A woman paints a purple ribbon on a wall with paintings by Debanhi Escobar in San Nicolás de los Garza, Mexico. DANIEL BECERRIL (Portal)
When Mario Escobar left the yellow walls protecting the Nueva Castilla Motel on the outskirts of Monterrey at dawn a year ago, he approached the press in a riot and said, weeping: “My daughter is dead and I don’t know what to do should “. With that phrase, the father realized the body found in an abandoned cistern was that of Debanhi Escobar, 18, who had been searching for him for 12 days with his family, neighbors and hundreds of police officers. The young woman’s disappearance rocked an anesthetized country, making her the latest icon for femicide. Her case, which still has no answers or arrests, demonstrates Mexico’s failure to seek justice for murdered women.
“We are 365 days away from Debanhi being planted in the motel and a year has passed since this atrocity they did to our daughter,” said Mario Escobar, who spoke with Dolores Bazaldúa, the young woman’s mother EL PAÍS called for a demonstration this Friday in Monterrey. The march leaves the macro square of the state capital and leads to the Prosecutor’s Office of Nuevo León. Finally, the goal is to reach the Nueva Castilla Motel to observe a minute of silence. “There are still many unanswered questions, what we are looking for is justice and truth,” says the father.
Debanhi Escobar studied law at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, she was the daughter of two teachers, she liked to dance. On April 8, he went to a party with a group of friends. The surveillance cameras recorded them entering and exiting a farm in the municipality of Escobedo. The first trip was accompanied by two friends and the return trip alone. The same driver took her on both trips. He got back in the cab at 4:17 a.m.; After driving a few meters, Debanhi got out of the car. He did it at kilometer 15.5 of the Monterrey-Nuevo Laredo highway in Tamaulipas. A dangerous stretch of asphalt where hundreds of people disappeared in 2021. At that point, alone and with her arms crossed, the driver snapped her picture.
It is now known from the surveillance cameras that the young woman tried to ask for help from a transport company located on this street. Finding no one, he went to the motel in Nueva Castilla. At 4:35 a.m. she is seen running into the premises and according to the leaked images, instead of going to reception – which is just after entering the motel – the young woman hid in a corner in a disused garden. About 20 minutes later, Debanhi moved. And this gust of wind has become the last of her. After 13 days, motel employees found the young woman’s body in a cistern located in that garden. A year later, the question remains the same: how did this happen?
Nuevo León prosecutors tried to pretend that the young woman had accidentally fallen into the cistern and died of a contusion on her skull. This hypothesis has already been refuted by the results of a subsequent autopsy, which the family recognizes as official and for which they had to exhume the young woman’s body. This latest study lists the cause of death as “suffocation from obstruction of the airways.” It is also established that the young woman died between three and five days before she was found in the cistern. That means Debanhi was alive between 10 and 8 days while the city was papered with her face, while her photo went viral across the country and her disappearance reached the President. Where was Debanhi then? With who? A year later and still no replies.
Irregularities in the case led to the dismissal of two prosecutors and eventually prosecutor Gustavo Adolfo Guerrero. Authorities piled on one negligence after another: they allegedly searched the motel several times before the body was found there without success, and for two weeks they assured there were no cameras or images to help locate the young woman could – after all, they provided hours of recording, both from the transport company and the motel. The investigation was conducted by the Republic’s Attorney General, which is now leading it, and which has given few details about the investigation over the past few months. Two motel employees have been linked to a court case alleging false testimony and concealing information. They are the only two people facing criminal charges.
The Debanhi case has left a deep mark on young Mexican women: the desperation of their parents in the search, the discovery of the body and the lack of answers as to who or why killed the young woman. In November, 23-year-old Lidia Gabriela Gómez jumped out of a moving taxi in Mexico City, thinking she was being kidnapped. Her brother Diego Maldonado told EL PAÍS that she was very upset by what happened to Debanhi a few months ago: “She was very involved in the feminist movement when Debanhi said: ‘If something like this happens to me, if one day she will in a car, I better dare to find myself in a free place.
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