In photographs, she is seen smiling or hugging her grandmother, celebrating her ninth birthday and eating an ice cream. Ariana Velázquez’s dream was to work in the countryside, but she disappeared a week ago and was found dead only a few days later, along with Miriam Cruz, 55, the woman who appears beside her in almost all the pictures.
Granddaughter and grandmother were murdered by two men in a community in the northwestern Mexican state of Chiapas on October 19, the same day the girl, then 12 years old, was last seen. The brutal crime was swiftly followed by the lynching of the two accused men, one decapitated and the other severely beaten — a fresh eruption of violence in a country that has failed to break the cycle.
“I want to ask the people of Ostuacán gathered in the Central Park to trust that the law will be enforced,” wrote Chiapas Governor Eduardo Ramírez in an “urgent statement” posted on his social media accounts while the crowd gathered outside the town hall. “Vigilante justice does not restore peace and only brings more pain and legal consequences for innocent people.”
The appeal proved futile, and so did, for the most part, the police presence guarding the two suspects in the double murder: Armando “N,” alias El Melo, and Andrés “N,” alias El Cera. State prosecutors say the two acted out of revenge. Both men were dragged from the municipal building and subjected to mob violence and collective frustration.
“It is a vortex in which the system itself is unable to contain violence through any means other than violence itself,” says Matilde Domínguez, a violence expert at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), who believes that what authorities truly fear is “social unrest.” “Access to justice is institutionally out of reach, and the system is telling you that violence is what grants you access. What the state should do is regulate it.”
According to Manuel Pérez Aguirre, from the College of Mexico A.C. (Colmex), in addition to both perceived and real impunity, there is the weakness of municipal police forces, “the most fragile link in Mexico’s security chain.” “There are nearly 2,500 municipalities, and in the vast majority we have police forces of 20 or 30 people split across shifts, which means basically 10 or 12 people have to provide security for large populations,” he explains.
Underlying all these factors, both experts argue, are deep-rooted cultural dynamics that make lynching a relatively common recourse in rural areas and on the urban fringes of central and southern Mexico. The lynching last weekend took place in the ejido Xochimilco Viejo, in the town of Ostuacán, which has just over 3,000 inhabitants.
The figures paint a stark picture on both fronts. According to Mexico’s Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System, 28 women were murdered in Chiapas between January and September of this year alone. The rate per 100,000 women ranks the state 10th nationwide and slightly above the national average.
Data from a 2021 survey on household relationships by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) does not paint a much more encouraging picture. Although Chiapas is the state with the lowest reported prevalence of violence against women, 48.7% of women aged 15 and older said they had experienced some form of violence in their lifetime, while 26.9% reported suffering violence in the previous year.
On the very day the Chiapas Attorney General pointed to revenge as the motive behind the double femicide, state authorities also announced that a man in the municipality of Sabanilla had been formally charged with aggravated sexual abuse; that two others had been arrested in Escuintla and Tuxtla for aggravated child sexual abuse; that another suspect had been detained in Chiapilla for aggravated domestic violence; and that yet another had been arrested in Siltepec for aggravated sexual abuse. Taken together, the steady stream of cases exposes the grim reality faced by women across Mexico.
On the other front, the reality is just as stark. The Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich documented 2,818 lynchings in Latin America between 2010 and 2019, 30% of them in Mexico. This year, the NGO Causa en Común documented at least five such cases in addition to the one in Chiapas: two in the State of Mexico and one each in Aguascalientes, Baja California Sur and Tlaxcala. Although this case was triggered by a brutal crime, Pérez Aguirre explains, “an actual offence is not always committed; many times it is the population acting on its own beliefs.”
The motives vary and periodically make headlines: theft, kidnapping, murder, or simply the suspicion that someone was responsible for a crime. In this case, the femicide has been confirmed by authorities, who say the involvement of the two suspects has been “fully established.” The surviving suspect faces a possible sentence of 100 years in prison, the maximum penalty sought by Chiapas Attorney General Jorge Luis Llaven Abarca. Prosecutors have also opened a homicide investigation into the death of El Melo, who was killed during the lynching. Both El Melo and El Cera fled the scene after the murders but were arrested shortly afterwards. Although prosecutors say the killings were motivated by revenge, they have not disclosed what prompted it.
In any case, the verdict offers little comfort to those still mourning the two victims and grappling with questions that will never be answered. “Why kill a girl who was only just beginning to live her life?” asks Salomé Cruz, Miriam’s niece, on Facebook. “Her dream was to work in the countryside. That’s what she longed for most,” she writes of young Ariana.
The missing-person bulletin could not capture the life she hoped to build. Instead, it reduced her to a handful of characteristics that tried, unsuccessfully, to define her: 12 years old, dark complexion, slim build. Brown hair, 32 kilograms, 1.4 meters tall. Straight nose, small nose, thin lips. Distinguishing marks: none.
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