CHIHUAHUA CITY, Mexico -- When Miguel David Meza Argueta heard last year that his cousin Neyra, a 20-year-old computer student, had disappeared, he said he immediately flew to this city in northern Mexico to help search for her. Hundreds of young women in the border state of Chihuahua, mainly in Ciudad Juarez, have been murdered in the past decade, so Meza said he feared the worst.
He and the family searched everywhere, even driving around in the desert where scores of bodies of raped and mutilated women have been dumped. He led protest marches against the police to complain that they didn't seem to be investigating. As his family grew more angry, he called the state attorney general incompetent.
Neyra Azucena Cervantes is mourned by her mother, Patricia Cervantes, left, her stepfather, Jesus Argueta, and their daughter Alejandra, 19. Argueta said police slapped him and told him to confess to her murder, but he refused.
(Kevin Sullivan -- The Washington Post)
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When Neyra Azucena Cervantes's remains finally turned up in the desert, Meza got his response from the police: He was arrested and charged with raping and murdering his cousin. The only evidence against him is a confession that he said was false and was signed after police tortured him.
"I asked for answers," Meza said, interviewed in a state prison where he has been held for 15 months, "and they answered me with torture and prison."
Human rights groups said Meza's case is typical of how authorities in the state have mishandled scores of investigations in Mexico's most notorious string of killings, in which more than 300 women have died since 1993, at least 90 of them in rape-murders.
Investigations by the United Nations, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International, members of the U.S. Congress and other groups have repeatedly shown that local police have mishandled or fabricated evidence and failed to follow logical leads. The probes have found that police have sometimes framed suspects or tortured innocent people into making false confessions so they could claim to have solved cases.
Guadalupe Morfin, the special commissioner appointed by President Vicente Fox to coordinate the government's response to the murders, said state police were reluctant to investigate because "they are hiding acts committed by their colleagues." Rights groups and Mexican federal officials say at least some of the killings were carried out by corrupt police officers working with powerful drug cartels, which Morfin called "a collapse of the rule of law" in Chihuahua. Chihuahua police regularly torture suspects because they want to solve cases "by any means," she said.
The women's murders have become a major embarrassment for Mexico and have led to protests in the United States and Europe and even a forthcoming Hollywood movie.
"A lot of international pressure has confused the authorities," Morfin said. "They think that by offering someone up as the guilty party, it will satisfy those demands. They don't realize they are creating double victims -- the people they are falsely accusing and the families of the victims."
She said she does not believe that Meza is guilty, and she has requested a federal investigation into allegations of torture by Meza and three suspects in other women's murders. Asked if Meza, whose trial is underway, might be found not guilty, Morfin said, "We cannot lose that hope."
The man in charge of investigating the murders is Jesus Antonio Piñon Jimenez, the state attorney general. He took over in March when his predecessor, Jesus Jose Solis Silva, resigned after 17 state police officials were implicated in the drug-related murders of a dozen people who were found buried in a back yard in Ciudad Juarez.
Piñon, an 18-year veteran of the attorney general's office, was Solis's deputy. He has consistently played down the women's murders, infuriating human rights activists and victims' families. In an interview, Piñon said claims that Chihuahua has a problem with serial murders of women are "all a myth." Piñon also denied that Meza had been tortured.
Piñon said the victims' families and rights groups have exaggerated the numbers for political purposes. He said that they were "members of the Communist Party" or have "leftist ideologies" and that they want to "give a bad name to Ciudad Juarez and the state of Chihuahua."
"They are inventing that bodies are being dropped in the desert; this is not true," Piñon said. He said that only 36 women since 1993 have been killed in murders classified as possible serial sexual killings and that almost all of those cases have been solved. He said some of the dead women cited by human rights groups actually died in car accidents, from heart attacks or in falls in the bathtub.
