In a social media photo, Betzabé Alvarado hugs her mother, Esmeralda Gallardo, in a celebration.RR.
H.H.
Her name was Blanca Esmeralda Gallardo and for a year and a half she had been looking for her daughter Betzabé, who disappeared in Puebla when she was traveling with her friend Fabiola Narváez.
Esmeralda's tireless search to find the young woman and to achieve justice in a possible case of trafficking in women have ended up costing her her life when she was waiting for the bus.
Around five in the morning on Tuesday, a group of gunmen fired up to seven shots at him while he was on the Mexico-Puebla highway, outside the Villa Frontera neighborhood, where he lived.
The local media point out that five assassins were waiting for her wife and that after shooting her, they have fled without any detainee yet.
With Gallardo, there are already four searcher mothers who have been murdered in Mexico so far this year.
The Governor of Puebla, Luis Miguel Barbosa, has lamented the murder and has indicated that his Government and the corresponding instances "will clarify the fact" and that "the law will be applied against those responsible."
Meanwhile, the local Prosecutor's Office has opened an investigation into the femicide.
The woman's body has been left lying on the ground at the height of Cerrada 9A North.
The paramedics and the police who have cordoned off the area have only been able to confirm the death.
Hours after this heinous crime, Gallardo's relatives were waiting outside the Puebla Forensic Medical Service to receive the body that had undergone an autopsy.
“He was cheerful and kind despite the pain he was carrying.
She kept her joy alive and the hope of finding her”, says a friend of the woman who prefers to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.
The mother of another 12-year-old boy, Gallardo had been left a widow a few months before Betzabé's disappearance due to the pandemic.
Her husband died of covid-19 in 2020 and to support the family she started driving a flatbed taxi to support the little one.
In the same neighborhood where Esmeralda Gallardo ended up dead, near the Central de Abastos, her 24-year-old daughter was picked up on January 13, 2021. The girl was traveling by motorcycle with her friend and neighbor Fabiola Narváez, 22 Around 3:00 p.m., the two women went to make a deposit at the bank and never came back.
When the family tried to contact them, both of their phones were turned off.
Days later, Betzabé's cell phone was turned on again in the Villa Frontera neighborhood.
Geolocation showed that the phone was in a house where a couple lived.
A man who was murdered in July of this year between Puebla and San Pablo del Monte and a woman, shot near her home, who was arrested when leaving the hospital as the main suspect in the disappearance of the girls.
Despite repeatedly stating that she was in danger and that she feared for her life, Esmeralda Gallardo never received protection from the authorities.
However, she did not stop looking either.
She was also an indirect victim of the violence suffered with the disappearance of her daughter.
The woman never ruled out that Betzabé's case was related to the trafficking of women, exploited in brothels in Puebla or in the neighboring state of Tlaxcala.
Gallardo herself recounted in an interview how a man threatened her with a gun in Tenancingo, Tlaxcala - one of the main trafficking points for women in the country - when she went to various brothels and bars asking about her daughter.
“I have gone down to the ravines, I have scratched the ground and my daughter does not appear alive or dead (...) but I do not lose hope that the two of them are well,
The activist's family and friends have no doubt that her murder is related to Gallardo's search for the young women.
According to information published by
Proceso
, both the disappearance and the death of the activist would have to do with a gang of drug dealers indicated by the Popular Union of Vendors and Street Vendors October 28 of having seized a part of the La Cuchilla tianguis with protection police.
In July, Esmeralda complained about the delay in the investigation and the information that the authorities had to find those responsible.
“It has been torture not knowing where she is, not knowing if she is still alive or not, if they hit her, if she eats, if they mistreat her, it is a pain that is not wished on anyone,” Gallardo declared in an interview with
El Sol from Puebla
.
The Colectivo Voz de los Desaparecidos Puebla, a group of about 100 families, has called on the governor and authorities to find and arrest the perpetrators of the femicide.
“In Puebla, the government leaves the indirect victims totally helpless and to their fate because they do not apply a protection mechanism for people who are at risk, like Esmeralda,” a person from the group assures EL PAÍS.
"We know that we are uncomfortable because what we say does not please the Government," she adds.
The group has recorded some 3,000 missing persons in Puebla alone since 2008, but they assure that these are conservative figures and that it could be many more.
This year the UN called for the search for missing persons in the country to be strengthened.
Throughout Mexico, it is estimated that this number exceeds 100,000.
The femicide of Esmeralda Gallardo is added to that of three other searcher mothers murdered in the country during 2022. Rosario Rodríguez, in Sinaloa;
Brenda Jazmín Beltrán, in Sonora and Ana Luisa Garduño, in Morelos.
They all kept the hope of seeing their sons and daughters again.
None made it.
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