LETTER FROM ECATEPEC 55the point, he returned his attention to
driving. Far be it from him to argue that
things weren’t messed up in Mexico. He
lit another cigarette.
“We need safe spaces,” Reyna con-
tinued. “I was thirteen when I was at-
tacked for the first time, on the metro.
The guy was like thirty years old. An-
other guy followed me for more than a
kilometer on the street. I was terrified.”
“Did you report him?” Joaquín asked.
“Yes. We report and report, and they
do absolutely nothing. You know this.”
She recited a litany of recent atrocities,
cases in which terrible things were
done and no one was punished, speak-
ing so rapidly that I couldn’t always
follow her Spanish. She asked how it
could be that there is nowhere in Mex-
ico where a woman is safe from rape.
“We’re not asking politely anymore,”
she said. “We’re demanding justice.”O
f the thousands of femicides
that have taken place in the
State of Mexico over the past
decade, about a dozen cases have come
to represent the phenomenon. These
are the faces that appear on placards at
protests, the portraits that are stenciled
in spray paint, the names that stand
for the far more numerous un-
named. One such case is that of
Fátima Varinia Quintana Gutiér-
rez, whose mother, Lorena, has
spent the past five years hoping to
see her daughter’s killer convicted.
She now lives in hiding in an-
other part of the country, but I
managed to reach her by phone in
early September. Lorena spoke
with force and eloquence, her sen-
tences ordered and deliberate, her
command of the facts precise.
Asked to describe Fátima, Lo-
rena thought for a moment and
said that if you were to go into the
evidence room of the state pros-
ecutor’s office and look inside her
daughter’s backpack, which still
sits on a shelf there, you would
know exactly what kind of girl she
was. She always kept her books and
notebooks organized, without so much
as a dog- eared page. She was a perfec-
tionist, preoccupied with tidiness, who
spent most of her time reading. Her
favorite books were the Hunger Games
trilogy, the Chronicles of Narnia se-
ries, and The Book Thief. Her favoritepoem was “A Margarita Debayle,” by
Rubén Darío. “She didn’t have a ton of
girlfriends,” Lorena said. “She went
everywhere with her little brother. She
didn’t like to sleep alone. She was
afraid of the dark.”
Fátima’s shyness comes across in
photos. In one, she stands diffidently
before the camera, hands clasped to-
gether, dressed in a navy peacoat over
a teal dress. She’s tall for her age, and
she resembles her mother. They lived in
a rural part of the State of Mexico, in
the terraced and deforested mountains
west of Mexico City. The name of their
tiny hilltop town was La Lupita Casas
Viejas, in the municipality of Lerma,
just east of Toluca, the state capital.
On the afternoon of February 5,
2015, Lorena was cooking lunch for
her family when she realized that
Fátima was an hour late coming home
from school. Children are expected to
adhere to strict timetables in Mexico,
so this constituted an emergency. Lo-
rena grabbed her husband, Jesús Quin-
tana Vega, and ran out of the house
without pausing to tie her shoes.
Fátima’s bus stop was on the edge of
Casas Viejas, where the asphalt road
descends into Lerma. A pair of brothersnamed Luis Ángel and Misael Atayde
Reyes lived in the house nearest to it,
overlooking the street. Three times in
the course of her frantic search that
afternoon, Lorena went to the Atayde
place to ask if they had seen Fátima pass
by on her way home from school. Three
times the brothers denied it, as did athird young man who was at the house,
José Juan Hernández de Cruceño. By
the side of the house, Lorena noticed a
bucket of water that looked pink, as if
it had been used to clean up blood. “By
this time,” she told me, “I had no doubt
that those three had done something to
my daughter.”
The Atayde brothers had known
Fátima since the day she was born.
Hernández de Cruceño, however, was
new in town, and had the look of a
malandro, or hoodlum. Photos taken
before the incident show three young
men mean- mugging for the camera,
throwing up cholo mudras and middle
fingers, smoking weed and drinking
beer. Misael and Luis Ángel were sev-
enteen and nineteen years old, respec-
tively. Hernández de Cruceño was
twenty-three. “He had been telling
everyone that he liked Fátima,” Lorena
said. “Asking my son to introduce him.
She was twelve years old.”
Only about three hundred people
live in Casas Viejas, and more than half
of them came out to look for the miss-
ing girl. The search party turned into a
lynch mob when they found her body
in a ditch behind the Atayde residence.
“They had stabbed her more than
ninety times,” Lorena said. At first
her telling of the story was matter-
of-fact, but by the time she fin-
ished she was crying, practically
moaning the words, as if to ask
how it was possible that any of
this was true. “The cut across her
face was ten centimeters. The
cut across her neck, ten centime-
ters. They had broken her shoul-
der. They fractured her wrists
and ankles. All three of them
raped her, vaginally and anally.
All three of them. They bashed in
her teeth. They put out one of her
eyes. They did all of this while my
daughter was still alive, still con-
scious. They killed her by ston-
ing. How could they have such
hatred for a twelve-year-old girl?”
The Atayde brothers and
Hernández de Cruceño tried to run,
but they couldn’t escape the outraged
crowd that had formed around the
house. In the absence of reliable law
enforcement, mob justice is rife in
Mexico, especially in rural areas. By
the time the police arrived, an hour
after they’d been called, the suspectsFátima Varinia Quintana Gutiérrez. Photograph courtesy Lorena Gutiérrez