Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Anger grows over police custody death
MEXICO CITY — Anger grew in Mexico and El Salvador as Mexican authorities said Monday that an autopsy of a Salvadoran woman who died in police custody confirmed that police broke her neck.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador flatly said that Victoria Esperanza Salazar was murdered by police in the Caribbean resort of Tulum.
Salazar let out a scream Saturday afternoon as a female police officer knelt on her back to cuff her hands behind her. Salazar was facedown on the street and barefoot. Her feet flailed. A couple people passed slowly by on a bicycle. There were food stands a few yards away.
Clips of video cobbled together give no sense of how much time elapsed. Then three other officers are seen standing around her motionless body still facedown, chatting casually. Later, three officers lift her still-handcuffed body into the back of a police pickup and drive away.
Video circulating on social media does not show events before Salazar was facedown on the street with the officer on top of her.
An autopsy concluded that Salazar died from a broken neck. The examination found, “a fracture of part of the upper spinal column produced by the rupture of the first and second vertebra which caused the loss of the victim,” Quintana Roo State Prosecutor Oscar Montes de Oca said in a video.
The injuries “coincide with submission maneuvers applied to the victim during her detention” and demonstrate a “disproportionate” use of force, he said, adding that his office was preparing femicide charges against the four police officers.
Salazar had been living in Mexico for some years on a “humanitarian visa,” El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said. “She was brutally murdered by Tulum police officers in Quintana Roo, Mexico,” the president wrote. He said the government would support Salazar’s two daughters.
“I see thousands of outraged Mexicans, demanding justice for our compatriot,” Bukele said. “They are as outraged as we are. Let us not forget that it was not the Mexican people who committed this crime, but rather some criminals in the Tulum police.”
Lopez Obrador swore Monday that those responsible would be punished.
“She was brutally treated and murdered,” Lopez Obrador said. “It is an event that fills us with pain and shame.”
On Monday, a small potted plant and a couple of candles sat outside the convenience store where Salazar was killed. Someone had written “Here they killed Victoria” in large purple letters on the pavement.
Salazar left Sonsonate, about an hour west of San Salvador, five years ago to look for better opportunities and escape the area’s street violence, said her mother, Rosibel Emerita Arriaza. She was a single mother of two daughters.
She left her daughters with her family and made her way to Mexico. In the southern Mexico city of Tapachula, near the Guatemala border, Salazar requested and received refugee status. Mexico’s National Immigration Institute confirmed that Monday.
Once she had legal status, she moved to the beach resort town of Tulum on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. A more relaxed alternative to Cancun and Playa del Carmen, Tulum had drawn crowds and was struggling with rapid growth. Salazar found work cleaning in hotels and brought her daughters, 16 and 15, to be with her.
On Monday, Arriaza was working with Salvadoran authorities on getting her daughter’s body repatriated. She also planned to travel to Mexico to be reunited with her granddaughters
“I want justice for my daughter, because it isn’t fair what they did to her,” Arriaza said. “She was a woman who wasn’t armed, just for being a woman, and I don’t know what happened.”
Protest marches were scheduled for later Monday in Tulum and Mexico City.
The scenes were reminiscent of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.