Dozens of Bodies Found in Sewage Canal Outside Mexico City - More Femicide in Mexico State?

By DD for Borderland Beat

Authorities have recovered up to 21 bodies from the canal since June.   Neighbors say there are more than 46.

At least 21 bodies have been recovered from a sewage canal in Ecatepec, Mexico State, just outside of Mexico City.


From June 1 to September 30, 2014 authorities drained the canal, uncovering the bodies, which were of both genders, many between the ages of 14 and 18.

The move to drain the canal comes after relatives seeking the appearance of 40 women, mostly minors, have been demanding more action by the authorities to find their missing loved ones.

Octavio Martinez Vargas, president of the Security Committee of the Legislature of the State of Mexico reported that most of the human remains were dumped at a place known as the Devil's Curve.

The congressman made the discovery public during a meeting between family members of the missing people and with officials of the attorney general’s office of the State of Mexico.

The information was also made known by officials from the attonery general’s suboffice on gender, office on femicides, and the office on human trafficking in the State of Mexico.

The move to drain the canal comes after relatives seeking the appearance of 40 women, mostly minors, have been demanding more action by the authorities to find their missing loved ones.

Members from Solidarity for the Families, which supports families searching for their disappeared loved ones, countered the information provided by the authorities. They affirm that since January, more than 46 bodies have been discovered.

David Figueroa, president of the organization, denounced the lack of care by the authorities to identify the bodies and investigate how they ended up in the canal.

"The government says this hand corresponds to that leg and that’s it. They don’t do tests to find out exactly to whom these parts belong, because often what they find are not complete body parts.

Since 2011, the State of Mexico (where Pena Nieto was governor) has become one of the states with the highest number of femicides, with a count of four women killed per 100. Civil and women’s rights organizations have been campaigning for the authorities to do more to fight gender violence in the state.

During his many campaign rallies Enrique Peña Nieto boasted that he knew about women, because he has six at home. "That's why I am sensitive to the intelligence of women",


In a book book by Humberto Padgett titled  The Dead Women of the State: Femicides During the Enrique Peña Nieto State of Mexico Administration he examines the issue.  It is the mixture of a chronicle and a report, an interview and a written history. A story of Mexicans from both the State of Mexico and elsewhere who drive armored cars, eat in the best restaurants, rub shoulders with corrupt church leaders and do not believe that femicide exists. Who think that Mexico is their property, their store to run. A deadly place for women.

Where the State of Mexico was the worst place to be a woman, not in absolute numbers, but in rates. More than seven thousand women killed. Between 1990 and 2011 the state, on eleven occasions, held first place in the rate of mortality due to assaults against women. Between 1990 and 1997 the state continuously stayed in first place in femicides.

In 2004, 24-year-old Nadia Alejandra Muciño was found dead in her home with a rope and an electrical cord tied around her throat.

Even though all signs pointed to murder via strangulation, and there had been a documented record of incidents of domestic violence, authorities declared Mucino's death a suicide.

Muciño wasn’t assassinated in Ciudad Juárez — the Mexican border metropolis in the Northern state of Chihuahua — which has become internationally known for these kinds of gruesome murders that largely target young women.

No, Muciño was murdered in the state of Mexico — on the outskirts of the capital city, where femicides or the killing of women, topped the nation’s murder statistics.

Between 2005 and 2011, during President Peña Nieto’s term as governor of the state of Mexico, 1,997 women were murdered in his state, according to official government statistics.

For the past decade, Muciño’s mother, Antonia Márquez, has fought for her daughter’s murderers to be held accountable — even though she said she has continually received physical and verbal threats from various members of the accused murderers' family. She even had to move to a different neighborhood to to avoid the threats by the murderer's family.  

Muciño’s three young children were present during her murder and they have repeatedly testified that their father Bernardo López Gutiérrez and uncle Isidro López Gutiérrez allegedly killed their mother, but their testimony has not been sufficient for the prosecutors in the case. 

Authorities didn’t arrest either man until a year after Muciño’s death..

In 2012, Bernardo López Gutiérrez was arrested in connection with the case but he still has yet to be convicted. Isidro Lopez Gutierrez was incarcerated between 2009 and 2010 but was eventually released after he appealed his conviction.

“When these men see that others have abused, raped and assassinated women and nothing has happened to them or at the most they serve one or two years in jail, there is nothing to prevent them from doing the same, because they know they will not suffer the consequences,”

According to NGO the National Citizens' Femicide Observatory, Mexico State experienced a higher increase in female killings during Peña’s term than that seen in Ciudad Juarez during a similar time period in the 1990s. According to the organization’s most recent report, during the first half of 2009, authorities followed up on just 33 of the 89 femicides registered in Mexico State.

The National Citizen Observatory on Femicide, made up of 43 groups dedicated to the defense of human rights, registered 922 femicides in the State of Mexico between January of 2005 and August of 2010. From those almost one thousand cases, only 12% ended in indictments before a judge, and only between 3 and 4% resulted in sentences for the killers. As in the rest of the country, a major factor behind the death of so many women is impunity.

As for Márquez, she said she has little faith in the state’s ability to remedy the crisis.

“Here machismo, corruption and cover-ups are what reign. For two pesos or cronyism or friendship, they’ll charge someone with a crime or delete their charge,” said Márquez. “What year it is? How is that people still think that women are objects — property of men?”