The case of María Ángela, the minor reported missing in Indios Verdes, continues to leave more doubts than certainties. The contradiction in reports between authorities leaves a black hole about what happened just hours before its live localization. The girl disappeared before the eyes of hundreds of people while her mother entered some public toilets next to the Metrobús. Faced with fear, from that day the family mobilized to demand the appearance of the girl. They disrupted traffic, moved his face on social networks and attracted the attention of all the news. Two days later, according to the police version, the teenager was found by traffic cops on a vacant lot in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, handcuffed and apparently disoriented.
Mexico City’s Attorney’s Office released an investigation that partially explains where the minor was between Thursday afternoon, April 19. While prosecutors assure that the girl left Indios Verdes of her own free will and was not the victim of a crime, the authorities of Neza confirm to this newspaper the precarious conditions in which the minor was found. The capital city authorities have requested the testimony of the police officers who helped the teenager and who have not yet appeared in the investigation folder. Meanwhile, the “Indios Verdes case” in Mexico has sparked debate about the country’s enforced disappearance crisis, re-victimization and the limits of journalistic ethics.
Fine Arts Camp
According to the prosecutor’s statement, the girl left Indios Verdes and arrived at the historic center around 6:00 p.m. to ask for help from a feminist collective – or collective, as they prefer to be called – which is usually located near the palace of the fine arts. The members of the Fénix Libertas group welcomed the girl and offered her a place to stay. “He came with a request for support, help and protection,” explained the leader of the collective. The group says they notified the women’s secretariat that the minor was with them, but they never received a response. The director assures that they had never seen the teenager until that moment and that she was alone when she arrived at the camp. The woman comments that one of the members welcomed the girl into her home so she could spend the night from Thursday to Friday. On Friday 20th night the girl’s search form reached the group and they distributed it. The director of Fénix Libertas explains that the teenager returned with them to Bellas Artes on Saturday morning and after a while they could not find her. The group is committed to providing a safe space to any woman who asks. The reasons why the minor had to reach her are unknown. “What he told us is in the public prosecutor’s file,” emphasizes the director.
the red sweater
The prosecutor’s version contains the publication of some pictures where the girl in a red sweatshirt is walking with another woman. However, the clothes she wears do not match what is written on her search sheet. The student’s mother said she was wearing a gray T-shirt with blue letters when she disappeared. The members of the collective assure this newspaper that they did not provide her with the multi-size sweatshirt with which she can be seen in the pictures.
The C5 camera
In the first hours of their absence, the minor’s parents had access to images from a C5 camera aimed at the place where the girl disappeared. In it, and always after its story, you can see a man standing next to the girl. “You see someone walking up to you and taking you away. He’s a man,” the mother explained. “He comes out from between the stalls and takes her with him,” repeated the father. The prosecutor’s office in the capital did not mention these images in their statement, nor did they clarify the man’s identity. From the first hours of her disappearance, the young woman’s parents denounced that their daughter had not left voluntarily. The mother explained that she could hear the girl yelling at her, “Amá!” from the outside before disappearing. It happened between 5:20 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. on Thursday. How Bellas Artes came about is unknown. According to the collective bill, the girl appeared there at 6 p.m. However, the authorities have not released any other pictures of Indios Verdes showing the young woman. They showed a map where their phone was tracked through geolocation.
The wasteland of Nezahualcóyotl
The student appeared almost 30 kilometers from Indios Verdes. On a vacant lot in the Las Águilas neighborhood, in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, at the intersection of Avenida de las Torres and Avenida Doce. Always according to the city police and local authorities, the girl was bound hand and foot with shoelaces, covered in plastic and clearly disoriented. About three and a half hours later, the women in the collective lost sight of him.
Where was the minor?
One of the key unknowns in the case is where the teenager was located between noon and afternoon on Saturday, January 21. “During her stay in the camp, the young woman informed one of the members that she intended to visit a person at an address in Nezahualcóyotl,” the capital’s authorities said. They also asserted that after losing sight of them, a member of the group received a message from an unknown cellphone, allegedly “reporting that the minor was fine.” According to prosecutors, the phone belonged to a “manager of an institution” that the young woman borrowed to communicate with the person in the group. The history of the capital authorities goes to this moment, and they come to the conclusion that the girl arrived “on her own two feet” to the place where she was found. The conditions under which she was found alive are not reported in this report. According to the local press, according to local residents, it was around 4:00 p.m.
The Indios Verdes case has revived the debate about where to draw the fine line between journalistic interest, curiosity, re-victimization of those involved in a case and society’s genuine interest in putting pressure on the authorities. How far to go in a country where sexist violence exceeds the judiciary, impunity is 95% and more than 100,000 people have disappeared?
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