Frontera NorteSur February 2003

Murderer of Casa Amiga Crisis Center Worker Sentenced to 14 Years

Ricardo Medina Acosta was sentenced to 14 years in prison for the December 21, 2001 murder of his wife, María Luisa Carsoli Berumen. Carsoli, age 33, was the mother of four children, then ages 2, 3, 6 and 8, and an employee of the Casa Amiga rape and abuse crisis center in Ciudad Juárez. 

Carsoli's first contact with Casa Amiga was as a victim of her husband's physical abuse. 

The two had been separated for some time when Medina stabbed Carsoli to death in front of Casa Amiga. 

Convicted of "homicidio simple intencional" (simple intentional homicide), Medina could have received a sentence of between eight and twenty years. At one point in the legal proceedings, a more serious murder charge with a twenty-year minimum sentence was nearly brought against Medina but it was dropped. 

    New AG Director for Northern Chihuahua

In other news related to violence against women in Cd. Juárez, Elfego Bencomo López resigned as assistant attorney general for Chihuahua's northern zone. Bencomo and other state officials have been heavily criticized by women's rights groups for their lack of progress against the Cd. Juárez serial femicides. 

Taking Bencomo's position is Octavio Valadez Reyes who was previously the director of the Office of Preliminary Investigations. Valadez is the seventh person to hold the assistant attorney general position since Governor Patricio Martínez took office. 

While Bencomo said that he was resigning for personal reasons, El Diario noted that Bencomo's resignation came days after it was discovered that someone had put a "freeze" on the arrest warrant for former Cd. Juárez mayor Ramón Galindo Noriega. 

Local business leaders reacted to the news by complaining about the inefficiency of the attorney general's office. The representative of a business owners' groups said that she was unsatisfied that there are 4,000 arrest warrants that have yet to be acted on in the area.

Source: El Diario, December 17, 2002. Articles by Roberto Ramos, A. Rodríguez and A. Quintero. 

Ciudad Juárez Women's News: Lawyer Beaten, Links Found in Disappearances

Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, a Ciudad Juárez labor lawyer, university professor, women's activist and former prison director, was pulled over, beaten, robbed and threatened between 12:00 and 1:00 a.m. on Wednesday, December 11 while driving to his home near Cd. Juárez. 

The four men that attacked de la Rosa tried to stop his car three times but he escaped on the first two of these occasions. When he was finally stopped De la Rosa had a gun pointed at him, was severely beaten and told "not to be so brave or outspoken." His wallet, passport and cell phone were also stolen from him.

Because of the lights the pursuing vehicle used and the men's weapons, de la Rosa believes that his assailants were police officers. De la Rosa also believes that robbery was not the motive for the attack because he is not a wealthy man, drives an old car and the warning or threat meant that the men knew who he was. 

De la Rosa told the Cd. Juárez newspaper El Diario that only two people are angry at him: State Attorney General Jesús José Solís Sliva and a local maquiladora owner. De la Rosa believes that he angered the attorney general when he spoke about the investigation of crimes against women in Cd. Juárez. De la Rosa is also the lawyer for a group of Cd. Juárez maquiladora workers and said that the owner of the facility has threatened him a number of times. 

Local police officers seen in a car near where the men first tried to stop de la Rosa did nothing to help him, de la Rosa said.

At one point during his career, de la Rosa was head of the prison where Abdul Latif Sharif Sharif was being held. Sharif is a suspect in some of the Cd. Juárez rape murders. 

The Attorney General's Office also maintains that Sharif used a cell phone while in prison to organize gang members and bus drivers to rape and kill women in his style so as to make it look like state police had arrested the wrong person. However, while in Las Cruces in early 2002, de la Rosa said that he was sure that Sharif could not have made the alleged calls. 

    Women's Disappearances and Murders Linked

An article in the Cd. Juárez newspaper El Norte states that María Isabel Mejía Sapién and Gloria Rivas Martínez, who both disappeared within three months of each other, both worked for the same company with branches just a block from the ECCO computer school which is mentioned in other rape murder investigations. 

Mejía and Rivas, between 15 and 16 years old, worked for the same store, La Estrella, but at different branches. Mejía disappeared in May, 2002 and Rivas in October. 

El Norte says that Rivas' body was found in October but this has not been confirmed. The newspaper also reported a rumor that Rivas was kidnapped and held alive in a drug house for a few days on the western side of Cd. Juárez. 

Other employees of La Estrella say that they have been chased by people upon leaving work. 

While the La Estrella and ECCO cases may be the result of one or more people stalking the area near the stores and school, ECCO's Chihuahua City branch is also allegedly related to some of the cases. 

According to an article in El Diario, on April 6, 2002, at least two ECCO employees are among the suspects in the Chihuahua City killing of 17-year-old Paloma Escobar. Escobar was reported missing at the beginning of March, 2002.

An El Paso Times article, also from April, 2002, went on to look at ECCO connections with murdered young women in Cd. Juárez.

Liliana Holguin de Santiago's body was found in 2000. She was 15 at the time of her death and attended ECCO. She also worked across the street from ECCO on a part-time basis.

Lilia Alejandra García, 17, attended ECCO. She was abducted on February 14, 2001. Police said she was held alive for approximately two days before she was murdered. She was abducted after leaving work.

Maria Acosta Ramírez, 19, worked at a Philips maquiladora and was last seen on April 25, 2001 leaving ECCO. Her body was one of eight found in a field in November, 2001.

Esmeralda Herrera Monreal, 15, had met with ECCO recruiters at her house a few days before her death. She was one of eight young women found in the cotton field in November, 2001. 

Cd. Juárez women's rights activists have pointed out to Frontera NorteSur that Acosta's, Holguin's and Herrera's cases have already been closed because of the arrest of bus drivers Víctor Javier García Uribe and Gustavo González Meza. How this affects the investigation of ECCO employees is unknown.

García and González have both repeatedly stated that they were tortured and coerced into confessing to the murder of Acosta, Holguin, Herrera and eight other women.

Earlier this year, El Diario reported that Oscar Maynez, the state police evidence expert, resigned from the state police because he was asked to fabricate evidence against the two men.  

Source: El Diario, December 12, 2002. 
El Norte, December 10, 2002. Article by Rosa Isela Pérez.

El Paso Human Rights Group Documents Abuses

Seeking to meet with residents of El Paso and Southern New Mexico to document violations of human and Constitutional rights, 40 volunteers with the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR) went door to door and set up tables in El Paso, colonias east of El Paso and in the New Mexico communities of Sunland Park, Anthony, Berino and Vado.

Flora Flores, who filed a report with the BNHR, told the Ciudad Juárez newspaper El Diario that a police officer responding to a problem between neighbors called the Border Patrol when she could not give the officer an official piece of identification. Flores believed that the officer’s call to the Border Patrol violated her Constitutional rights. Flores said that she later proved to a Border Patrol agent that all of her children were US citizens and the Border Patrol agent left the scene telling the police officer that there was nothing he could do.

El Paso resident Maria Noriega, who also participated in the BNHR documentation campaign,  said that during a traffic stop she was verbally abused in front of her daughters by a police officer when she answered his questions in Spanish. The officer's questions were in English, she said. Pulled over because her daughters were allegedly not wearing their seatbelts, Noriega was kept on the side of the road for 45 minutes until a Spanish-speaking officer could arrive at the scene.

Both Flores and Noriega told El Diario that although they had not filed a complaint with authorities or law enforcement out of fear of arising from their encounters with the police, they felt safe sharing their stories with the BNHR.

Fernando Garcia, executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights, said that the Networks’ volunteers went into communities to document abuses because of the fear that law enforcement officers are inducing in area residents.

Javier Sambrano, spokesperson for the El Paso Police Department, said that he did not know about the cases but added that not all officers speak Spanish and that sometimes everyone must wait until a Spanish-speaking officer is free to respond to a situation.

Sambrano also stated that the police never contact the Border Patrol when officers respond to a complaint or go to help the victim of a crime. However, information is shared in some instances as when someone is pulled over for a traffic violation and appears to be transporting undocumented foreigners, he said. 

Source: El Diario, December 9, 2002. Article by Julián Reséndiz.

Baja's Cocopa Community: Still Unable to Fish Traditional Areas

Another year of fighting for expanded fishing rights has gone by and Baja California's Cocopa indigenous community has yet to see changes that would allow it to earn money through fishing in the Colorado River delta. The heart of the Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve, where the Cocopa traditionally fished, is closed to Cocopa fishing. 

On Tuesday, January 14, 2003, BC Governor Eugenio Elorduy Walter met with Víctor Lichtinger, the head of Mexico's Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Secretaría del Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, Semarnat) and the two discussed the problems facing the Cocopa. However, they did not come to an agreement regarding fishing. 

Mónica González, a Cocopa representative, told the Mexicali newspaper La Crónica that on January 14 she also had spoken with a high-level Semarnat figure who said that the question of fishing rights would not be soon resolved.

This was a disappointment to the Cocopa who had hoped that they would not face problems with enforcement officials at the beginning of the fishing season in February.  

According to González, the Cocopa are also disappointed that federal environmental officials with power over the area have ignored recommendations made by Mexico's National Commission for Human Rights which would expand fishing opportunities for the Cocopa. 

To see a previous FNS article on this subject go to http://www.nmsu.edu/~frontera/dec01/Mexicalinews.html and scroll down to December 11. 

Source: La Crónica (Mexicali), January 15, 2003. Article by Gerardo Franco.