The remains of a couple of two women were found this weekend inside plastic bags, 17 miles apart from each other, on a highway in Ciudad Juárez, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, in what human rights organizations LGBTIQ+ community qualify as a hate crime.
Nohemí Medina Martínez and Yulizsa Ramírez, 28,
were mothers of three children and had been married in July
, confirmed Karen Avizo, director of the Chihuahuan Committee for Sexual Diversity, according to The Daily Beast website.
Óscar Martínez, a spokesman for the Chihuahua attorney general's office, said that both lived in Ciudad Juárez (a city marked by violence against women, a short distance from El Paso, but that they constantly traveled to the United States, where they have relatives, as reported by The Washington Post.
The Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office indicated that both were tortured and dismembered.
"The brutality of what is happening in Ciudad Juárez hurts us: now the double femicide of a lesbian couple," David Adrián García, secretary of the Chihuahua Sexual Diversity Committee, told the Spanish newspaper El País, demanding that the state government justice for the crime.
Despite the clamor of the Chihuahuan Committee for Sexual Diversity that this be recognized
as a hate crime
, Roberto Javier Fierro, prosecutor generated by the State, has ruled out that the murder is linked to his sexual orientation.
"We are very advanced in the investigation, there are different lines, but it is not a hate crime," he said.
According to Fierro, the motive for the crime is linked to the economic activity and the couple's environment, although he did not give more details.
Spokesman Martínez, according to The Washington Post, was also asked if the couple could be linked to organized crime, but said he was not authorized to give more information because it is an ongoing investigation.
According to data from the Letra S organization, Chihuahua is the second state with the most hate crimes in Mexico:
20 people from the LGBTQ+ community were murdered
in 2019.