Thirteen long and painful years has taken justice to reach the home of the Lima Buendía family.
The Judiciary of the State of Mexico has announced the 70-year sentence for former police officer Julio César Hernández Ballinas for the femicide of Mariana Lima, murdered in 2010 in Chimalhuacán.
In a country where 95% of crimes are not solved, the case of Mariana Lima has become a symbol against impunity in sexist murders and in favor of the struggle of mothers to obtain justice for their daughters.
The conviction came after a harsh legal battle and Irinea Buendía's efforts to ensure that her daughter's name did not fall into oblivion.
Mariana Lima, a law student, murdered at the age of 29 in the house she shared with her attacker.
When Mariana Lima was assassinated, femicides were not sanctioned as a crime in Mexico.
In that year it was not even defined in the penal code and the authorities decided to shelve the case, pretending that everything had been a suicide.
A strategy that is repeated in prosecutors throughout the country to explain the violent death of hundreds of women, even though the figures for sexist violence say otherwise.
It happened to Lesvy Berlin Rivera, murdered at UNAM in 2019. To Abigail Hay, in Oaxaca last year.
To Dr. Beatriz Hernández, in Hidalgo.
To Yolanda Martínez, in Nuevo León.
And Luz Raquel Padilla in Guadalajara, who was accused of setting herself on fire.
Five years after the femicide, the Supreme Court granted an amparo to Irinea Buendía and ordered the State of Mexico Attorney to redo the investigation under the hypothesis of femicide and applying the gender perspective.
We had to start over five years later.
That again brought to light hundreds of documents and dozens of boxes full of files.
At the head was a public ministry that led the case and that opened the way for other investigations that came later.
Today that woman, Brenda Celina Bazán, is the femicide prosecutor of Mexico City.
"In the end, as victims, they help us to have those hugs from their mothers, they teach us not to give up even when the loss is great, to demand justice and fight against everything," the prosecutor told this newspaper.
It took another two years to rebuild a case strong enough to bring the femicide to justice, including exhuming Mariana for a new autopsy.
Hernández Ballinas was arrested in 2016.
The defense opted to delay the process.
The attacker's lawyers filed protections for seven years.
But the evidence that Mariana Lima's husband assaulted her was so evident — he threatened to kill her with a bat, raped her while he pointed the gun at her, accused her of stealing money, according to the testimonies of her relatives — that it is hard to believe that the blindness of the authorities was involuntary.
Along the way, Irinea Buendía and her children had to leave their home.
They were attacked and threatened with death to make them give up their search for justice, but they never stopped demanding punishment for the guilty.
The case of Mariana Lima opened the path to justice for other victims and established that any violent death of a woman in Mexico be investigated as a femicide.
“The sentence is a way to repair the damage for Mrs. Irinea and Mr. Lauro [her parents], to recognize Mariana's dignity and dignify her.
A historic debt of justice that the authorities are settling,” says Sayuri Herrera, Coordinator of Gender Crimes at the Mexico City Prosecutor's Office.
“It is a powerful message for all those people who are seeking justice, for the mothers that justice arrives, takes time, but arrives”, says Herrera.
That Supreme Court ruling set the main judicial precedent for the fight against gender violence and changed Mexican justice.
This in a country where between 10 and 11 women are murdered a day.
“It is a paradigmatic sentence, a watershed that has to be studied by all criminal law students,” says lawyer Leticia Bonifaz, proposed by Mexico to join the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, for its acronym in English).
The case was the seed for thousands of women and their families to raise their voices.
"The ruling sets out criteria to take into account the contexts of violence that women experience when there is a sentimental relationship with the perpetrator and they have some power as they are police or military," explained María de la Luz Estrada, director of the National Feminicide Observatory. , in an interview with this newspaper.
A different way of working and investigating femicides also emerged from this ruling.
Prosecutors specializing in this type of crime were created throughout the country.
"From the union of these cases, from these two women, Mariana and Lesvy, this Prosecutor's Office emerged," Herrera said in an interview with this newspaper.
She was the first femicide prosecutor attached to the Attorney General's Office directed by Ernestina Godoy.
"They were seeds of justice for the rest of the women."
Now he adds something else after the sentence: "It is also a powerful message for the aggressors who at some point tried to evade justice, it shows that for them there will be no truce, neither for the mothers, nor for the lawyers, nor for the investigators nor for the authorities," he says.
Irinea Buendía went from selling juices in the market to becoming a defender of human rights and a benchmark in Mexico.
“She has traveled through a Mexico that she never imagined knowing, talking about her daughter, telling her story, trying to prevent other young women from falling into a spiral of violence from which they will not be able to get out alive,” Bonifaz wrote in a recent article.
"Irinea and her family's path has been deeply painful and we know it, however it has been instructive for the state and its institutions in Edomex and in the entire country," explains Aracely Osorio, mother of Lesvy Berlín Rivera.
In addition to the 70-year prison sentence, the judge ordered reparation for the damage and recognition of all family members as victims.
Worn out after more than a decade in search of justice, Mariana Lima's family plans to give a press conference next Wednesday.
The ruling is final.
The seeds of justice have been slow to bear fruit, but the sentence marks the way so that a femicide like that of Mariana Lima does not happen again.
And so that the victims and their families do not have to wait 13 years to see the culprits behind bars.
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