Jailed mother a cause celebre

Media blitz helped get Arizonan freed

After spending more than a week in a Mexican jail facing drug-smuggling accusations, the woman who had become the center of a social-media and news-media storm returned home to metro Phoenix even as her case turned into a political lightning rod.

Early Friday morning, she and her family crossed the border into Arizona. There, by day’s end, a congressman had called for an investigation into the case, suggesting someone planted the 12 pounds of pot that was found under the woman’s seat on a Mexican bus, and a Mexico governor had apologized for the incident.

The woman at the center of it all, Yanira Maldonado, 42, smiled frequently and looked vibrant during an interview

Friday night, but her eyes welled with tears at times as she recalled her nine days in jail.

“It’s a situation I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” she said. “You don’t have control. You’re behind bars. You don’t have your freedom.”

Maldonado, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said she passed the time in jail praying and reading scripture with other inmates from a copy of the Book of Mormon she found at the jail. On Sunday, she said, she also led several other inmates in a fast.

Maldonado told and 12 News that she credited her release to a combination of public pressure, evidence “and the heavenly father.”

“The heavenly father is the one who answered my prayers and the faith that I had,” she said.

The couple’s first wedding anniversary was last Saturday, a day she spent behind bars.

“We’ll have to make it up,” her husband, Gary Maldonado, said at a Friday news conference.

Maldonado was freed Thursday evening in Nogales, Sonora, walking into Gary’s arms for an extended embrace on the jailhouse steps.

The two live in Goodyear and have seven children between them from previous marriages. The couple said they had traveled to Mexico for a funeral. On May 22, they were returning to Arizona by bus. At a military checkpoint in Hermosillo, Sonora, soldiers entered the bus to search it. All passengers were ordered off, and their luggage was X-rayed.

Soldiers reported finding taped-up bundles of marijuana attached with metal hooks to the undersides of two seats. The people sitting closest to the bundles of drugs, the soldiers determined, were the Maldonados, the only two U.S. citizens aboard. At first, authorities arrested Gary. Then, he said, they came to his cell and told him he was free to go because they suspected his wife, instead.

What followed was the stuff of tourism nightmares: The couple were caught up in another country’s unfamiliar legal system that offered no easy path out.

While a Mexican court weighed the case, a crescendo of public opinion grew on the U.S. side of the border.

The Maldonados turned to the media — social and traditional — to get the word out. Relatives spread word through Twitter. Yanira’s children and relatives gave interviews, at first locally, then to national networks.

The cause also enlisted Arizona politicians. U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon and U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake provided telephonic diplomacy. Calls from Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer kept Maldonado in a detention center near the border, an official said, rather than being moved to one farther in-country.

Salmon, who had been a member of the same LDS ward as relatives of the Maldonados near Washington, D.C., said mutual friends of the family alerted him to the case last weekend.

Salmon, who is the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, said he figured it was his role both as friend and congressman to do something.

He worked the phones starting Monday, calling the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and, the next day, the Mexican ambassador in the U.S.

“I told (the Mexican ambassador) that I know the family very well, they’re good people,” Salmon said. “I don’t understand why your people have arrested her. And I’m demanding you personally insert yourself and find out what the problem is and help us out.”

On television, the stories were accompanied by luminous wedding photos outside the Mormon Temple in Mesa.

A break came eight days later. Family members said surveillance footage shown to a judge Thursday captured Maldonado boarding the bus carrying her purse, a blanket and some water bottles, with no bundles of pot in sight. The judge granted her release hours later.

Salmon said public pressure — the news coverage, the tweets, the phone calls from U.S. officials — led to Maldonado’s move into cozier quarters near the jail warden’s office and to her eventual release.

Salmon said the incident had the earmarks of a set-up, that maybe Mexican law-enforcement agents wanted to arrest U.S. citizens so they could arrange bribes. Salmon said that he had no evidence of this but that he has heard similar anecdotes from several Arizonans who have traveled through Mexico.

Salmon said he wants to hold a hear- ing on the congressional subcommittee he chairs.

“I’m going to do everything I can to expose this. It stinks to high heaven,” he said. “I want to hear from anyone in America pulled over and shaken down by police (in Mexico).”

In the Friday interview, Maldonado said that she didn’t believe she was framed but that Mexico’s justice system “needs to be fixed somehow.”

The U.S. State Department addressed Maldonado’s release in its Friday briefing in Washington. “We appreciate the efforts on the part of the Mexican authorities to ensure that a decision was made in accordance with Mexican law,” said Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman.

The State Department does issue travel advisories to Mexico. The one on its website Friday advised tourists that “Sonora is a key region in the international drug and human trafficking trades and can be extremely dangerous for travelers.”

It also cautioned against driving off main highways or at night. It did not offer caution about buses.

The governor of Sonora, Guillermo Padrés Elías, was in Phoenix on Friday for a previously scheduled event with Brewer. He used the occasion to apologize for the incident.

“We’re very sorry that that happened to her, that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Padrés Elías said. “She can always come to Sonora. I’d like to meet her and tell her personally that we’re sorry that happened to her.”

Padrés Elías said that tourists from Arizona will still be welcomed and protected. “We see you as family, so we want to continue with that,” he said.

Some posts on social-media sites, including Twitter, had urged people to boycott Mexico until Maldonado was re- leased. Had she been convicted, she faced 10 years in prison.

Padrés Elías said the soldiers boarding the bus are fighting drug trafficking and are not in the business of planting drugs. He said that in this case, it just took some time for the evidence to come out and Maldonado to be released.

“I can’t judge the judicial systems or how our constitutions operate in each country,” he said, saying he had seen friends spend months in U.S. jails for less serious matters.

Padrés Elías said he also feels the tightness of security at the border when he crosses into Arizona. “I get my car torn apart and put back together,” he said. “And I understand that you’re protecting your country, that’s your laws, and I understand that.”

Brewer said she was “very grateful” that Mexican officials moved the case “so swiftly and quickly.”

“As Americans, we all know that our precious constitutional rights don’t extend beyond our nation’s border,” Brewer said.

Maldonado was met by a mob of media as she walked out of custody on Thursday evening. She gave an impromptu news conference in front of the detention center. And then another 2:30 a.m. news conference by the pool of a Nogales, Ariz., hotel.

On Friday night, she set up brief oneon-one interviews with a bevy of television crews at a hotel conference center in Avondale.

She said she plans to go back to Mexico in the future but not right away.

“My family is still there,” she said. “It wouldn’t be fair” not to go back.