The saxophonist, María Elena Ríos and her attacker, Juan Antonio Vera Carrizal.EL PAÍS / RR SS
The fears of María Elena Ríos have come true.
The saxophonist from Oaxaca, as she has been known since a man burned half her body with acid, now sees how the accused of having engineered the attack has been released from jail.
Juan Antonio Vera Carrizal, former local PRI deputy and businessman, with whom the young woman had a stormy relationship, will spend her sentence under house arrest, as ruled by Judge Teódulo Pacheco.
“With a made-up audience and an agreed agreement, today, my attacker has been released.
This is Mexico ”, Ríos has criticized on her Twitter account.
"If they release him and he runs away and kills me # BurnAll", adds the woman on social networks.
Ríos was 26 years old in September 2019 when a man entered his house with work tricks and sprayed his face and half of his body with acid.
Upon entering the hospital, where she remained for five months of interventions, still on the stretcher, the woman called Vera Carrizal on the phone: "It was you, I know," she told him.
Some time later, two men entered preventive detention, and also the then PRI deputy, accused of the painful revenge that was taken against Ríos when she cut off their relationship.
"If he was able to do this to me when I told him that I no longer wanted to be with him, now that everyone knows what he did, if he is released, he can attack me and my family," he said in May 2022, when he was suspended. the protection he had.
Today, fear has multiplied.
Both Ríos and his defense attorney have accused Judge Pacheco of accepting the evidence presented by the convicted person to continue his sentence at home.
"They try to make him pass off as sick," said the victim in a tweet.
The lives of Malena, as acquaintances call her, and Vera Carrizal intersected in 2017, when a vacancy opened for a position in the press office of the then PRI deputy, in her town in Oaxaca.
The saxophone, which she studied at the Puebla Conservatory of Music, was not enough to live on, so the young woman took another path.
He was 43 years old at the time and the work contact became a sentimental relationship marked by tensions and jealousy, which were revealed in emails and messages that the family still keeps: "You are a whore, a starving woman, without me you will not do nothing...", the politician and gas station businessman, also the owner of a local radio station, instigated him.
On a trip to the United States, he forced her to have sexual relations, her wife would later tell.
The relationship was depleting under the classic pattern of gender violence: abuse, breakups, crying and forgiveness.
Until the final end and revenge came.
Three months passed to arrest the culprits, while the deputy excused himself by issuing statements on the radio he owned.
In them, also according to the pattern established in these cases, the man's defense consisted of re-victimizing the young woman and making her guilty of what happened, sowing suspicions of sexism: “María Elena Ríos worked with me and we have a friendship, but that does not imply anything.
If you have a healthy lifestyle, that's how it goes, but if you have an unusual lifestyle, you're going to have problems”.
Vera Carrizal was right about something.
In a country like Mexico, where an average of 10 women are murdered a day due to sexist violence, the victims do not have due justice.
They are all problems.
Those who manage to save their lives do not see that their processes follow the logical judicial course.
Today, half the country is surprised that the former politician has won his house arrest.
And the son of the politician, Juan Antonio Vera Hernández, also accused of attempted femicide, has not gone through justice.
The Oaxaca Prosecutor's Office even offered a million pesos (about $50,000) as a reward for him.
Although voices criticizing the judge's decision are raised, such as that of the governor of Oaxaca, Salomón Jara: "Although I am respectful of the decisions of the Judiciary,
I do not agree with the judge's decision in the case of Juan Antonio Vera Carrizal.
He should remain in prison until justice is done for María Elena ”, he said on his Twitter account.
"Violence against women requires the commitment of the three powers of the State and we cannot be indifferent to this determination."
The president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also became interested in the case in the spring of last year, when he was questioned about the slowness of justice: "We are going to request reports to see the progress made in the investigations and why the aggressor He is free," he said.
Today you could ask the same thing.
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