MEXICO CITY –
The ghostly story of a young woman left on a highway late at night in northern Mexico ended in grief, with her decaying body found in an underground water tank at a motel.
Assistant Secretary of Public Safety Ricardo Mehia said on Friday that the woman’s body – apparently unrecognizable after nearly two weeks in the water – had a crucifix necklace and clothes that Debanchi Escobar wore the night she disappeared.
Despite what authorities in the border state of Nuevo Leon described as a mass search for her, the story ended the way it often happens in Mexico: when her body was discovered by locals.
“The signal was given by hotel staff because of the unpleasant odors coming from the area,” Mejia said.
Debanhi Escobar’s story made headlines because of an intrusive photo taken by a driver who was supposed to take her home that evening. It is unclear why she got out of the car, but her father, Mario Escobar, said prosecutors had told him that surveillance footage showed the driver had touched his daughter inappropriately.
“I guess my daughter didn’t put up with the harassment,” the father said. The driver has been detained, but his full name has not been released. Escobar said that although the driver did not kill her, he was responsible for his daughter’s death.
The driver, who worked for a taxi app, took the photo to show the young woman getting out of her car alive on April 8 on the outskirts of Monterey. Here she is, a young woman standing alone at night by the highway, wearing a skirt and high sneakers.
The image seemed to speak of the young woman’s great vulnerability and self-confidence – or despair.
No one saw her until late Thursday, when investigators managed to remove her body from a 12-foot (4-meter) deep water tank near the pool at the roadside motel.
Mario Escobar said he was sure 18-year-old Debanhi was dead.
“My daughter is dead. “I don’t know what to do,” Escobar said. “Prosecutors haven’t done their job properly.”
Nuevo Governor Leon Samuel Garcia said “everything shows that this is her.”
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Friday that the case “logically created a lot of worries, a lot of anxiety” among Mexicans.
Critics are concerned that even when authorities are urged to act in public protest, investigations are rarely very timely or effective.
During the week that investigators said 200 officers used drones, search dogs and surveillance camera footage to search for Debanhi, her body was actually lying not far from where she was last seen.
Murders of women have increased in recent years in Mexico, from 977 cases in 2020 to 1,015 in 2021. And these were just cases classified as “murders of women”, a legal term used in Mexico when women were killed because of their gender. Murders of women are generally much higher.
The disappearance of women is also high, with about 1,600 missing so far this year. Authorities say 829 of them are still missing and 16 have been found dead.
Just before Debanchi Escobar disappeared, another woman was killed in Monterey, 27-year-old Maria Fernanda Contreras. The suspect – apparently a friend or acquaintance of the woman – was arrested.
Authorities searched for Escobar this week, and local media reported that the bodies of five other women and girls had been found in the state. All the victims were reported missing at about the same time as Debanhi. Four were 16 or younger.
The head of the state search commission, Mary Balderas, later said the reports were wrong. She said all five young women were found alive.
Angelica Orosco, who heads the United Forces for Our Missing Persons relatives in Nuevo Leon, said the problem was not only that the authorities were slow to investigate and did badly, but also tended to blame the victims.
“The first thing is that they do not carry out thorough investigations or searches, and the second is the statements of the authorities, which in some cases link them to illegal activities,” Orosko said.
She was particularly concerned when Nuevo Public Prosecutor Leon Gustavo Guerrero said on Thursday that most women were disappearing voluntarily or as an act of “riot”.
“The main reason for the disappearance of women is due to lack of communication with their families, because of disputes with them, because of the rebellion of young people,” Guerrero said. “The age range of most women who go missing is between 14 and 25, but this is not a crime, but rather a voluntary one.
This view was challenged by Maria de la Luz Estrada of the National Feminicide Observatory activist group, who said it had become a depressing pattern that when women disappeared, they were dead.
“This is very serious and deplorable,” Estrada said of Escobar’s case, “but this is the pattern in recent years, with disappearances becoming crimes like the murder of women.”
The problem is also not limited to Nuevo Leon. Authorities in another border state, Sonora, have so many missing women – and men – that state prosecutors there have announced they are sending mobile labs to three cities to “collect mass DNA samples” from relatives of the missing to help identify the bodies. found there.
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