For example, it was not until November 14, 1997 -eight months after the IAPA complaint -that officers from the Assistant Attorney General’s office of Chihuahua went to a maximum security jail in Texas to take a statement from Samuel Reyes, “the probable culprit of the homicide.” Reyes was identified and located just a few months after Oropeza’s murder.

The IAHRC is expected to issue its report about the Oropeza case -case file no. 11,740 -at the end of 1999. The report should be similar to the one released in the case of Héctor Félix Miranda, which assigned “international responsibilities” to the Mexican government because of its violations of human rights.

The IAPA complaint regarding Oropeza holds that with the murder and the investigative deficiencies demonstrated by police and the courts, there has been a violation of standards established by the American Convention on Human Rights. These refer to the rights to life, physical integrity, equality before the law, freedom of expression, legal guarantees and the protection of the courts. Against that framework, the IAPA asserted that “the Mexican government has not demonstrated the political will to solve internally the criminal investigation of the homicide...” It added that “Mexican authorities have been unable to produce suitable explanations for the total impunity of the culprits in this matter.”

Arguments over Inadmissibility

The government of Mexico argued that the IAPA complaint was inadmissible because domestic appeals have not yet been exhausted. It said further that investigations to determine the physical and intellectual perpetrators of the crime are still being conducted by the attorney general of Chihuahua.

It is reasonable to assume that the IAHRC will reject that argument because there’s been an unacceptable delay in solving the crime. Eight years have passed since the murder was committed July 3, 1991. Reyes, the “probable culprit,” has refused to talk to the Mexican authorities. He is serving a murder sentence in Texas.

The IAHRC ruled that 10 years was an “unreasonable” period to clear up the murder of Miranda. That is nearly as long as the Oropeza case. Rejecting Mexico’s claim of inadmissibility, the IAHRC declared that “the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has said that the reasonable period established in article 8(1) ‘is not a concept of easy definition’ and has referred to rulings of the European Human Rights Court to define it. Those rulings say the following elements should be considered to determine the reasonableness of the time frame in which an inquiry unfolds :the complexity of the issue, the procedural activity of the interested party, and the conduct of the judicial authorities.”

Apropos of the IAPA petition regarding the Oropeza case, it is worth noting Amnesty International ’s view that “impunity, in fact, may occur when the authorities fail to investigate human rights violations, and even when they do, do not proceed quickly and diligently and observing relevant international standards.”

“Likewise, there is impunity of facts, not only when the government fails to bring the culprits of human rights violations before the courts, but also when it prosecutes only some individuals,” Amnesty International declared.

Flaws in the Investigation

This may be argued in the Oropeza case where the authorities are accusing only Reyes as the “probable culprit,” despite investigation findings that five persons


Víctor Manuel Oropeza pictured during one of his last interviews -with the mayor of San Luís Potosí -on June 26, 1991, one week before he was killed..

were involved in the crime. Four of them were in Oropeza’s office while the fifth one waited outside in a vehicle.

Moreover, it is not logical to assert that the “probable culprit” has been located when the information for such a conclusion came from two youths who were detained and later released on evidence that they had confessed to the crime under torture.

Marco Arturo Salas Sánchez and Sergio Aguirre Torres were freed February 7, 1992 after Mexico’s National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) confirmed the torture allegations. The NCHR also noted severe flaws -negligence, obstruction and possible concealment -in the Oropeza case. The Chihuahua State Commission for Human Rights reached similar conclusions.

The NCHR also alluded to presumed irregularities on the part of some staff members of the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic. This suggests there was corruption of the criminal investigation at the federal as well as state levels.

Some prisoners were released as a result of that report and the State Attorney General’s Office fired some officials and police officers who took part in the initial investigation. Among those terminated were Refugio Ruvalcaba Muñoz, commander of the state judicial police, Felipe Pando Jáquez, chief of the investigative group, and José Luis Yepson Núñez, chief of criminal investigation. Ruvalcaba and Pando had been criticized by Oropeza. Ruvalcaba and his two sons were murdered two years later in Ciudad Juárez.

The Mexican authorities simply discredited the theories advanced by the IAPA regarding the mastermind of the Oropeza murder, an issue never addressed. The IAPA suggested the possibility that police officers killed Oropeza in retaliation for criticizing and denouncing various Chihuahua authorities for their close ties with drug traffickers.

The authorities sustained that there was no evidence in Oropeza’s writings that he was slain because of his professional activities. Several instances clearly spotlight the journalist locking horns with figures of the federal judicial police and the Chihuahua state judicial police. In his column, “My Way,” published May 8, 1991, Oropeza accused the federal police of not having investigated in-depth charges of homicide and extortion leveled at Elías Ramírez, the commander of that group in Chihuahua. Ramírez was only relieved of his duties. In another controversial column, published a few weeks before his death, Oropeza denounced the mysterious death of a suspect detained by the state police. The man’s corpse had signs of torture and bullet wounds when it was found along the Río Grande.

The authorities also alleged that the journalist never complained officially about supposed intimidations or threats, nor was he ever harmed physically. This argument holds little water in light of the fact that Oropeza would have had to take any complaint to the very authorities he regularly criticized for inefficiency and corruption.

The IAPA investigation was able to establish that Oropeza was the target of a host of telephoned threats at the time of his revelations about the activities of Attorney General Office staffers with alleged links to local drug traffic. Whenever Oropeza wrote about Javier Coello Trejo, the assistant attorney general for the war on drugs, he was always warned by phone not to meddle with the personnel. Six or seven months before being murdered, Oropeza told his wife that he thought he was being followed.

The ex-governor of Chihuahua, Fernando Baeza, sent a message to Oropeza with Fernando Molina, a journalist from the newspaper Diario de Juárez. The message warned Oropeza that he would get “blow for blow.” Oropeza replied with a column he headlined, “Blow for Blow, Verse by Verse,” which alluded to the lyrics of a song. The


Víctor Manuel Oropeza types on his old Remington a piece for his column titled "My Way.".

column also complained about the harassment and revealed that Oropeza was getting anonymous calls.

The government alleged that all steps were taken to find the perpetrators of the crime.

However, one clue noted in the IAPA investigation was ignored. Jesús “Chuy ” Molina voluntarily told a reporter of Diario de Juárez how the murder occurred. Molina admitted to being one of the killers and implicated four others. One was Mauro Tovar; another was José Parra, an ex-policeman with the highway patrol, and two others he did not identify, although he said one of them had ties to the federal Attorney General’s Office and the narcotraffickers. Parra was murdered in 1994.

Several aspects of Molina’s account match evidence found by the police at the scene of the crime and statements from witnesses. Molina’s story was never printed by Diario de Juárez, but the audiotapes were handed over to the State Attorney General’s office.

The Mexican authorities always argued there was no impunity in the Oropezacase. They cited disciplinary and criminal measures taken against officials involved in the investigation of the crime. However, they were unable to refute the argument that nothing has yet emerged to reveal how, why and by whom the journalist was killed.

The fact that the authorities engaged in a cover-up or were negligent in their investigation strengthens the IAPA’s argument that the case was plagued by deliberate and unjustified delays. In short, that there is impunity.

It becomes necessary for the IAHRC to recommend a serious and exhaustive investigation of this case as it did in the Miranda case, in order to force Mexico to do justice and not permit impunity.

Impunity for those who violate human rights has been defined as “an infraction of the obligations that states have to investigate the violations, adopt appropriate measures to deal with the violators, especially in the area of justice, so that they may be tried, judged and sentenced to appropriate punishment; to offer victims the guarantees of effective appeal and reparation for losses suffered and to take all the steps necessary to prevent a repetition of such violations,” according to the Subcommittee for Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the United Nations.

Regarding the Miranda case, the IAHRC argued that “the Inter-American system’s jurisprudence defined the obligation of investigation as an ‘obligation of means or behavior’ that cannot be considered unfulfilled solely because the investigation did not produce a satisfactory result, but which must be “undertaken seriously and not as a simple formality condemned beforehand to be fruitless.’”