LETTER FROM ECATEPEC 53LETTER FROM ECATEPECIN HARM’S WAY
A plague of unsolved femicides haunts Mexico
By Seth Harp
T
en yards was
the nearest we
could get to the
river. Any closer and
the smell was too much
to bear. The water was
a milky gray color, as if
mixed with ashes, and
the passage of floating
trash was ceaseless.
Plastic bags and bottles,
coffee lids, yogurt cups,
flip-flops, and sodden
stuffed animals drifted
past, coated in yellow
scum. Amid the old
tires and mattresses
dumped on the river-
bank, mounds of rank
green weeds gave refuge
to birds and grasshoppers, which didn’t
seem bothered by the fecal stench.
El Río de los Remedios, or the River
of Remedies, runs through the city of
Ecatepec, a densely populated satellite
of Mexico City. Confined mostly to
concrete channels, the river serves as
the main drainage line for the vastmonochrome barrios that surround the
capital. That day, I was standing on a
stretch of the canal just north of Ecate-
pec, with a twenty-three-year-old pho-
tographer named Reyna Leynez. Reyna
was the one who’d told me about the
place and what it represents. This ruined
river, this open sewer, is said to be one
of the largest mass graves in Mexico.
When we visited, last September,
the most recent discoveries includedthe body of a wo man
whose whole head
had been wrapped in
ban dages; a teenage
girl, between thir-
teen and seventeen
years old, in a black
plastic bag; and a
woman about whom
the police disclosed
no information, ex-
cept that she’d been
“executed onsite.”
El Río de los Reme-
dios is not the only
dumping ground in
Ecatepec. During the
first half of 2019, the
bodies of at least
twenty women ap-
peared on street corners and sidewalks
and vacant lots known as baldíos. Near
a public park, the police found a mother
and daughter who had been raped and
beheaded. On Apatzingán Street, of-
ficers were summoned to open a sack
that contained two legs, one thigh, and
part of a thorax. In a trash-filled ditch
in the Cuauhtémoc neighborhood, a
body was found in a transparent plastic
bag, naked but for a red coat. At anSeth Harp lives in Austin, Texas. This article
was supported by the MacDowell Colony.Family members of femicide victims place a memorial in a field outside Ciudad Juárez in 2006.
The bodies of eight murdered women were discovered there in 2001. © Maya Goded