From Frontera Norte Sur
http://frontera.nmsu.edu/
Thanks to Kent Patterson for his great reporting on the femicides
December 21, 2005
FNS Special Report:
Narcos, Greens and Gangland-Style Murder: Explosive Stories Follow Murder of Femicide Commission Member's Husband
Victims of yet another suspected gangland-shooting, Ruben Armando Sanchez Olivas and his nephew David Garcia Sanchez were buried December 17 in Ciudad Juarez. The 38-year-old Sanchez was the husband of Mexican federal Deputy Maria Avila Serna, who serves on the femicide commission of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. Described as hard-working and well-liked, Sanchez and Garcia were given their farewells in the Juarez Valley south of the city at a funeral attended by hundreds of people, many of them arriving in vehicles with Texas license plates.
The two men were shot to death December 14 in Avila's 2006 Hummer vehicle while it was parked outside the La Mentira ("The Lie") bar on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez. Because of the circumstances of the double homicide, speculation was rife about the possible involvement of organized crime. Avila, who's also the Ciudad Juarez leader of the Mexican Green Party (PVEM), quickly denied any such possible connection. Avila maintained her husband was an upstanding man who dedicated his time to staying home and taking care of the couple's infant son while she worked as a federal deputy traveling back and forth between Ciudad Juarez and Mexico City. Sanchez also left behind 4 children from a previous relationship.
"I am very sad, very hurt by these acts. I am a victim of the violence," Avila said. "Nobody is excluded from this. Right now it's me, my children, my family..."
Backing up the federal congresswoman's remarks were Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez and Ciudad Juarez District Attorney Cony Velarde, both of whom rejected any organized crime connection to the Sanchez- Garcia murder. Dispelling any taint of organized crime, the Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office (PGJE) ordered that the homicide division of the State Agency for Investigations handle the Sanchez-Garcia cases instead of Grupo Zeus, the special state unit ostensibly set up to probe organized crime-related homicides.
In addition to the home she shared with Sanchez, Avila owns two homes in Ciudad Juarez proper. Avila and Sanchez resided in the Juarez Valley, the scene of heavy drug trafficking and the place where Mexican soldiers and federal police engaged in a shooting match earlier in the month. Responding to questions about her ownership of the $75,000-dollar Hummer, Avila insisted there was nothing unusual in the purchase of the vehicle. "Like many people from the country, I like big vehicles, pick-ups," Avila said. "I liked the Hummer because it's a car nobody has, so I applied for bank credit. They approved me, and I am paying for the vehicle in monthly installments."
AN EXPLOSIVE SERIES
Following Sanchez's murder, the Ciudad Juarez daily El Mexicano ran a series of articles that linked Deputy Avila's slain husband to cross-border drug trafficking. According to the newspaper, Sanchez was arrested three times on drug charges in three different Texas cities since 1991. Contradicting the official version of the Sanchez-Garcia slayings, El Mexicano reported that the murder victims might have been drinking in La Mentira with a drug trafficker from Michoacan just prior to their murders. El Mexicano also alleged that Avila's husband was engaged in the crystal methamphetamine business.
What's more, another story in the paper raised a possible family link between the slain Sanchez and an individual who was arrested almost two years and linked to the "Narco- Graves" ring, a group of former Chihuahua state policemen and drug cartel operatives responsible for more than a dozen grisly killings. A US customs and immigration enforcement agent is accused by victims' relatives of being a key participant in the "Narco-Graves" slayings.
The Sanchez-Garcia murders occurred amid a wave of violence this month in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua City and the border town of Palomas on the New Mexico border. In one incident, a body of a man was left in the trunk of a car parked outside the home of the Ciudad Juarez transit police chief. In another instance, Ignacio Rodriguez Ruiz, a former state police official, was kidnapped in broad daylight in front of his family by as many as 15 armed men in Chihuahua City on Sunday, December 18. And a riot at the Ciudad Juarez prison authorities blamed on drug- related disputes broke out last weekend, leaving 6 inmates dead and 30 prisoners and guards injured.
Sanchez's slaying wasn't the first time Avila suffered the murder of a romantic partner. In 2000 Jorge Luis Reyes Terrazas, the father of Avila's daughter, was shot to death in Ciudad Juarez. Reyes previously worked for the Chihuahua State Judicial Police but was dismissed from the agency because he reportedly flunked a drug test. Again denying any links to organized crime, Avila blamed Reyes' murder on a man, Arturo Arellano, who is currently serving a 27-year sentence for the crime. Numerous former members of the PGJE, especially state policemen, have been involved in drug-related crimes and suspected mafia executions, either as victims or victimizers.
DEPUTY AVILA´S CONNECTIONS
If El Mexicano's reports pan out, Sanchez's relationship to Avila becomes very interesting in light of the federal deputy's position. As a member of the federal congress, Avila has budgetary authority over federal law enforcement as well as access to top law enforcement officials charged with enforcing drug laws. In their Internet reports on the Sanchez-Garcia murders, none of the Ciudad Juarez dailies have mentioned that Avila is a member of the federal Chamber of Deputies' special femicide commission, a body that was formed to monitor investigations of slayings that have been linked in some cases to drug traffickers.
Since its inception in 2003, the commission has reviewed the budgets for federal femicide commissioner Guadalupe Morfin and the vanishing office of the special women's homicides prosecutor in Ciudad Juarez, received reports from the National Human Rights Commission assessing the murder investigations, heard testimony from former Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha, examined cases of murdered women from states besides Chihuahua, and pushed a multi-million dollar study to compare murder rates of women in different Mexican states.
The femicide commission was created in response to years of protests by relatives of murdered women and their supporters worldwide. They contended that Mexican authorities, especially the Chihuahua PGJE, were not only failing to investigate and stop the women's murders, but were framing innocent people for the crimes as well.
Deputy Maria Avila knows this history quite well. On her congressional web site, The 32-year-old Avila is listed as having attended law school during 1992-96 at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez. As a young woman in the 1990s, Avila gained first-hand exposure to the women's murders when she worked in the preliminary investigations section of the PGJE's Ciudad Juarez office, the strategic department that filters and assigns new murder cases. During her stint with the PGJE, Avila worked with preliminary investigations chief Hernan Rivera.
While later serving as the Juarez city council's secretary in 1998, Rivera was quoted as saying the municipality had no responsibility for the femicidies. "(The murders) are due to the lack of values, economic crisis and other causes; besides, public insecurity is a national problem," Rivera said.
Also working in the Ciudad Juarez PGJE at the time of Avila's employment was state police commander Antonio Navarrete, one of the law enforcement officials who had a hand in the 1995 arrest and prosecution of Egyptian national Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif, the so-called "Jackal of Juarez" supposedly responsible for the serial murders of young women.
Navarrete is likewise credited with the 1996 round-up of the Rebeldes gang, whose members were accused by the PGJE of accepting payments from the jailed Egyptian in return for killing more women so Sharif would appear innocent. As in many other cases, irregularities, dubious or non- existent evidence and even allegations of torture marked the Sharif-Rebeldes cases. Public doubt about the suspects' guilt grew as more bodies of young women kept appearing in the city and its outskirts.
Rivera and Navarrete were cited by former women's homicides special prosecutor Maria Lopez Urbina as two of the former PGJE officials responsible for botching the Juarez femicide investigations. Lopez Urbina turned over her findings last year to the Chihuahua PGJE which, under the new administration of Governor Jose Reyes Baeza, then initiated legal proceedings against Rivera, Navarrete and 4 other former officials for abuse of authority. Early this year, however, state judges blocked the prosecutions. No action has been taken against the superiors of Rivera and the other, former mid-level PGJE officials named by Lopez Urbina. Now Rivera has emerged as the spokesperson for none other than femicide commission member Avila and the Ciudad Juarez PVEM. Although they are associated with a political party that purports to have ecological protection as one of its primary aims, neither Rivera nor Avila have been identified with grassroots environmental movements in Ciudad Juarez. Avila joined the PVEM in 2002 and was elected to the federal congress the following year; her term in office expires in 2006. Avila's work background also includes a position from 1997 to 2003 with the federal labor conciliation service that handles employment- related complaints in maquiladoras and other businesses.
POLITICAL POWER PLAYS, MORE FEMICIDES
When the femicide commission was being formed in 2003, a struggle broke out between the PVEM and the PRD parties over which group would preside over the new congressional body. PVEM spokesperson Carlos Maldonado denied that his party was trying to impose Avila, a person with no prior political experience before becoming a legislator, as the head of a high-profile commission in the international limelight; the post went instead to Deputy Marcela Largarde of the PRD.
Questioning the legality of femicide commissioner Guadalupe Morfin's post, Avila nevertheless publicly expressed great sympathy for the family members of murder victims. Early this year, Avila and fellow PVEM Deputy Jorge Kawahgi personally paid for the insurance policies for 35 minor relatives of murder victims so they could be treated at Ciudad Juarez's best hospitals.
A one-time boxing champ once romantically linked to Mexican pop singer Altagracia Ugalde Motta, better known as Ana Barbara, Kawahgi has also served as a vice- president of the national Canaco business association. The Green deputy attended the swearing-in ceremony of Roberto Madrazo as the PVEM's presidential candidate in coalition with the PRI party earlier this month.
At an October 2004 femicide commission-sponsored meeting in Ciudad Juarez, Avila publicly expressed outrage at the women's killings. She heard riveting testimonies victims' mothers who demanded that the perpetrators of the crimes against their daughters be brought to justice. Among the women present were the mothers of Lilia Alejandra Garcia, Silvia Arce and Rebecca Contreras. In all three cases, suspects with links to narco-trafficking and organized crime have been identified but none have been arrested and charged in connection with the women's disappearances or murders.
As Frontera NorteSur was going to press, Avila had not yet publicly responded to the El Mexicano stories. Most Mexican media outlets still have not picked up the story of the federal congresswoman's murdered husband's alleged ties to drug trafficking. According to Chihuahua law enforcement officials, more than a dozen people have been interviewed in the Sanchez-Garcia murders and a firm line of investigation exists. The femicides, meanwhile, continue. The body of a semi- nude woman estimated to be from 30 to 35 years of age was found Tuesday, December 20, in downtown Ciudad Juarez. Showing signs of sexual assault, the still-unidentified victim had a belt wrapped around her neck. Her slaying brings to 31 the number of women murdered in the border city so far during 2005. The remains of three other suspected murder victims also have been recovered this year.