LETTER FROM ECATEPEC 63that the other two women were last
known to have answered an adver-
tisement for second hand clothes
that Patricia had placed. The moth-
ers of the victims and the reporter
took the information they had gath-
ered to the police. “The prosecutor
wouldn’t listen to us,” María Guada-
lupe said. “We told them, ‘It’s Juan
Carlos. Arrest him.’ They said, ‘We
don’t have proof.’ ”
That October, a vigilante posse in-
cluding María Guadalupe returned to
the police station to inform the au-
thorities that they intended to deal
with the couple on their own. It must
have been clear that they were seri-
ous, because the police finally sent of-
ficers to check out the house. When
they arrived, they happened to catch
the pair outside pushing their baby
stroller. Inside were chopped-up body
parts. It would later be reported that
Patricia had served her husband ta-
males made with flesh from Samanta’s
body. They had sold her bones to a
practitioner of Santería.
Both husband and wife were swiftly
convicted on multiple counts of femi-
cide and murder. While I was in Mex-
ico, they were sentenced to a com-
bined 327 years in prison. There’s a
video online of a police psychologist
questioning Juan Carlos about his
motivations and state of mind. The
Monster of Ecatepec is stocky, mo-
reno. He sits in a chair, handcuffed,
wearing faded jeans and a black
T-shirt. “I’m completely sane and
well,” he says. In the twelve- minute
clip, he rants about what a whore his
mother was, brags about how smart
he is and how many women he’s had
sex with, sobs until his whole body
shakes, and talks about a head injury
he suffered as a child.
After Juan Carlos was sentenced,
María Guadalupe had the opportuni-
ty to confront him in court. “I told
him he was a coward because he only
killed women. He answered me, ‘I
also killed men.’ I told him my daugh-
ter was a queen, unlike the nameless
thing at his side, who calls herself a
woman and is an embarrassment to
our gender. He said, ‘Your daughter is
never coming back.’ I don’t know
where I got the strength to speak to
him without crying. He said he hates
women. Because his mother did very
ugly things, and at times his girl-
friends had cheated on him. And
since then he’s hated women. He said
it in open court. That he couldn’t
bear to see us go on breathing.”O
n a cloudy afternoon later in
September, I knocked on the
door of a publishing house in
La Condesa, a tranquil and tree-lined
enclave of Mexico City. I had come
to meet four members of a collective
called Marabunta, an “assemblea au-
todefensa feminista” whose name
evokes a swarm of ants. Three of the
four women were recent graduates of
Mexico’s biggest and best university,
known as UNAM. Part of their ethos
is not to discuss the collective, but
they agreed to talk about their indi-
vidual participation in the protests
that had disrupted downtown Mexico
City over the previous two months.
We settled into a lamp-lit conference
room, where they arranged them-
selves on a couple of couches. They
were fashionably attired in baggy
sweaters and jackets, ripped jeans,
and chunky boots and sneakers.
The largest demonstration of the
summer had taken place on August
12, incited by the rape of a
seventeen- year- old girl by four Mex-
ico City police officers. What ap-
peared to be one or two thousand
self-described radical feminists had
shown up, mostly college-age women,
many of them hooded or masked,
wearing the green bandannas that
symbolize the movement. They
marched to Paseo de la Reforma
carrying portraits of murdered wom-
en, tagged sidewalks and walls with
spray paint, and left broken glass
everywhere they went. “Ve rg a v iol a-
dora, a la licuadora,” they chanted.
(The translation, “Rapist member,
into the blender,” greatly understates
the profanity of the original.) The
police formed a cordon around the
attorney general’s office and stoically
withstood being berated at close
range and hit with handfuls of glit-
ter. Fires were set. The riot culmi-
nated in the vandalism of the An-
gel of Independence, a grand obelisk
at the city center. méxico feminici-
dio was painted across the plaque of
the pedestal. On the monument’s
base was written estado violador:A PORTRAIT OF
VALOR
FROM A LION OF
THE LEFT
BEFORE HE BECAME A CELEBRATED
POLITICIAN, GEORGE MƜGOVERN
SERVED IN WORLD WAR II AS A
B-24 BOMBER PILOT. HE FLEW IN
THIRTY-FIVE COMBAT MISSIONS AND
EARNED THE DISTINGUISHED FLYING
CROSS FOR HIS INGENUITY IN THE
FACE OF ADVERSIT Y. MY LIFE IN THE
SERVICE, A FACSIMILE OF THE DIARY
MƜGOVERN KEPT BETWEEN 1944
AND 1945, VISUALLY EVOKES THE
ERA AND PROVIDES A FIRSTHAND
ACCOUNT OF THE ALLIED BOMBING
OF NAZI-OCCUPIED EUROPE.STORE.HARPERS.ORG
INTRODUCTION BY
ANDREW J. BACEVICH,
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF
HARPER’S MAGAZINEFRANKLIN
SQUAREPRESSDistributed by Midpoint Trade Books,
a division of IPG