(Mexico City) The death – still unexplained – of the young Debanhi Escobar, 18, awakens deep anger in Mexico towards the authorities accused of negligence in the investigations into the murders and disappearances of thousands of women each year.
Posted at 6:32 p.m.
A fairly exceptional fact in a country with nearly 100,000 missing persons in total: the incessant media interest for a week in the disappearance of the student on the night of Friday 8 to Saturday 9 April near Monterrey, the industrial capital of North.
After twelve days of searching, his body was found on Friday April 21 at the bottom of a cistern next to a roadside motel going to Nuevo Laredo, on the border with the United States.
Photo DANIEL BECERRIL, REUTERS
Viral, his last photo – at the side of the road, alone in the night, in profile, slender figure and long hair, arms crossed, handbag slung over his shoulder, white top, long beige skirt, Converse shoes – has become the emblem feminist protests.
“Debanhi I lend you my voice”, “we demand justice” shouted women in Mexico City last Sunday, after demonstrations on Friday in Monterrey.
Interest in its history has gone beyond the borders of the country, from Peru to the United States. “A woman disappears in Mexico. One among several thousand”, summed up the New York Times on Thursday, adding: “the case rekindles anger at the inaction of the authorities”.
Even before the discovery of his daughter’s body, the father, Mario Escobar, played the media card to denounce the failures in the initial phase of the search.
“This case is more visible than the others because the media have decided so,” Valeria Moscoso, an expert in psycho-social issues, told AFP, pointing out that the complaints of other families of victims have not had any effect. the same echo.
This case sums up all the defects of justice in cases of disappearances of women, adds Mme Moscoso: “the indolence of the authorities, the complicity, the guilt of the victims, the criminalization of the families and the impunity of the aggressors”.
On Wednesday, in the presence of the father, the attorney general of the state of Nuevo Leon sketched a mea culpa during a conference by announcing the dismissal of two public prosecutors for “errors” and “omissions” .
The search teams, for example, passed several times near the tank, but only discovered the body after 12 days.
Ten feminicides a day
During this same press conference, the Public Prosecutor presented a video to try to clarify the facts.
At 4:29 a.m. on Saturday April 9, Debanhi was wandering alone by the side of the road, before entering the motel grounds and leaning out of the window of an abandoned restaurant, according to CCTV footage.
Previously, the young woman allegedly bought a bottle of alcohol at a convenience store with two girlfriends, then left a party after an argument with her girlfriends and other young people, according to witnesses and other CCTV footage presented by televisions.
The young woman then boarded a Didi vehicle – an on-demand transport service application – which she later got off for an unknown reason, according to several testimonies.
In this affair which is spread in the media, the driver denied on a television set the accusations of an inappropriate gesture towards Debanhi made by the father.
The driver, on the contrary, claims to have wanted to contact her friends and parents when she decided to get out of her white car, which is why he took and shared the famous photo of Debanhi by the side of the road.
“There are a lot of assumptions. We can’t rule anything out,” prosecutor Gustavo Adolfo Guerrero said.
“We are not ruling out any investigation leads,” admitted the father, who initially spoke of kidnapping and assassination.
It is paradoxically this death, the result of an assassination or an accidental fall, which has provoked a rare anger against feminicides and disappearances.
In Monterrey itself, a young mother, Yolanda Martinez, has been missing since March 31, according to the Mexican press.
A total of 322 women have disappeared in the state of Nuevo Leon since the beginning of the year alone. “90% of these disappearances are located within 72 hours”, minimized the prosecutor.
In 2021, Mexico recorded 33,308 homicides, according to official figures. Almost 10% of the victims are women. Feminists denounce an average of ten feminicides per day.