The bodies of three women, aged 23, 25 and 26 —two of them sisters— were found on Tuesday night inside the house they shared in the San Isidro neighbourhood, in the municipality of Santiago Tulantepec, in the State of Hidalgo. The information that has been made public, given the secrecy of local and state authorities— has been that which witnesses and the parents of the sisters Guadalupe and Joselin have given to the media, where they detail how they found the bodies of the three women with signs of having been attacked with knives and their arms tied. “My daughters lived alone, they were already adults, they wanted to become independent and live alone,” said Balbina Garrido, mother of two of the young women.
They were inside their apartment and it was there, inside their home, where the sisters Guadalupe de Jesús and Yesenia Joselin, aged 23 and 25, and a friend of theirs who lived in the same house, Daniela, were murdered. Balbina Garrido, the sisters’ mother, has told the local media how after several days of not being able to communicate with her daughters, she contacted a friend of one of them through Facebook and the young man informed her that her daughter had not shown up for work.
According to Balbina Garrido, no more than 10 minutes had passed when the young man called her back to ask her to go to her daughters’ house — which was about five blocks from her and her husband’s home, Guadalupe and Joselin’s father — and to please call a patrol car. “We arrived at the street, the boy was crying and told us not to go in,” she said. Garrido’s statements describe the scene she found, which revealed the three women with their hands tied, “handcuffed,” and with signs of having been attacked with sharp weapons.
The voice and image of Mrs. Balbina Garrido and her desperate and still bewildered gesture have been replicated in the media along with scenes of a funeral in which neighbors and relatives of the sisters accompanied the funeral procession, amid cries of “Justice!”. The father of the Garrido sisters has assured one of the local media that his youngest daughter was four months pregnant.
The only information that has come to light about Daniela, Guadalupe and Joselin’s friend, is that she was originally from the state of Baja California, in northern Mexico, and that she had been living in the same apartment for a year. Joselin, 25, worked as a clinical laboratory technician; and the youngest, Guadalupe, 23, worked in a self-service store, 3B, and was also in the final months of her criminalistics degree.
The Attorney General’s Office of the State of Hidalgo has reported that it has already launched an investigation into this case, and is treating it as a femicide. Santiago Tulantepec is a municipality in Hidalgo, located about 50 kilometers from the state capital, Pachuca. Although the authorities still do not have information that explains the violence of these murders, several collectives and activists have expressed their concern about the growing violence unleashed mainly by organized crime groups that fight for control of illegal fuel taps, a crime known as “huachicol.”
Information from the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (SESNSP) reports seven investigation files for femicides and 14 more classified as intentional homicides in the first half of 2024, in Hidalgo.
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