Frida, the femicide hunter: a journalist searches for missing women and their murderers in Mexico

Alejandra Pataro

02/26/2021 14:30

• Clarín.com

• World

Updated 02/26/2021 2:30 PM

Her name is Verónica Villalvazo.

But the task she decided to put on her shoulders led her to adopt another name, one that would eloquently represent her crusade in a country like Mexico, where the disappearance of people and the murder of women runs like a plague.

So he chose "Frida Guerrera";

a 

femicide hunter

.

Like a ritual, five years ago, this 50-year-old journalist and activist spends her hours tracking down cases of missing women, memorizing them, and harvesting clues to find predators.

She started in 2016, denouncing the murders of babies and women through her blog # NiUnaMás.

And then what happens when someone prowls swamps with monsters happened:

death threats

.

But that never stopped her.

"Chronicler of FEMINICIDE throughout Mexico since 2016. You want to tell a story of femicide, look for me, help me to visualize them. WE DO NOT PROFIT, WE DO NOT LIE," says her Twitter account, where she is followed by 66 thousand users, including UN Women Mexico and Human Vigilancia de los derechos.

Frida Guerrera's account on Twitter.

Photo: screenshot

UN Women calls Latin America the

deadliest

place

for women outside of war zones.

More femicides are committed in Mexico than in any other country in the region (10 per day), except Brazil.

Activist, journalist and "hunter", Frida is the product of the ineptitude of others and of her own experience.

She acts where nobody does.

And you know what it's about.

There are more than 73,000 missing people in Mexico.

But many never meet.

In this tide of "lost" people, Frida Guerrera searches first thing in the morning.

Track.

Classify.

It is methodical.

He immerses himself in the news and "fishing": he identifies cases of femicide, catalogs the age of the victims, the location and the method of their murder.

She publishes the cases on the networks so that her followers help her to solve, to provide clues.

And on his blog he publishes the photos of the missing or found murdered girls.

Activist, journalist and hunter, Frida is the product of the ineptitude of others and of her own experience.

Photo: AFP

On the cover of # NiUnaMás, like mosaics, images of beautiful women unfold, many of them smiling, photos of the past that crash with a brutal ending:

They find the lifeless body of a woman inside her home in Salina Cruz Femicide # 12 Oaxaca

Carolina dies in Juchitán, the victim of a beating by her partner Femicide # 13 Oaxaca.

FEMINICIDE IN MÉRIDA: Subject stabs his partner Femicide # 02 Yucatán

They find the lifeless body of a woman inside her home in Salina Cruz Femicide # 12 Oaxaca

They find human remains of a woman in an abandoned car in Tijuana Feminicide # 12 Baja California Norte

Cover of "El Blog de Frida # NiUnaMás", by Frida Guerrera.

Photo: screenshot

The cases go on and on.

"They all hurt me, but girls break me," he says.

In a report with The Guardian, Guerrera says she helped police find dozens of murderers over the past few years.

His hunts are worth double in a country where everything seems to play against: police incompetence that goes hand in hand with corruption.

A patriarchal and misogynistic society.

More narco violence.

Given the disappearance of a woman, the authorities will believe that she escaped.

No one will open an investigation or issue a search warrant before 3 days have passed.

By then the girls are already dead.

"They are inept,"

Frida tells the Guardian. 

The monster of Toluca

One of his hunts was that of Óscar García, nicknamed the Monster of Toluca.

Three bodies were taken from her home, that of Jessica Jaramillo, a 23-year-old psychology student, murdered and abandoned in a bathroom, in October 2019. That of Martha Patricia Nava Sotelo, 25, who has been missing since February 2019, and Adriana González Hernández, 27, disappeared since March 2017. From that house, the police also took García's pets, and that drove him crazy.

Pets.

To find the murderer, Frida provoked him.

On his blog, he called him a "Nobody."

An attention-starved guy.

On Twitter

he treated him as an idiot

.

And challenged him to meet.

"I'm waiting for you," he told her, knowing he was going to take the bait.

He's going to get mad. He's going to look for me, he thought.

So it was.

He contacted her by messages.

He referred to his victims as "my bitches", "whores".

"Why do you defend them? ... You should defend the animals that are more loyal."

He confessed that he always wanted to be a serial killer, as if he were an astronaut or a lawyer.

The first one he killed was his father when he was 16 years old.

And then more followed.

Almost 40 days on the run and in communication with Frida, they led the police to locate him, eating a sandwich.

The arrest of Óscar García

The Monster of Toluca

▶ This was the capture of the alleged serial feminicide of #Toluca, who a day before bragged about his crimes on social networkshttps: //t.co/6YmPSj4mPi pic.twitter.com/jTvhP3vSFW

- Millennium Television (@mileniotv) December 7, 2019

Personal experience

Frida knows these guys, she knows how they think because she herself had the experience of a hitting boyfriend, who broke her nose and ribs.

The violence against women that he had read happened far from home, this time had entered his.

With more than 30 years she went to Oaxaca and reinvented herself as a chronicler who would tell the suffering of others.

And he stepped on the land of wolves.

They left dead cats on her doorstep.

They took her out to the street, blindfolded her, put her in a truck, beat her and told her to leave Oaxaca. 

Then it was time to look for an alias:

Frida Guerrera

.

"I put on Frida, by Frida Kahlo," she explains.

The Guerrera thing does not need to be explained.

For 2017, denouncing the femicides was not enough.

The killers had to be hunted.

Frida knows these guys, they know how she thinks because she herself had the experience / AFP

It started with one case, and more followed.

It became famous.

Large media such as The Guardian or El País have written about her.

He confronted AMLO for doing nothing.

And that meant more insults and more threats.

They accused her of not being a journalist, of setting up a circus, of being moved by political interests.

From being financed by the opposition, in a country where the president has, to say the least, a complicated relationship with the press.

That is why his motto

"we do not profit, we do not lie"

heads his pages on the web.

Since 2017, he says, he has helped find 40 killers.

And it goes for more.