SWOPblogger

July 30, 2007

Women’s/Human Rights News

Angela’s Story: Mixtecs, Migration and Murder


Raised in a dirt-poor indigenous Mixtec community, 25-year- old Angela Alejandro Ortiz left southern Mexico’s Guerrero state one day in 2002 to seek a better life in the northern borderlands. Accompanied by her four-year-old daughter, the new migrant initially landed work along the familiar harvest paths of Sonora state.

Last weekend, Angela’s remains arrived in a cardboard coffin to her home village of Yozondacua Llano del Carmen, a place which is known as one of the most destitute communities of Latin America and a prime expeller of migrant labor for the north.

Angela’s parents, Francisca Ortiz Flores and Francisco Alejandro Varela, lost contact with their daughter in 2003 after Angela called them from La Palma, Sonora. Undertaking a grim journey that traversed Sonora, Baja California, Sinaloa and Chihuahua states, the couple did not know that Angela’s beaten and decomposed body had been recovered in a rural part of Chihuahua back in November 2003.

For three years, Angela’s remains sat in the cold storage facilities of the Chihuahua Office of the State Attorney General (PGJE). A missing person’s report had long been filed by Angela’s parents, but state law enforcement authorities did not match their body with the report.

While working as laborers in the Chihuahua community of Casas Grandes last year, Angela’s parents finally got their break. A relative informed the migrant couple that Angela had been murdered. After knocking on the doors of the official Chihuahua Women’s Institute, the parents were put in touch with the PGJE. Officers displayed pictures of murdered women, and Angela’s parents identified their daughter as one of the victims. To verify the identity of Angela’s probable remains, DNA tests were conducted in
November 2006; it took six months for the results to confirm the bad news to Angela’s parents.

The state’s story is that Angela was murdered in Casas Grandes by her common-law husband, Porfirio Santiago Gonzalez, 34, and two of his friends, Rutilio Diaz Martinez and Catarina Ortiz Ortega. In the official account, Angela was beaten to death after confronting her husband over the Ortiz woman.

Claiming that Angela strolled out of the couple’s house to go to the bathroom early on the morning of September 22, 2003, and never came back, Santiago filed a missing person’s report for his wife in 2003. However, authorities later extracted a murder confession from the man. Santiago and Diaz received 14-year sentences for killing Angela, but Ortiz, who was allegedly involved in the homicide, remains free.

Angela’s daughter Zenaida witnessed the killing of her mother, but the 9-year-old’s retelling of the crime differs somewhat from the state’s version. According to Zenaida, different men participated in the brutal slaying.

For several years, Zenaida was missing too. Angela’s parents later found out that their granddaughter had been dumped at a church and raised by a minister. The young girl is now in the custody of her grandparents and headed back to Guerrero.

Angela’s parents are investigating a story that their daughter was pregnant with another child before the murder.

“This situation has hurt us a lot,” Angela’s mother Francisca said. “We ask the authorities to investigate and clear this up to guarantee legality.”

The wrenching odyssey of Angela’s parents has involved years of frustrating travel, reams of paperwork and shuffles between offices. In their struggle to transport Angela’s remains back home and recover Zenaida, Francisca Ortiz and her husband were assisted by Lucia Chavira Acosta of Chihuahua City’s Integral Family Development program, attorney Lucha Castro of the Women’s Human Rights Center of Chihuahua City and staff members of the Guerrero-based Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of the Mountain.

Neil Arias Vitinio, a lawyer for Tlachinollan, contended that Angela’s case sums up the perils that indigenous women migrants encounter on a long and dangerous road.

“Considering what happened to Angela, it should be understood there are no mechanisms to guarantee the integrity of indigenous women, whose vulnerability is grave,” Vitinio said.

According to the religious beliefs of the Mixtec people, the burial of Angela Alejandro Ortiz will mean that the woman’s soul can finally rest in peace.


Sources: El Sur, July 29, 2007. Article by Gonzalez
Benicio. Cimacnoticias, July 27, 2007. Article by Patricia
Mayorga. El Diario de Juarez, July 27, 2007.


Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico