THE CRIME

Oropeza, born in Puebla in central México, lived in the northern city of Ciudad Juárez on the U.S. border for 30 years. He began his career in journalism as an occasional contributor to publications. He was an influential person in his adopted hometown, playing a prominent role in organizing campaigns against corruption, electoral fraud and other ills afflicting the city. In 1986, the publishers of the daily Diario de Juárez invited him to write for the paper. Through his daily column, titled "A mi manera" (My Way), Oropeza became highly influential, exposing corruption, criticizing the authorities for human rights abuses and drawing attention to the inroads drug traffickers were making in Ciudad Juárez.

Between 1986 and 1992, because of its proximity to the United States, Ciudad Juárez became a key location for illicit narcotics. The Juárez Cartel — run by overlords Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, Rafael Muñoz Talavera and Amado Carillo Fuentes — became quite powerful, corrupting members of both the federal and state judicial police forces.

Oropeza went from criticizing electoral fraud to writing about police officers who, instead of protecting citizens, were covering up or taking part in drug-related violence as the drug barons sought to control the area.

In his last columns, Oropeza sharply attacked local federal police chief Elías Ramírez and Javier Coello Trejo, deputy head of the special drug squad. He began to receive anonymous threats. A male voice that he could not identify warned him on the telephone, "You have gone too far, doc, and you’re going to remember us," recalled his widow and second wife, Patricia Martínez Téllez.

As Oropeza continued to write about alleged corruption and irregularities in the federal attorney general’s department, the threats were renewed. "It was always the same person, the same voice," the widow said. "We never alerted the police, but he used his columns to let people know what was happening."

Oropeza was killed a day after returning from a trip to several Mexican states during which he interviewed gubernatorial candidates. His youngest son, who usually was with Oropeza in his doctor’s office, was not there that afternoon. The murderers found Oropeza alone.

The last people known to have seen Oropeza alive were Edmundo Azamar Gómez and his wife, Rosalba Chavarría de Azamar, an elderly couple who had an appointment with the doctor at 7:30 p.m. They said that when they left Oropeza’s office they saw four men, all in their early 20s, sitting in the waiting room.

As he left, Edmundo Azamar saw one of the men enter the doctor’s examining room.

Several people witnessed the murderers’movements. A neighbor told police that he saw one young man watching the premises from outside before going in. A patient who was there before the elderly couple also said he saw a young man acting suspiciously outside.

The police ignored all these accounts.

All eyewitnesses said they had seen four men, but the police insisted in their final report that there were only three murderers.

Oropeza was mortally stabbed 14 times. The forensic report said he struggled with his assailant, but was overcome as he lost a good deal of blood.

Nothing of value was taken, including the equivalent of $1,000 in Mexican currency found in the office. That underscored the belief the motive was not robbery but in reprisal for what Oropeza had written.

José Guadalupe Bolaños García, a neighbor waiting for a ride, told police he saw the four men close the front door and walk away normally.

That night, Oropeza’s wife went to her husband’s office at 9 p.m. to pick him up and go home together. She knocked repeatedly, but received no reply. She saw the light was still on in the office but not in the waiting room; normally her husband worked with all the lights on. His car was parked some yards way, in its normal spot. Returning home worried and not finding her husband there, she asked the youngest son, José Alejandro, who had another key to the office, to go back with her to find out what was happening. Around midnight, they found Oropeza in his office, dead in his chair. The front door was locked from the inside.

THE INVESTIGATION

The federal attorney’s office took charge of the Oropeza case. It was an odd decision, given that the murder was within state jurisdiction.

Special prosecutor Rafael Aguilar García was put in charge. Direct investigations remained in the hands of the federal and state police, who showed some animosity toward the case because of Oropeza’s outbursts against their departments and bosses.

The fact that both departments were working on the case worried family members, who continue to believe that police could have been involved in planning and executing the homicide. The state police assigned Refugio Ruvalcaba Muñoz, commander of the northern district, to open the investigations. Some alleged that he had close ties with drug traffickers, although later killed by them, reportedly for being an informant for U.S. agents.

Within hours of Oropeza’s murder, Ruvalcaba Muñoz announced that the 20 members of the state Homicide Division would join the investigation. Some would look at the columns Oropeza had written over the past year. Others would investigate his private life, while yet others would interrogate known criminals who operated near the doctor’s office. But there is no evidence of any real investigation. Colleagues and members of Oropeza’s family told the IAPA that the state police never looked at the columns nor questioned other journalists. Had they done so, they would have quoted Oropeza’s most recent articles, which attacked that very police department and which might well have a factor in his slaying.

A column published one month before the murder was titled "The Judicial Police: Judges and Executioners?" Oropeza accused the state police of extortion, torture and murder of a detainee whose body was found on the banks of the Río Grande.

At the outset of the investigation, police carried out illegal roundups of street people, youths who hung out and washed cars, and drug addicts.

Several of those detained complained they were tortured, which led the National Human Rights Commission to open its own investigation. At the time, there were persistent insinuations that Oropeza had a homosexual relationship with one of the detained youths. But police withdrew this version after two other suspects confessed to the murder.

Marco Arturo Salas Sánchez and Sergio Aguirre Torres confessed, naming as an accomplice Samuel Reyes de la Rosa, whom police failed to trace. Reyes is currently in jail in Texas for an unrelated 1991 homicide.

When arraigned in court, the two defendants said they had been beaten and pressured to plead guilty. Their statements would indicate they had no idea how the crime was committed.

The Human Rights Commission and the U.S.-based human rights group Americas Watch corroborated the defendants’allegations of torture.

The two were freed almost immediately after the Human Rights Commission, on Feb. 7, 1992, issued its findings in the Oropeza case, and recommended acquittal. The report indicated suspects were tortured as well as investigation irregularities. The report also suggested that Oropeza’s widow and her brother, Armando Martínez Téllez, be questioned about their possible participation in the crime, based on the testimony of two unidentified informants.

The report had three consequences: The defendants were freed, the state attorney’s office fired officials and police officers, and the investigation bogged down.

Although convincing evidence related to the guilt of the widow and her brother was never produced, the issue sparked off a row within the Oropeza family. That halted the investigation.

During a later stage of the investigation, in which the case file was sent to México City and then returned to Ciudad Juárez, considerable documentation was lost. That made further inquiries much more difficult.

Then three years later, on Oct. 14, 1995, the National Human Rights Commission sent to the state attorney’s office 139 pages of background and seven audiotapes of interviews with Oropeza’s sons, José Alejandro and Victor Manuel, allegedly involving the widow and her brother in the murder.

Based on these accusations — called totally false by those concerned — the widow’s family opened its own investigation and delivered its version of events to assistant state attorney Jorge López Molinar. It accused the Chihuahua state government, dominated by the opposition National Action Party (PAN), in particular Governor Francisco Barrio Terrazas, of lacking the political will to solve the murder. It went further, implicating Oropeza’s sons in the crime.

Patricia and Armando Martínez Téllez have appealed to several international organizations to come out against the Mexican human rights group’s allegations about them.

TESTIMONY IGNORED

Meantime, investigators ignored a possible lead that could help solve the crime. The state attorney’s office appears not to have taken into account a statement by a person who claimed he was one of the murderers. An individual identifying himself as "Chuy" Molina told a reporter from the daily Diario de Juárez in 1995 that he and four other persons took part in the slaying.

In tape recordings of telephone and in-person interviews, the selfproclaimed murderer named as accomplices one Mauro Tovar, a former traffic policeman named José Pa rra (himself murdered in 1994), another young man who was not identified, and a fourth man with slicked-back gray hair who issued the orders. This latter person was linked to the federal attorney’s office and to drug traffickers.

Several points Molina mentioned coincided with evidence found by police and eyewitness accounts shortly after the crime was committed. For example, that they could not kill Oropeza a week earlier as ordered because he was not in Ciudad Juárez at the time; that four people entered the doctor’s waiting room but only two of them entered his examining room when a couple of patients left; that after slaying Oropeza they took nothing of value, even though they were supposed to make it look like a robbery; that they forgot to take a plastic bag and they also left behind a pair of spectacles.

Molina also provided other details, such as that each received 20,000 pesos; how they made off in daylight in a blue Volkswagen driven by a fifth individual who gave the orders; and, among other things, that in the struggle with Oropeza he cut his hand.

Among evidence gathered by police on the night of the murder were two types of blood, one Oropeza’s and another not identified, a plastic bag and a pair of eyeglasses.

The tapes, which contained a detailed description of the self-proclaimed murderer, were not published by Diario de Juárez, although they were handed over to the state attorney’s office for analysis.

CHRONOLOGY: VÍCTOR MANUEL OROPEZA

July 11, 1990
Víctor Manuel Oropeza Contreras begins a series of columns uncovering corruption and illegal activities in the Federal Judicial Police and the Chihuahua State Judicial Police.

Jan. 24, 1991
He boasts in his column of having played a part in the recent firing of Elías Ramírez as the federal judicial police chief in Chihuahua on charges of corruption.

May 8
He accuses the federal police of not having fully investigated the accusations against Ramírez, who he said was guilty of homicide and extortion.

May 30
He reports the suspicious death of a man, arrested by the federal police, whose body, with signs of having been tortured and shot, was found on the banks of the Río Grande.

July 3
He is stabbed to death.

July 4
The family and police reject suggestions that the murder occurred during a robbery. The murderers took no money, jewelry, other articles of value or documents from Oropeza’s medical office. Oropeza had ignored several threats. The Chihuahua Solidarity and Human Rights Defense Committee asks the National Human Rights Committee to conduct an investigation and demands guarantees for the safety of journalists in the area.

July 5
State attorney José Miller Hermosillo heads a homicide investigation. He admits that he has no immediate clues. State and federal police — the very agencies sharply attacked by Oropeza — are put in charge of the case.

July 6-10
Police charge local common criminals Marco Arturo Salas Sánchez, Sergio Aguirre Torres and Samuel Reyes de la Rosa with Oropeza’s murder. Salas and Aguirre are arraigned. Reyes remains at large, but is later arrested in connection with an unconnected murder in El Paso, Texas. The commission receives complaints that the arrests followed suspicious police roundups some days after the murder near the scene of the crime.

July 11
Salas and Aguirre plead innocent in criminal court, saying they signed confessions under torture and threats.

July 11
Experts from the state attorney’s office issue a report on blood samples taken at the crime scene. A blood type different from Oropeza’s is detected. This evidence is ignored by the investigators.

Sept. 3
Quarrels erupt between the children of Oropeza’s first marriage — José Alejandro and Víctor Manuel — and his widow, Patricia Martínez Téllez. They accuse each other of having been involved in the murder. At the children’s request, an autopsy is performed.

December 20
The widow sues the children for libel.

Feb. 7, 1992
The commission criticizes the methods used by the authorities to investigate the murder. It asks that the two persons arrested be freed and that the dead man’s widow and her brother, Armando, be questioned about possible links with the crime. The commission document is sharply questioned by relatives and colleagues of Oropeza. Commission President Jorge Carpizo McGreggor had been criticized by Oropeza. The family believes the commission is trying to throw a smoke-screen around the case.

February 15
As a result of commission accusations, including documentation of alleged torture and irregularities in the investigation, the state attorney’s office is forced to fire officials and police officers who had been engaged in the investigation at the outset. Dismissed are Refugio Ruvalcaba Muñoz, chief of the State Judicial Police; Felipe Pando Jáquez, head of the investigating team; and José Luis Yepson Núñez, chief of criminal identification. Ruvalcaba and Pando had been criticized by Oropeza. Two years later, Ruvalcaba is murdered in Ciudad Juárez with his two children. The bodies are marked with a yellow bow — an underworld emblem for informants. The murders remain unsolved.

February 15
The Ciudad Juárez newspaper Norte publishes a front-page photograph of Oropeza’s doctor’s office where he was murdered; the office appears dismantled and completely empty. This is a serious irregularity; the investigation was still open, and the crime scene was supposed to be sealed to preserve any evidence.

April 23, 1993
The new chief federal attorney in Chihuahua, Teresa Jardí Alonso, fires José Luis Yepson Núñez from his new federal post as an expert investigator for several agencies.

May
The federal attorney’s office decides to reopen the Oropeza case. The new attorney general, Jorge Carpizo McGreggor — former president of the Commission — makes the decision and announces it through Jardí. The case file is transferred to México City, where the investigation bogs down. Some months later, the file is returned to Ciudad Juárez. Oropeza’s widow charges that several documents disappear from the file during the transfer. The state attorney’s investigation still points to Sergio Aguirre and Marco Arturo Salas as the guilty parties.

July 12, 1994
The assistant state attorney for northern Chihuahua, Felipe Terrazas Morales, asks the commission to identify the person or persons who had linked Armando Martínez Téllez, the widow’s brother, with federal police officers in its report Nº 13/92. He also requests the tapes of interviews with José Alejandro and Víctor Manuel Oropeza.

Sept.22
Armando Martínez, in complaint Nº 2704/92-03 filed with the state attorney’s office, accuses Oropeza’s sons of being involved in the murder. He bases his accusation on his own investigation, concluding there were serious differences between the journalist and his sons, a dispute that after the murder extends to his widow, for reasons related to the inheritance.

Oct. 14
The officer handling follow-up action for the commission sends the copies of 139 pages of the state attorney office’s initial investigation, document Nº 638/91, into the Oropeza murder to the Chihuahua state government representative in México City, Salvador Beltrán del Río. He also sends seven tapes of interviews with the sons.

Dec. 2
Martínez complains that the commission failed to identify the persons who had implicated him in the crime and characterized him as a friend of police officers.

May 22, 1996
Jorge López Molinar, new assistant state attorney for northern Chihuahua, says the murder investigation has not been abandoned, but reports no progress and says new leads have led nowhere.