Rosa María Bello was a 53-year-old woman, teacher and lawyer, passionate promoter of reading for boys and girls. She had lived alone for more than 20 years in the Azcapotzalco mayor’s office, in the north of Mexico City, and was murdered in her home without anyone being able to do anything during the 7 or 10 minutes that the attack allegedly lasted. against her, on June 11, 2022. Of her femicide there is nothing more than an investigation folder full of omissions, negligence and abandonment. Her family struggles not only to seek justice, but to have an idea of what exactly happened on that Saturday morning.
Rosa María was brutally beaten all over her body and the cause of her death appears in the file as suffocation. In her apartment, the authorities found no trace of a robbery, nor of sexual violence. Rosi’s belongings, as her family and friends affectionately call her, were scattered around the living room of the house, indicating that she was preparing to leave the house.
The lawyers currently handling the case assure that during the three months prior to their taking over, the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office demonstrated a clear “ineffectiveness.” “We found very obvious negligence, expert tests that they had not been able to do due to lack of technology, and that they did not really care to do. In four months they did absolutely nothing,” says Enrique Guerrero Aviña, one of the family’s lawyers.
Among the many negligence that the legal escorts have found and that had already been detected by Rosi’s family, is the fact that the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office did not request sufficient material from the cameras of the housing unit. “They requested the videos from the cameras of the Command and Control Center (C2), but only for 10 minutes. It is absurd. The ten minutes in which Rosi arrives. It is an important moment, but not the only one, knowing that this is going to be deleted, a receipt of at least 24 hours had to be requested, you don’t know if all the material will be useful to you, but as someone who knows the protocols, they know that tomorrow that information may be relevant and that it will be lost if you don’t ask for it at that time,” says Guerrero Aviña.
In addition, the investigative police officer in charge only requested the videos from the main entrance of the unit and not the one from the back. To this endless sum of omissions, which make up an investigation folder of more than 1,000 pages, and which grows with the passing of days, we must add that Rosi’s apartment has been intervened about five times, due to the fact that in that first intervention, on the night of June 11, the expert opinion was insufficient, something that the family denounced from the beginning and the reason why it was they themselves who began to interview neighbors and demand, without being able to get them to pay attention, that they recover more evidence and more expert reports on things and details that they themselves were discovering.
Juan Bello García, Rosi’s brother, shows a tiredness and weariness mixed with sadness and impotence when he talks about the case. He lists the institutions, people, organizations and lawyers to whom they have resorted and who have not returned their calls, have not provided guidance or help, and who have defrauded them out of thousands of pesos. “Those from Justicia Pro Persona AC never returned our call, we went to several feminist forensic groups or UNAM specialists and neither did we. They stop answering us and they didn’t even tell us that it was not possible for them to help us or anything. They just disappeared. The lawyers that we have had, have either left the case as complicated or have defrauded us. One of them asked us to deposit 40,000 pesos, talking to us and convincing us of his experience and we never saw him again. We have never had the need to deal with lawyers”, he says. In addition, the family assures that the investigative police “recommended” that Rosi’s case was so complex that buying a witness could be an alternative to speed things up.
The history of Rosa María Bello’s family is constantly repeated in the testimonies of other femicides, murders or disappearances in Mexico. In December 2022, a report by the organization Impunidad Cero indicated that from 2016 to 2021 the accumulated impunity for intentional homicides was 93% at the national level and in femicides it was 56.6%. Of every hundred murders that are registered in the country, on average, only seven are clarified.
And the sum of omissions and negligence does not end there. The day that Rosa María Bello was attacked inside her home, her clothes covered in blood and the remains of her hair on the floor were collected until the subsequent expert reports that the family requested because this material had not been analyzed. Blood samples were also collected later in another part of the building. The genetic opinions, to see if in addition to Rosi’s DNA another could be detected, have not been delivered. First, because the conclusion of the Prosecutor’s Office was that they did not have the necessary tools to make them. “With the technology I have, a genetic profile cannot be obtained and that is my opinion, they practically said that. The prosecution does not carry out an investigation further, and leaves it there. The family had requested that they investigate or do something with those samples because they could have been important, however, they never received a response from the Prosecutor’s Office,” says lawyer Guerrero Aviña.
The family’s lawyers have been working around the clock. According to genetic experts to whom they have resorted, the tests have to have a conservation life of only six months. Right at the limit of that time, and since they took up the case three months after the femicide, they managed to get the National Guard to carry out the studies they required, however, they are still awaiting the results.
Adriana Rubio, coordinator of the forensic area of the National Citizen Observatory on Femicide, knows about the case because she was one of the people who would be in charge of giving guidance on the investigation. “The Mexico City Prosecutor for Femicide allows collaborations with independent experts, schools, colleges, civil society organizations and I think that this is very good and positive. Because the expert services and public ministries are saturated. We had to make a technical opinion. The end of the year came to an end and the dates got complicated, in the end we no longer specified anything, but probably in a few months we will have to finish it, ”she says.
Rubio explained that, as in Rosi’s, when there are gaps in the case and the alleged perpetrators cannot be clearly established, it demonstrates the lack of work that the prosecutors incur: “Not being able to open an accurate line of investigation is result of a lack of investigation. In the case of Rosi, the scene was not processed correctly. There is a pattern, a repeated conduct that does constitute omissions on the part of the expert services, because when they arrive at the place they focus on cordoning off the place where they found the body and do a non-exhaustive review of other parts of the department or the building”, he explains.
In Mexico City there have been several cases like those of Rosa María Bello, according to what Adriana Rubio has related: “That is, women over 45 years of age who live alone, at least from November to February approximately, I have known of four cases that They have this profile, both in terms of age and characteristics, that they live alone and that the femicides or violent deaths occur within their homes, and in these four cases there is no clear line of investigation. The subjects are unknown, not necessarily to the victims, but to the Prosecutor’s Office, subjects who cannot be identified. I think it is very important to mention it because I think this additional vulnerabilities is something that has to be highlighted in investigations”.
The void after the death of Rosi, a woman “with a great desire to live”
Rosa María Bello was murdered on the morning of Saturday, June 11, 2022. She was preparing to attend a medical appointment very early. Rosi took great care of her health, of her physical condition. That morning she would have a knee check that had been bothering her for some time. When her siblings saw that she didn’t come to her parents’ house like she usually did every weekend, they worried. It was until the evening of that day that they went looking for her and found her dead on the floor of her living room. She did not take the uber that would take her to the lab, and they also found no indication anywhere that she was accompanied by her.
As her family has recounted with sadness and anger, several neighbors heard her screams, only hers, for about 7 or 10 minutes. Then the silence. Nobody did anything.
Rosi used to meet every day with friends to have dinner, go to cultural shows and live together. She really liked to travel. She obtained a scholarship to live in Japan for two years, in which, her family says, she was very happy. Rosi was that sister who organized the family parties, the one who motivated the rest to prepare more academically, travel and study. Since she was 18 years old, when she finished her training as a teacher, she worked in schools with boys and girls in whom she instilled a love of reading. She liked to tell stories. She also studied a master’s degree in Law at UNAM and wanted to continue her studies by doing a doctorate.
Zoraya Bello García, Rosi’s sister, remembers her as a light in her family. “She left me above all an emptiness. I don’t believe it sometimes, that my sister who wanted to live so badly, died that way. It makes me tremendously sad that he sowed so much that he was doing and that a murderer, a person who is on the loose, and not only him but the people who heard when they whipped her, when they screamed, that they did nothing, leaves me very horrified. ”.
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