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Irinea Buendía, mother of Mariana Lima: "It took two seconds for my daughter to be killed and 13 years to get justice"

2023-03-22T05:07:06.400Z


The mother of the murdered young woman talks about the conviction of the femicide and denounces that, despite the trial, her family is still in danger


The story of Mariana Lima and her mother, Irinea Buendía, is the portrait of an entire country.

It is the story of families looking for their missing in the desert.

She is the one of the woman who screams the name of her friend who was murdered and she is the one of the mother who fights every day so that the case of her daughter does not go unpunished, even though more than a decade has passed to achieve it. .

The story of Irinea Buendía is a story that can rarely be told in Mexico.

It is a femicide that ends up in front of a judge.

More than 95% of the cases remain in total impunity, which is why the conviction of the feminicide of Mariana Lima sets a precedent not only for her family, but for the entire country.

“We took a murderer off the streets,” says Doña Irinea.

And they forever changed the way crimes against women are investigated and prosecuted in Mexico.

Last week the Judiciary of the State of Mexico sentenced former police officer Julio César Hernández Ballinas to 70 years in prison for the femicide of the 29-year-old girl, murdered in 2010 in Chimalhuacán.

The court sentence finally agreed with her mother: Mariana Lima did not commit suicide.

Mariana Lima was killed.

Doña Irinea had been waiting for 13 years to hear those words.

"Since I recognized her body in the morgue, I knew it," she says.

Coldly, the killer called her to tell her that the woman had committed suicide.

Irinea never believed him.

“Have you killed her yet, son of a bitch?” she remembers what she told him.

"It took two seconds for him to kill her and 13 years to get justice," she says in an interview with EL PAÍS.

Irinea Buendía, mother of Mariana Lima Buendía, activist and promoter of the Mariana Lima Buendía Judgment of the SCJN.

Nadya Murillo

The same day that she was murdered, Lima had told her mother that she planned to leave her husband.

"The man who hits the first time, he doesn't stop hitting," says Mrs. Irinea.

She is convinced that her daughter was going to abandon her murderer and that is why she ended up dead.

“When the femicidal murderers see the decision that they are going to leave them, that is when they kill them,” she adds.

The history of violence in the relationship was well known - 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 difficult to believe that the blindness of the authorities was unintentional.

“We went to see Enrique Peña Nieto, who was the governor, and Alfredo Castillo, who was the attorney for the State of Mexico.

No one wanted to receive us,” says Buendía.

After an investigation riddled with irregularities and re-victimization, the Castillo Attorney General's Office ordered the criminal action not to be pursued, that is, to shelve the case and put it in a drawer.

“There was no time for the violent death of a woman, they didn't care because they never care,” says the mother.

Buendía has long, curly white hair that falls to her shoulders.

While she talks on the phone, he walks slowly and leans on his cane.

He mixes among the people who get on and off the minibuses in the heart of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, in the State of Mexico.

Nobody seems to know that this almost 71-year-old woman is a symbol of the fight against femicides and she has just won an important battle against the Mexican justice system.

When her daughter was murdered, femicides were not even sanctioned as a crime in Mexico and they were not classified in the Penal Code.

She went from selling juices in the market to having to learn about laws, sentences, procedures and protections.

Accompanied in the legal battle by her lawyers, she learned to be a coroner, an expert, a public prosecutor and a lawyer, the profession that Mariana had chosen to study.

“Her femicide of hers thought that since her father and I were poor, we would never dare to continue with the investigation,” she says.

The killer was wrong.

The woman wrote every detail of the case in a notebook.

The marks, the bruises... each clue counted and as he repeated several times throughout the interview "there is no perfect crime".

She read many of the Law books that Mariana studied at the university and got so involved in the case, that she came to verify on her own neck that it was not possible that the girl had hung from the ceiling like her murderer. I was trying to make believe.

"I hung myself with that thread to see how the line would look," she says coldly.

"Not to kill me.

I wanted to prove that the fracture my daughter had was not hanging, but strangulation, ”she says.

A cross against femicide, in Chimalhuacán (State of Mexico). Nadya Murillo

He always carries a portrait of her.

From Marianita, as he affectionately calls her;

two wooden crosses and a copy of the Supreme Court ruling that in 2015 forced the reopening of the case so that it could be investigated from a gender perspective.

Her body was exhumed five years after she was buried.

They found that Mariana still had traces of skin under her fingernails.

As Mrs. Irinea says: "He was still crying out for justice five years later."

The decision of the High Court established jurisprudence in the country and forced every violent death of a woman in Mexico to be investigated as a femicide.

Mrs. Buendía's eyes are tired and sad.

She feels lonely and says that there will never be peace for someone whose daughter has been killed.

“The hole will always be there,” she says.

- As if they ripped off an arm?

- Worse, because if they had torn off one arm I could say that I have the other.

Here they broke the lives of the whole family.

I had five children and I have four left.

The death of her husband, Lauro Lima, and the attempts against two of her children so that they would not testify in the case, have marked these painful years.

“He no longer saw justice.

I do, here I am, ”she replies.

Despite everything, the family had to leave their home due to death threats, they lived in Neza, one of the most dangerous municipalities in the State of Mexico to be a woman.

“All the people here, in the Eastern Zone, owe a favor to the Ballinas police officer and they are still obliged to pay him back,” says Buendía.

"I'm still afraid for my children."

Meanwhile, the convicted ex-policeman's defense has appealed the sentence.

She knows that the fight for justice in Mexico is an exhausting battle that never ends.

We as activists and defenders of human rights do not have a war with men.

Personally, I have a war with the wicked, with the violent, with the rapists and with the cowardly murderers.

This is a war against corruption, simulation, impunity, indifference and intolerance”, she affirms.

- After all that has happened, Mrs. Irinea, finally, trust justice?

- No. But as Miguel Lorente says in his poem: “Silence kills more than blows and the minutes of silence are over.

Now our voices will be heard."

Keeping silent is like closing your eyes in the dark.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-03-22

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