Mexican police find body of missing woman in cistern

MEXICO CITY – The haunting story of a young woman left on the side of a highway late at night in northern Mexico ended in tragedy Friday, after her decomposing body was found in a subterranean water tank at a motel.

Assistant Public Safety Secretary Ricardo Mejia said Friday the woman’s body – which was apparently unrecognizable after what may have been nearly two weeks in the water – had a crucifix necklace and clothing that Debanhi Escobar was wearing that night.

And despite what authorities in the northern border state of Nuevo Leon described as a massive search for her, the story ended the way it often does in Mexico: when her rotting body was found by locals.

“The alert was sounded by hotel workers, because of the fetid odors coming from the area,” Mejia said.

The story of Debanhi Escobar made headlines because of a haunting photo taken by a driver who was supposed to take her home that night. It was not clear why she got out of the car, but her father, Mario Escobar, said prosecutors told him that surveillance camera footage suggested the driver had inappropriately touched his daughter.

“I suppose that my daughter did not put up with the harassment,” her father said. The driver has been detained though his full name has not been released. Escobar said while the driver may not have killed her, he was responsible for Debanhi’s death.

The driver, who worked for a taxi application, took the photo to show Escobar got out of his car alive on April 8 on the outskirts of the city of Monterrey. There she was, a young woman standing alone at night on the side of a highway, wearing a skirt and high-top sneakers.

The image seemed to speak of the tremendous vulnerability, and the self-assuredness – or desperation – of the young woman.

Nobody saw her until late Thursday, when investigators managed to pull her body from the 12-foot (4 meter) deep water tank near a pool at the roadside motel.

Mario Escobar said he was sure Debanhi was dead.

“My daughter is dead. I don’t know what to do,” Escobar said. “The prosecutors didn’t do their job correctly.”

Authorities did not say how her body wound up in the underground tank, a common feature in Mexico where local water systems aren’t pressurized and every household has to have a tank to store incoming water for later use.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Friday the case “has caused, logically, a lot of worry, a lot of concern” among Mexicans.

Critics are disturbed by the fact that even when authorities are spurred to act by public outcry, investigations are seldom very timely or efficient.

During the week that investigators said 200 personnel used drones, search dogs and reviews of security camera footage to look for Debanhi, her body was actually lying not far from where she was last seen.

The president pledged to help prosecutors find the culprit, but in fact the killings of women have increased in recent years, rising from 977 cases in 2020 to 1,015 in 2021. And those were just the cases classified as “feminicides,” a legal term used in Mexico in cases where women are killed because of their gender. Killings of women overall are much higher.

Just before Debanhi disappeared, another women was murdered in Monterrey, Maria Fernanda Contreras, 27. A suspect – apparently, a friend or acquaintance of the woman – has been arrested in that case.

And during the week authorities were searching for Debanhi, local media reported that the bodies of five other women and girls had been found in the state. The victims had all been reported missing around the same time as Debanhi, and all of them – four were 16 or younger – were found dead.

Angelica Orozco, who leads the relatives’ group United Forces for Our Disappeared in Nuevo Leon state, said the problem is not only that authorities are slow to investigate and do it badly, but that they also tend to blame the victims.

“The first thing is that they don’t carry out diligent investigations or searches, and the second thing are the statements issued by authorities, in some cases linking them to illegal activities,” Orozco said.

She was particularly disturbed when the Nuevo Leon state prosecutor, Gustavo Guerrero, said Thursday that most women disappear voluntarily, or as an act of “rebellion.”

“The main reason for the disappearances of women is because of a lack of communication with their families, because of disputes with them, because of the rebellion of young people,” Guerrero said. “The range of age of most of the women who disappear is from 14 to 25, but it’s not due to a crime, but rather is a voluntary situation.”

That view was refuted by Maria de la Luz Estrada of the activist group National Feminicide Observatory, who said it had become a depressing pattern that when women disappear, they turn up dead.

“It’s very serious and lamentable,” Estrada said of Debhani’s case, “but that has been the pattern in recent years, disappearances become crimes like feminicide.”