Haunting disappearance sparks outrage over gender violence
MONTERREY, MEXICO » On the 13th day of searching for his missing daughter, Mario Escobar stood outside a gas station in the choking heat, clutching flyers with her photo and the vestiges of a desperate, lingering hope.
Hours later, in a wash of red and blue police lights, that hope was destroyed.
Debanhi Escobar’s body was found the night of April 21 in an abandoned underground water tank on the grounds of a motel in northern Mexico, which authorities had already searched four different times.
“I’m shattered,” Mario Escobar said of his daughter’s disappearance. “My life has changed completely.”
The case of Debanhi Escobar, an 18-yearold law student who disappeared April 9, has sparked outrage and protests over a phenomenon that is now chillingly common in Mexico: the disappearance of women and girls all over the country.
In just the past month, at least nine other women and girls have gone missing in the greater metropolitan area of Monterrey, one of the wealthiest cities in the country. Nationwide, more than 24,000 women are missing, according to government figures, and last year, roughly 2,800 women were reported missing, an increase of nearly 40% compared with 2017.
The rising rate of disappearances correlates to the general surge in violence across Mexico in recent years, security experts say, in addition to the rise in organized crime, like sex trafficking, as well as high rates of domestic violence that force many women to flee their homes.
But security analysts and human rights groups also point to a broader failure by state authorities to carry out proper investigations of missing women or prosecute femicide cases, fueling a culture of deepseated impunity.
“The state has simply completely turned its back on its responsibility to investigate cases of disappearances,” said Angélica Durán-martínez, an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. “It’s an environment that makes it easier for these practices to continue propagating because there is no punishment or justice.”
As recently as last week, the state prosecutor, Gustavo Adolfo Guerrero, cited a “lack of communication” among families as well as “rebelliousness” among teens as the cause of most disappearances of women, adding that most were missing as “a voluntary” decision.
Before Escobar disappeared, public outrage had already been building for weeks after a string of disappearances of young women in Monterrey, which seemed to underscore the negligence of authorities.
Yolanda Martínez, 26, went missing March 31. According to her brother Jesús, it took authorities two weeks to even visit their home. She has yet to be found.
“It starts to feed our despair,” Jesús Martínez said. “I can’t tell you that they’re doing nothing, but I also can’t tell you what’s being done.”
Three days after Yolanda Martínez disappeared, María Fernanda Contreras, 27, went missing. Through a family contact, Contreras’ father, Luis Carlos Contreras, obtained cell tower data showing the approximate location of her phone the last time it was switched on.
Her father scoured the area, passing the information to the state prosecutor’s office. But he said it took authorities three days to close off and search the neighborhood. By the time they found her, she had been dead for days.
“With all the information I had, I almost found my daughter, and these guys couldn’t do anything,” Luis Carlos Contreras said. “It’s ridiculous.”
The Nuevo León attorney general’s office has denied they were slow to act, noting that María Fernanda Contreras was killed the night she disappeared.
Then came Escobar’s case. The uproar prompted a rare outpouring of public support, with people offering everything from drones to sniffer dogs to help the search.
The night she went missing, Escobar had been at a party on the outskirts of the city. According to the state prosecutor’s office, Escobar left the party in a private car, but in the early hours of April 9, she got out of the vehicle on the side of a highway, where the driver apparently left her.
For nearly two weeks, her family and friends desperately searched, at times walking through barren fields, prodding at the dirt for signs of a buried body.
Eventually, complaints of a foul smell by the motel workers tipped authorities off to check the water tank.
Nuevo León’s top security official, speaking to reporters last week, acknowledged that the search for Escobar had been flawed. “It’s a massive human failure,” said Aldo Fasci, the state’s security secretary. “They were there four times and didn’t find anything.”