A rather extraordinary fact in a country with a total of almost 100,000 missing persons: the uninterrupted media interest for a week in the disappearance of the student on the night of Friday April 8th to Saturday April 9th near Monterrey, the capital of northern industry.
After a 12-day search, his body was found Friday, April 21, at the bottom of a cistern next to a roadside motel that leads to Nuevo Laredo on the United States border.
Viral, his latest photo — on the side of the road, alone at night, in profile, slim figure and long hair, arms crossed, handbag over his shoulder, white top, long beige skirt, Converse shoes — has become a landmark in feminist protests.
“Debanhi, I lend you my voice,” “we demand justice,” women shouted in Mexico City last Sunday after Friday’s demonstrations in Monterrey.
Interest in its history has spread beyond the country’s borders, from Peru to the United States. “A woman disappears in Mexico. One in several thousand,” The New York Times summarized in One on Thursday, adding, “The affair reignites anger at the authorities’ inaction.”
Even before his daughter’s body was found, 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 that’s how the media decided,” says Valeria Moscoso, an expert on psychosocial issues, who points out that the complaints of other victims’ families have not received the same response. This case sums up all the shortcomings of justice in cases of women’s disappearances, Ms. Moscoso adds: “The inertia of the authorities, the complicity, the guilt of the victims, the criminalization of the families and the impunity of the attackers”.
On Wednesday, the Nuevo Leon state attorney general outlined a mea culpa in the presence of the father during a conference, announcing the firing of two prosecutors for “errors” and “omissions”.
For example, the search teams passed the tank several times but only discovered the body after 12 days.
Ten murders of women a day
During the same press conference, prosecutors presented a video to try to clarify the matter. At 4:29 a.m. Saturday, April 9, according to CCTV footage, Debanhi wandered alone along the side of the road before entering the motel grounds and leaning out the window of an abandoned restaurant.
Earlier, the young woman allegedly bought a bottle of alcohol with two friends in a supermarket and then left a party after an argument with her friends and other youths, witnesses and others showed CCTV images presented by television sets.
The young woman then got into a Didi vehicle – an application for an on-demand transport service – from which she later got out for an unknown reason, according to several witnesses.
In that affair, which has been circulated in the media, the driver denied on a television the father’s allegations of an inappropriate gesture towards Debanhi.
The driver, on the other hand, claims to be in touch with her friends and parents when she decided to get out of her white car, which is why he took and shared the famous roadside photo of Debanhi.
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“There are many assumptions. We can’t rule anything out,” prosecutor Gustavo Adolfo Guerrero said. “We do not rule out investigation information,” admitted the father, who initially spoke of kidnapping and murder.
Paradoxically, it is this death, the result of an assassination attempt or an accidental fall, that has sparked a rare anger against femicide and female disappearances. According to the Mexican press, a young mother, Yolanda Martinez, has been missing in Monterrey since March 31.
A total of 322 women have disappeared in the state of Nuevo Leon since the beginning of the year alone. “90% of these missing persons cases are located within 72 hours,” minimized the prosecutor.