Source: British Newspaper Sister
On the evening of Friday, April 8, 18-year-old Mexican girl Debani Esquebar had a verbal altercation with two friends at a party and decided to leave early.
A friend called a taxi driver she knew and felt trustworthy to take her home.
In the early hours of April 9, shortly after getting into the car, Debani had an argument with the 47-year-old driver, who actually drove her out of the car and took a photo of the girl alone on the highway and sent it to her friend.
Debani, forever gone from that late night.
On Friday, April 22, after 12 days of searching, police found her unrecognizable body in the underground cistern of a motel a few hundred meters from the site where Debani disappeared.
The forensic doctor preliminarily determined that the cause of her death was a head injury, a deliberate murder.
The highway where the driver took the last image of Debani became the focus that the public could not ignore.
The road from Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo León, in northeastern Mexico, to Nuevo Laredo, and to the northeast connecting Texas, is an important freight road on the U.S.-Mexico border, but is also known as the "Road to Death" because of the scuffle between drug lord gangs and the military.
After Debani disappeared, police quickly arrested the 47-year-old driver. Police found that after he received Debani, he turned off the ride-hailing app on the road and the location information disappeared.
Debani's father told the media that the car surveillance filmed the driver sexually harassing her daughter, the two had a fierce quarrel, Debani struggled to resist, and finally the driver drove her out of the car.
After being kicked out of the car, the helpless Debani stood on the side of the road, and the driver actually took a picture and sent it to her two friends to throw the pot and leave.
It is hard to imagine the despair and fear of the girl being thrown alone on the "road to death" at five o'clock in the morning.
Later, surveillance on the side of the road captured debani walking into the door of a motor transport company on the side of the street, and never came out of it again.
Later, her body was found in a motel cistern near the company. At that time, the staff of the hotel called the police after smelling the stench.
As soon as Debani disappeared on April 9, the police arrested the driver and found him stealing drugs and sexually harassing Debani.
But after further interrogation, he was ruled out of the suspected killing.
In the next 12 days, the police dispatched a hundred search teams, police dogs, and drones to conduct dragnet investigations, but found nothing, and finally found the body after the hotel personnel called the police. But what happened to Debani before she died, the investigation is still ongoing.
Debani's death sparked a huge discussion in Mexico. These discussions, about the rising number of missing deaths related to the "way of death" in Mexico every year, the thousands of murders against women each year across the country, and tens of thousands of cases of missing women.
In fact, back in 2006, the Mexican military had already begun a war on drugs.
Under the pressure of force, some drug trade was destroyed to a certain extent. But for 16 years, the border drug trade has been rampant, and the fights between drug lords have intensified, and they have begun to prey on civilians on important trade routes.
Taking the "Road of Death" as a typical example, on this important freight highway of about 219 kilometers, there were 77 disappearances of ordinary people in 2021 alone, of which only 18 survived.
Most of them were ordinary truck and taxi drivers, who disappeared because drug dealers armed robberies snatched vehicles to transport goods and killed them.
Some are just the most ordinary family of three, and they are not spared.
Last year, military police found a "killing center" in an abandoned building next to the "Road to Death", which was piled up with remains of white bones.
The surviving missing women suffered even more miserably on the road, in addition to being threatened with death, while others were sexually assaulted and tortured in buildings similar to the ones next to the road where Debani finally appeared.
Since the war on drugs began in 2006, more than 85,000 people have reportedly gone missing throughout Mexico, including 25,000 women.
In 2021, 1,015 women died in murder, while in the first two months of this year alone, there were already 155 murders against women in Mexico.
In response to these large numbers of disappearances of the same nature, some Mexican state governments have announced that they will send multiple mobile DNA collection vehicles to different cities to collect the DNA of the families of missing persons, in order to identify the bodies they have found as soon as possible.
Debani's grief-stricken parents complained about the devastation that the "Road to Death" had brought to families with daughters, arguing that the military and police had failed in protecting the population.
Debani's father pointed out that his daughter was missing for more than ten days, and the police were very slack in searching, only doing a sloppy search.
It's not just that that, it's also about the thinking and rhetoric of top local government agencies.
After Debani's disappearance, Gustavo Guerrero, the chief prosecutor of the state of Nuevo León, told the media: "Many of the reasons for the disappearance of these girls are due to lack of communication with their families and quarrels, they are quite rebellious." The missing women are all between the ages of 14 and 25, and the accident is not because of a crime, but more like a matter of taking the initiative to provoke. ”
Officials' appropriate "victims are guilty" rhetoric, while throwing away the systemic problems caused by the drug war, and ignoring the huge threat to innocent people's lives, is really outrageous.
As a result, Mexicans speaking for Debani and the other missing people began to run around, handing out leaflets and marching in the hope that the government would return the lives of ordinary people to peace.
In addition to Debani's heartbroken parents holding prayer ceremonies for their daughters, some mothers near the "Road to Death" have also come out to support.
A woman named Maria Rodriguez, who was at the scene for days in a row, was handing out leaflets to comfort Debani's mother, who said that Debani reminded her of her 20-year-old daughter: "It could have been my daughter who had an accident, so I came." ”
Another 45-year-old mother, Adriana Flores, said: "I came for all my daughters in Nuevo León because I want them to live in a free and safe place. ”
At present, because the Debani incident has attracted widespread attention, Mexican President López Obrador has paid tribute to her family and promised to order federal prosecutors to investigate the case and give it to everyone.
Unfortunately, at the same time as the Debani incident was fermenting, police in the same city found the body of another long-missing 27-year-old woman, Maria Gernanda Contreras.
Preliminary investigations revealed that she had died in the murder of an acquaintance male. Police in other cities in the state have also found traces of at least five missing women. The density and frequency are so high and the nature of the crime is so bad that it is frightening.
Debani's father tearfully told reporters that his daughter was a new law student and had just finished attending Women's Day on March 8.
She is intelligent, independent and brave, but in the end she dies of sexual assault and the sins of the road to death.