Azul perfectly remembers the day she was raped. The date will always remain in her memory, not because of the brutal attack, nor because of the trauma, nor because of the fear that she has remained to live in her body since then, but because the next day her mother died. “I was so beaten that I didn’t want her to see me like this and that’s why I didn’t go to visit her or say goodbye to her,” she narrates, drowned out by her tears. At least in her case, her blows didn’t leave tattooed marks on her face forever, like Alba’s. She was assaulted by the same man on March 18, 2021, five months before Azul. She knows that he was the same subject because of the phrase that she whispered into her neck while she felt the barrel of a gun resting on her back: “You were worth your while.” They are the same words with which she threatened Valen that same year. She also used that phrase with Mariajó when she went to work a couple of days before Christmas in 2020. And again with Paulina and Yesenia. They all recognize him as the same person: the serial rapist who posed as a client to the sex workers on Calzada de Tlalpan, south of Mexico City. He agreed on the price of the service with a smile, took them up to his car or to the hotel, and there he subjected them without a condom, to beatings and with the help of a gun or a knife. Last Friday he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for just one of the crimes, but the way he was hunted and more testimonies reveal a “modus operandi” with countless victims.
Alba knew that what had happened to her had been experienced by many of her companions on the street when she returned to work on her corner with the scars from that day. She told it to the group of women who work a few meters from her. Several recognized the story, the details, that phrase and the fear. They had also been victims, but many remained silent. “Who is going to believe a prostitute?”, they repeated. They chose to go back to work and try to forget everything. But Alba couldn’t shake the feeling of terror with each new client. “My daughter is disabled and I work to give her what she needs, but she was afraid that she would come looking for me,” she confesses, holding up the photos that the police took of her injuries.
He met him at the intersection of Unión Postal street and Calzada Tlalpan, one of the main arteries of Mexico City. It was the perfect place to make it his hunting ground. Women who engage in prostitution abound to the south of this road, there are several cheap hotels and alleys that enjoy a complicit darkness to use the back seat in case you don’t get a room. Alba worked there. She didn’t seem suspicious in her eyes, trained of hers by a guild that assesses a client before being left alone—and extremely vulnerable—with him. They talked, laughed and went to the Hotel Diana. Entering the room, he asked her to pay him before service as she turned to close the door. The feel of the cold metal of the gun on his skin was the indicator that everything had gone wrong. “Instinctively, I nudged him and jumped on the bed, but he grabbed my clothes and threw me to the floor,” he says. In a daze, she was dragged across the bedroom rug, smacking her head hard against the edge of the bed on the way. Despite her shock, she was able to kick him in the balls of hers when he climbed on top of her and escaped from her.
He had to insist that the employees call the police. “Why are they coming with him?”, he assures that they told him. That was the first suspicion that she was not the first. The police informed her that they could not file a complaint about her when she explained the reason why she was alone in the room with him. “I left there angry and beaten up, but I remembered the license plate number,” she says. Thanks to this, when she shared it with her colleagues, they all decided to create a WhatsApp group to send the photos they had of him, the description of the car, and let each other know if they saw him on the road.
“They already got him!”
It was thanks to a message in that chat that they all went to the police station at the end of March 2021. “They already caught him!” Several women celebrated. It was a mistake, a coincidence, which led him to be detained by the police. Without realizing it, he tried to repeat the attack with one of his former victims, Azul. She was still fresh in her memory of her razor, pointing menacingly at her belly as he forced her to perform oral sex on him. She vividly remembered how she smashed his head into her steering wheel when she tried to get out of her car. The tear-choked pleas for him to take pity on her when he demanded anal sex. The two hours walking around fearing for her life, the money he stole from her purse, and how the police told her she couldn’t file a complaint because she was a “whore.” But he did not remember her face, since the first time, in the middle of the pandemic, he had covered her with a face mask and was wearing a cap.
She realized who he was when she got into his car for the second time, a year after he raped her. She had painted it another color, but she still smelled like Resistol, like inhalant drugs. “I recognized his eyes. They were marked, as if she had outlined them in black. With a piercing gaze, like a murderer, like dangerous, ”she recalls. He began to touch her and she was assailed by the memory of her mother dying of covid in the hospital and her declining the nurse’s farewell video call so they wouldn’t see her face covered in bruises and blood. “There I said that the same thing was not going to happen to me again. We struggled and I managed to escape. I stopped a patrol car and told them that this was the man who had raped me a year ago, ”she recounts.
They took him to the Benito Juárez Public Ministry. Among the commotion of women who recognized him as his attacker and crowded around the building, one of the most veteran prostitutes called the lawyer from the Street Brigade, a civil association that supports sex workers. Arlen Palestina, a specialist in sexual and reproductive rights, is seasoned in the harassment suffered by women who engage in prostitution, the contempt of the authorities and the corruption that is law in the capital of Mexico. She was not surprised when she was told that she was going to release him for “having paid the agents”, as she recounts. Upon entering the police station, she assures that she saw how one of the prosecutors violently beat the table where one of the victims she wanted to denounce that man for having assaulted her in the last year was. “He was yelling at her: ‘So did she rape you or didn’t she rape you? Zero perspective of gender or humanity ”, she laments Palestine. This attitude of the officers encouraged the detainee. She smiled calmly and laughed at the women who roared with indignation and accused her, according to the lawyer’s testimony.
Palestine hopes that the rest of the sentences that follow this first will be under the term “modus operandi”. Several testimonies agree on the smells, the phrase, the place of the events. But the victims also look alike: heavyset, dark-haired, all prostitutes. If he manages to prove that he is a serial rapist, he would seek a sentence with the maximum sentence: life imprisonment. A punishment that would compensate the indignation and fear of the victims for being able to see him out in 10 years. However, the lawyer fears for the development of the trials. Of the victims who have endured whole days declaring, going through psychologists and forensic doctors, looking for nannies for their children while they were with the authorities, few are left willing to continue fighting for justice in a country with 95% impunity. Okay, for example, she has decided to flee the country out of fear and she still doesn’t know when she will be called to testify. She still believes that she will not get justice. “The police were going to release him because there was not enough situation because we are sex workers and people have the right to mistreat us and do whatever they want with us,” she says resignedly.
Valen was also present the night he was arrested. He recognized the tattoos on him right away. While he was raping her, he used the hotel’s mirrors to memorize the letters he held in her arms. A way to escape from the situation. The memory of the metallic taste of the gun in her mouth as he begged her to stop because he was hurting her still haunts her.
Mariajó joined the group that went to the police station and was anxiously awaiting justice. She was terrified. That subject had assaulted her on December 23, 2020, a day that she had gone to work “with all her attitude” to get enough for Christmas gifts for her children. After her rape, she was harassed by him. She asked him to stop working and be her partner. “I no longer go to work because of fear,” she admits. Mariajó was one of the six women who stayed to make the complaint, the rest of the group—Palestine estimates that there were 20 women who accused him of rape—disbanded. Not all of them had the economic resources to be without work all the hours they waited to file the complaint. Mariajó’s aggression was the first for rape to obtain justice, in addition to the abuse of Azul, which only got seven years. The rest of the cases are stuck in the saturated judicial network.
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