.
In the past year, when Peña Nieto was the governor, the state government created an office to specifically handle crimes related to gender violence.
But Estrada Mendoza says that it’s inefficient and doesn’t necessarily treat the cases as femicide.
Of the 282 homicides of women reported, the state office is only investigating 53 cases as femicides, according to office records made public at the observatory’s request. Yet 60 percent of the women were killed with excessive violence, a distinctive feature of femicides, according to the observatory and Arteaga Botello.
In 2011, authorities included femicide as aggravated homicide in local law. But Estrada Mendoza says that the complex language of the law makes it hard to pursue in court. As of February 2012, there were only three convictions, according to office data.
Estrada Mendoza calls for more effective judicial measures and a public policy of prevention in order to combat femicide.
Arteaga Botello agrees that strong judicial measures are essential to punish perpetrators and to end the culture of impunity in order to discourage future cases. But he insists that the first step to solving the problem is social intervention in the zones where these crimes are persistent and recurrent.
“If they want to stop the femicides, it is necessary to go to the communities to work,” he says. “There’s no other option.”
Buendía and her husband have joined other parents of women who have been murdered in Mexico state in marching to demand that authorities address their daughters' cases and punish those responsible.
“What we hope to gain is that they see,” Buendía says, her voice choked with emotion and eyes full of tears, “that the people realize what is happening, that our daughters were people, with names, and that they had a place here where we live, and that they realize that what we are asking for is nothing more than justice. We don’t ask for anything else.”
