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One homicide, four lawyers and lack of expert opinions: Roxana Ruiz's family criticizes "vices" in the process

2021-08-06T22:06:19.061Z


The defense of the 21-year-old woman who killed her alleged aggressor in Nezahualcóyotl criticizes the fact that the Police did not take photographs of the blows he had on his body or carry out medical studies


Ana Ruiz, the mother of Roxana Ruiz, asks for justice for her daughter, this Thursday, in the municipality of Nezahualcóyotl.Quetzalli Nicte Ha

Ana Ruiz is 1.50 meters tall and has long, black hair tied in a half ponytail.

The eyes, the only part of his face that the mask does not cover, point to the other side of the street, where there is a church, but they look further away.

Her cell phone rings and she answers.

Perhaps it is her daughter, who in recent months calls her when she can, "quick two minutes" to see how she is.

Roxana Ruiz, 21, confessed in May to having killed her alleged attacker after he raped her and threatened to kill her in Nezahualcóyotl, one of the most dangerous municipalities in the State of Mexico for women.

He has been in preventive detention for the murder for three months.

It is not Roxana who is calling this time.

Her mother speaks softly, without air: "If she did not defend herself, she was going to be the dead one."

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A few kilometers away, in the Bordo de Xochiaca penitentiary, the young woman has been locked up since the police detained her.

Roxana worked selling potato chips at a stand 20 minutes by truck from her home and was already thinking of opening her own store.

Her ex-husband's mother took care of their four-year-old son during the day and when the young woman finished her shift she went to look for him.

If it got too late, their mother-in-law and sister-in-law accompanied them on foot to the room that she rented for 800 pesos a week.

It was for security: the municipality has been on alert for femicides since 2015.

French fries stand where Roxana Ruiz worked, in Nezahualcóyotl.Quetzalli Nicte Ha

To her sister-in-law, Sarahí Mejía, it seemed strange that Roxana did not arrive that Friday and the anguish increased when after midnight a prosecutor arrived to notify them that the young woman had been arrested. Two women who worked at a food distributor meters from her had invited her for a beer. Roxana accepted one and when she was leaving an employee of the distributor offered to accompany her home. Upon arrival, he insisted so much on entering that she gave in out of fear and prepared a mat for him to lie down on the floor, according to a letter he wrote from the prison. In the middle of the night, the man climbed onto her bed and raped her.

In the struggle, the two fell to the ground and he no longer got up, according to Mejía. Roxana confessed that she had killed him by suffocation, because that is what she had tried. "But she may not have even killed him, that it was the blow," says Ana Ruiz. What the family demands, in any case, is a fair process. The mother criticizes that on the day of the arrest, after Roxana left the body of her alleged assailant in a bag a few meters from her house, the police did not take her statement into account, nor did they take photographs of the blows she had on her body. , nor did he do medical studies.

The process, says Abigail Escalante, Roxana's lawyer, was “flawed” from the beginning, and lists: “The necessary measures to determine the facts did not exist, there was no action with a gender perspective, the testimony was discredited in a prejudicial way. of the detainee and the necessary actions were not carried out to determine if she had been raped ”. Sources from the State of Mexico Prosecutor's Office have assured this newspaper that the public prosecutor is "in the best disposition" to make the expert opinions, but that it is Roxana's defense who "has to accept that they are carried out." Escalante responds that three months after the alleged assault, "the only pertinent evidence is a psychological examination," which the defense will authorize, but that "valuable time and evidence" has already been lost.

Slogan painted on the walls of the courts of Nezahualcóyotl.Quetzalli Nicte Ha

Since her arrest, Roxana has had four lawyers: the first ex officio, who advised the family to pay 20,000 pesos as bail that did not serve to get her out of jail;

a private lawyer who abandoned the case when she fell ill with covid;

another ex officio, who was absent from the second hearing, which should have been this Monday, because he was on vacation, and Escalante, who got involved in the case this week through feminist groups.

"If it weren't for them, Roxana would stay inside," says Ana Ruiz. She is confident that her daughter will be released. Since arriving from Pinotepa, the municipality where she lives in Oaxaca, the 43-year-old mother of Roxana has had the support and advice of feminist groups, her neighbors and her family, but she has felt abandoned by the state. She travels to the State of Mexico every 15 days because she has to continue working and taking care of her youngest child. She can only see her daughter for three hours every Saturday, and she says she sees her well even though she cries because she misses her child. "It is not fair, she is not a murderer," he laments, "there are many innocent women in there."

Roxana's case is not exceptional in Mexico.

In 2015, the justice acquitted Yakiri Rubí Rubio when he had been in prison for 18 months for having murdered a man who was raping her.

A court then decided that the woman had injured her attacker in self-defense.

The case of Reyna Gómez, 60, was different.

She killed the man who mistreated her since they had moved in together and was sentenced to 25 in prison for the murder because the judge considered that her life was not in danger.

The historian Martha Santillán analyzes in her book

Criminal Women

(Editorial Crítica, 2021) the cases of women who murdered their aggressors in the 1930s and 1940s. “The homicidal tendencies of women are linked to social contexts in which they are victims of recurrent abuse and physical or verbal attacks. recurring ”, explains the author.

The researcher adds that over the years, and according to the data that she and other researchers have been able to collect, "homicidal behavior in women is very low," and she specifies: "For the amount of physical violence that exists, to the number of rapes, few women react by killing the aggressor ”.

"Defending my life is not a crime"

Fresh paint still shines on the walls of the Nezahualcóyotl courthouses. They have been there since Monday, when the second hearing in the case was suspended. "Defending my life is not a crime," he says in capital letters. And in purple it reads: "Roxana, you are brave, not a criminal." Elsa Arista, activist of the Nezahualcóyotl collective "We want to live", demands that the case be investigated with a gender perspective. "We are concerned that those who are judging do not take into account the context in which women are living in the State of Mexico," he says.

A few meters from there is the penitentiary where Roxana is imprisoned.

The young woman has started psychology and crafts workshops while she remains locked up.

The sour smell of one of the largest garbage dumps in the State of Mexico reaches there.

The stalls that promise "free 24-hour counseling" are empty before five in the afternoon and the rain threatens, as it happens almost every day this half of the year in Mexico.

The new graffiti contrasts with the worn colors that draw the face of Diana Velázquez Florencio on the floor, a victim of a femicide that occurred four years earlier.

The newly colored walls ask the question that also worries Roxana's mother: "Do the judges prefer us dead?"

Sarahí Mejía and Ana Ruiz, sister-in-law and mother of Roxana Ruiz, respectively, this Thursday.Quetzalli Nicte Ha

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-08-06

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