On the night of 30 October 2019, as many Mexicans were preparing to celebrate the Day of the Dead, the family of Jessica Jaramillo stood in the pouring rain watching two dozen police search a house on the outskirts of Toluca, the capital of Mexico State. At about 9pm, the authorities carried out a dead dog, followed by two live ones and a cat. Then they pulled out a woman’s body.
Jessi, a 23-year-old psychology student at a local university, had gone missing a week earlier. On 24 October, she hadn’t appeared at the spot where her parents usually picked her up after class. Within a few minutes, she called her mother to say she was going out, abruptly hung up, then texted to add, “Don’t worry, I’m with Óscar”.
That was strange. Óscar, the father of Jessi’s 10-month-old son, was no longer in the picture. Maybe they’d been talking, the Jaramillos thought. But when Jessi hadn’t returned home by morning and her parents’ calls went straight to voicemail, they knew something was wrong. She never stayed out all night. Between school, church groups and her baby, she didn’t have the time.
Growing increasingly concerned, Jessi’s older brother logged on to her computer and tracked her phone through her Google account. A pin appeared in Villas Santín, a satellite of Toluca about nine miles from the university. Jessi’s parents, her brother and his fiancee piled into their van.
After knocking on a few doors, the family was told by a neighbour to check out No 136 Ponciano Díaz street, which they said was home to a strange young man. The man always wore a black shirt tucked into black cargo pants, with calf-high black combat boots. He was muscular, about 6ft tall, and had a military-style buzz cut. This wasn’t the first time a young woman had entered the house and not come out again, the neighbour said.
The neighbour’s description matched one Jessi had given six months earlier of a former classmate who had repeatedly asked her out and then begun stalking her. The family had helped Jessi transfer to another local university so that she could get away from him. She wasn’t with her ex: she must be with this other man, whose name also happened to be Óscar. Now, they rushed over to the address, a two-storey concrete house with iron bars on the front door and windows. A bright yellow sign warned: “Caution: attack dog.”
The family knocked, but no one answered. So they divided up. Two stayed behind to keep watch over the house, while the other two drove over to a prosecutor’s office in Toluca to file a missing person’s report. They were starting to panic. There are more than 73,000 missing people in Mexico, collectively known as “the disappeared”. Their faces haunt billboards and social media feeds, alongside pleas for help returning them to loved ones. In 2019, #We’reLookingForYou and #AmberAlert were Mexican Twitter’s top trending social or political hashtags. Many of the missing are never found.
At the prosecutor’s office, Jessi’s father told officials about her stalker, the message she had sent the previous night, and how they had tracked her phone to Villas Santín. According to the Jaramillos, the officials shrugged them off. Jessi’s message indicated she was with Óscar García Guzmán of her own free will, they said, and besides, they couldn’t report her as a missing person until 72 hours had passed from the time she was last seen. The Jaramillos insisted that the officials launch an investigation and refused to budge. After several hours, the officials relented.
That night, police knocked on the house’s door and when no one answered, left. The following morning, Saturday 26 October, García emerged. The Jaramillos, who had been eating and sleeping in their van opposite the house since the previous day in order to keep watch, approached García to ask him to let them in to check on Jessi. García shouted that he hadn’t seen her and that they couldn’t come in without a warrant. Then he called the police on them. Officers came, took statements outside, and once again left. But before they did, García agreed to go to the prosecutor’s office to leave a statement regarding Jessi’s missing person’s case – though not until Monday. He had homework to do over the weekend, he said. The following day, a judge denied a search warrant request for García’s house.
At about 8.30am on Monday 28 October, García took a taxi over to the prosecutor’s office. In his interview, an account of which I was shown, he described Jessi as a “friend with benefits” whom he’d known for a few months. He stated that the two had met up on the afternoon of 24 October, bought a pizza and gone back to his place to eat it, after which she had left in a taxi to see the father of her baby, the other Óscar.
At 11.45am, García returned home from the prosecutor’s office. Then 20 minutes later, he stepped out again. In a video the Jaramillos took, you can see him stride by, clad in his black, military-style uniform – like an overgrown action figure – a backpack slung over his shoulder, a phone clutched to his ear. With his free hand he flashes them a peace sign before disappearing out of the camera’s frame. According to police, at this point, he skipped town.
On 29 October, five days after Jessi had first disappeared, a judge approved a second search of García’s house based on new evidence – CCTV footage showing Jessi entering García’s house and not coming out again. The following night, police swarmed the house. By then, Jessi was dead. According to local press reports, she had been strangled and left in a bath.
The Jaramillos were exhausted, heartbroken and furious. But then, a few days later, a woman named Frida Guerrera knocked on their door. She told them she could help them track down Jessi’s killer.
Frida Guerrera is a journalist who hunts down men who kill women. A year before Jessi Jaramillo’s death, Guerrera had moved to Villas Santín, just a few blocks away from the house where Jessi’s body was found, a wild coincidence she later ascribed to fate. “I’ve always believed the girls tell me where to go,” she told me when we met last year. “Call it magic.”
For the past five years, Guerrera, who is 50, has devoted nearly every waking hour to searching for disappeared women and memorialising the victims of femicide. A distinct crime recognised in many Latin American countries, femicide is defined as the murder of a woman because of her gender. Some of the signs that characterise a femicide, according to Mexico’s criminal code, include sexual violence, a relationship between the victim and the murderer, prior threats and aggression, and the display of the body in a public space. UN Women calls Latin America the most lethal place for women outside war zones. More femicides are committed in Mexico than in any other country in the region, except Brazil.
Every day, Guerrera trawls national and regional news outlets, identifies femicide cases and catalogues victims’ age, location and the method of their murder on a spreadsheet. She then selects a few cases to write up on her blog, a never-ending scroll of pictures of victims, which she gathers from interviews with their parents. “She’s one of a kind,” says Jan-Albert Hootsen, the Mexico representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “She has been constantly shedding light on specific cases of women who have fallen victim to violence, which is something that very few people in Mexico have actually done.”
Throughout the day, Guerrera posts missing person notices on her Twitter and Facebook pages and asks her tens of thousands of social media followers to help find the women or the men who targeted them. Guerrera claims that she has helped police find more than 40 killers since 2017. Though there is no official count, the prosecutor’s office for Mexico State, where Guerrera is based, confirmed she has helped to resolve a number of murder cases.
The night Jessi Jaramillo’s body was found, Guerrera was drawn to García’s house by the crowd of police. From that moment on, she kept a close eye on Jessi’s case. On 1 November, two days after Jessi was found, two more bodies were dug out from the property’s back patio: 25-year-old Martha Patricia Nava Sotelo, missing since February 2019, and 27-year-old Adriana González Hernández, missing since March 2017. The media in Mexico State began covering the killings daily, calling García “the Monster of Toluca”. It was then, shortly after the Jaramillos had returned home from burying their daughter, Guerrera showed up at their house.
Guerrera does this work in part because the police regularly fail to. “They’re inept,” she told me. The journalist Lydiette Carrión, who spent more than six years investigating how Mexico State handles femicide investigations, found that cases are often kicked from one agent to another like Hacky Sacks and that mothers are sometimes shown victims’ bones and asked if they can identify their daughters. The rise in violence, following the inception of the drug war 15 years ago, has overwhelmed Mexico’s police, and most violent crimes go unsolved.
Police incompetence is compounded by corruption: federal money that is meant to go to training and paying skilled local police gets siphoned off by local officials instead. Misogyny also plays a large role: many police assume that young women have simply run off with their boyfriends and refuse to open cases before 72 hours have passed – even though a national protocol clearly states that a search should be initiated immediately. “What we see from investigators is bad performance from the very start,” says Nancy Lopez, director of the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights. Only about 12% of Mexicans say they have much confidence in state police or prosecutors.
To find García, Guerrera began by writing a blog post lambasting the authorities for waiting a whole week to search the house. If, in person, Guerrera’s tone oscillates between deadpan and sedate, online she is brash and combative. She described Garcia as an attention-starved “Don Nadie” (Mister Nobody), and asked readers to get in touch with any information relevant to the case. She published the blog on 11 November.
That same day, Guerrera came across a Facebook post from 28 October, the day García fled town. A certain “Alexander Anderson” – the account’s profile picture showed García at a martial arts studio – had posted a screenshot of the missing person notices for Jessi Jaramillo, and the two other women who were subsequently found buried under the patio. Above their pictures he’d written, “To catch a serial killer, you must think like one”.
Guerrera felt a surge of anger. On Facebook and Twitter, she wrote, “Óscar García Guzmán is an idiot who thinks he’s so great. I’m waiting for you here,” along with a closeup of his face. She remembers thinking, “He’s going to get mad. He’s going to look for me.”
A little over a week later, he did.
For Guerrera, violence against women is personal. She was born Verónica Villalvazo in 1970, and grew up in Ecatepec, a sprawling municipality on the outer edge of Mexico’s capital. In recent years, Ecatepec has sometimes been described as the most dangerous place in the country to be a woman – between January 2015 and March 2019, at least 1,258 women were killed there – but back when she was a child, Guerrera said it felt safe.
As a young woman, Guerrera studied psychology, fell in love, had a child, fell out of love and met somebody new. In the early 2000s, she started reading articles about shocking murders in Ciudad Juárez, where women had been strangled and arranged in public spaces like morbid trophies. It was the first time she remembers reading about these kinds of crimes. But all that was taking place so far away – 1,200 miles north of Mexico City – on the border with the US. Then the violence hit close to home. Her new boyfriend started beating her, and the violence slowly escalated. He broke her nose, then several ribs. On 3 May 2006, when she was 36 and had been with him seven years, she left. She moved to Oaxaca to reinvent herself.
“I never saw myself as a victim,” she told me, plainly, but she hungered to write about others who had suffered at the hands of violent men. In Oaxaca, she joined a left-leaning radio collective and began reporting on local corruption and victims of state-sponsored violence, especially women and children. Guerrera’s work was lonely and dangerous. Death threats were routine, and she isolated herself from friends and family to protect them. One time she opened her front door to find the crushed corpse of one of her cats lying in front of her. Then one day she was grabbed off the street, blindfolded, hustled into a van, beaten and told to leave Oaxaca. This happened on three occasions, she told me.
To protect her identity, Guerrera’s producer suggested she come up with an alias. She thought of one immediately: Frida, after the artist Frida Kahlo. She added “Guerrera” later after overhearing someone refer to her as a “warrior”. The producer encouraged Guerrera to try out a new, safer job: working on the communications team for a young senator running for Oaxaca governor. The senator won, and hired Guerrera full-time. She stayed for the next six years, safe under a friendly administration.
In 2016, Guerrera moved back to Mexico City to live with a new partner. Coming back to the city she’d left a decade earlier, it seemed like a new place entirely, transformed by Mexico’s drug war, which had claimed the lives of 150,000 people over the previous decade. The surge in violence had created a far more lethal country for women, one in which they were more likely to die in the crossfire, but also in private, domestic settings. One afternoon, Guerrera found herself searching the internet for stories of murdered women. She found 123 different cases. “It broke me,” she said. She saved the women’s names, ages and dates and location of death on a spreadsheet. Later, she got in touch with their parents to talk about who their daughters were, and why no one protected them. That’s how Frida’s Blog was born.
She wasn’t the only journalist to start taking a more serious interest in femicide stories. Even before #MeToo broke in the US in 2017, the Mexican Twitter campaign #MiPrimerAcoso (#MyFirstAssault) in 2016 gave voice to an increasingly vocal women’s movement. “This feminist movement allowed women to insist that gender issues be part of the public agenda,” says journalist Valeria Duran. “We were able to fight our editors.” Whereas stories about murdered women had, until then, been relegated to the “nota roja” – a lurid crime beat rife with victim blaming and gratuitous violence – they pushed for more sensitive coverage that focused on the systemic reasons behind the killings.
But if Guerrera was part of a movement of journalists chronicling the murders of women, she went one step further. She started trying to solve them, too. It started in early 2017, when an unidentified four-year-old girl was found dead in a dumping ground in Mexico State, naked save for a green T-shirt and a pair of ruby-coloured socks. The case made national headlines, often accompanied by a blurry picture of the girl’s dead body, her face out of the frame. The press called the unknown girl “Little Red-Socks”, but the investigation into her murder made little progress.
Guerrera couldn’t stand that the child remained anonymous, or the fairytale name by which she was known. To her, the case represented the casualness with which the media and the government treated crimes against women and girls. She couldn’t just write about the girl and move on. So she went online and on the radio and asked her growing base of followers to help identify the girl.
After four months, she received an email with three photos of the girl taken on the day police found her, in which her face was visible. Guerrera did not want to share the images of the semi-nude child, and looked around for an artist to sketch a portrait of the girl’s face. A forensic artist got in touch and offered to do the job. Guerrera published the picture on social media, soon attracting the interest of the press, who also shared the girl’s portrait, along with the story of the woman who wouldn’t give up looking for her.
A few days later, the girl’s aunt, who had seen the picture making the rounds, contacted Guerrera and confirmed that the girl was her niece, Guadalupe Medina Pichardo, or Lupita to her family. She hadn’t heard any news of her for months. Then a few weeks later, a man phoned Guerrera. He introduced himself as a neighbour of Lupita’s, and said he’d tried to rescue the girl, who was a victim of heinous abuse. Guerrera compiled all the evidence she had been given and turned it over to the authorities. Police arrested Lupita’s mother and her boyfriend – Lupita’s killer – and in 2019, the pair were sentenced to 88 years in prison.
Guerrera grew famous, and her combative manner attracted plenty of press attention. On 14 February 2020, she confronted President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at a press conference, taking the floor to accuse him of doing nothing to tackle femicide, which she called a “national emergency”. Amlo, as the president is known, has previously attributed the rising number of murdered women to past “neoliberal policies” and a “moral breakdown” in the country that could be solved by promoting “moral regeneration”. He has also repeatedly suggested that women speaking out about femicide are funded by his conservative political enemies who wish to discredit his administration.
After Guerrera’s public spat with the president, Amlo’s most vocal supporters lobbed insults and death threats at her on social media, and also accused her of being financed by the political opposition. She stuck to her Twitter mission statement: “I don’t profit and I don’t lie.” She told me she lives off a meagre state stipend, which the Mexican government pays to certain journalists who face considerable danger. Jan-Albert Hootsen, the Mexico representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, told me the accusations against Guerrera are almost certainly unfounded. It was a familiar smear, regularly used against any journalists and human rights activists. “The López Obrador government has been extremely hostile towards journalists and human rights defenders who have been critical of the government’s activities,” said Hootsen.
Other journalists are more dismissive of Guerrera. “She’s not a journalist. She’s an activist,” says Monserrat Ortiz, a reporter with Reporte Indigo who has covered femicide cases. “She loves to create a media circus.” Ortiz’s criticisms went further. Late last year, she published an exposé accusing Guerrera of exploiting the families of victims she purports to assist, by barring them from speaking to other journalists and occasionally posting stories to her blog without families’ consent. I’d heard similar criticisms from several journalists who hesitated to go on the record, and experienced some of this myself: after giving me several interviews for this story, Guerrera grew terse and ultimately uncommunicative when I asked to speak with some of the families she’s worked with. To her supporters, this is a sign of Guerrera trying to protect vulnerable and mourning families from an industry which, historically, has not been on their side. To her critics, it suggests that Guerrera does not want to share the limelight.
Lucía Lagunes Huerta, who has founded multiple organisations aimed at protecting female journalists in Mexico, offered the most nuanced view, saying simply: “For some victims, she does good work.”
On 20 November 2019, three weeks after Jessi Jaramillo’s body was carried out of Óscar García’s house, Guerrera received a Facebook friend request from “Alexander Anderson”, the account she suspected was García’s. Along with the request was a message claiming to reveal when the three women found in García’s house had been murdered and where their bodies had been stashed, and describing the house’s interior. It also mentioned a black notebook containing five names and five dates – a list of the people he had murdered. It was missing one name: “I ran out of time and I couldn’t put down Jessica. How do I know this? I’m Óscar,” the message read, in all caps. “Do I have your attention now?”
Guerrera immediately showed the message to the commander in charge of Jessi’s case, who confirmed to her that the message’s description matched the inside of García’s house and told her to reply. “What do you want?” she messaged García. García said he wanted to know how his pets were doing. He was concerned about his cat, Paz, and his dogs, three large mutts named Gronda, Petra and Demona, all of which he’d left behind in Villas Santín. If she checked up on his pets and sent him pictures, he told Guerrera, he would give her information on his murders.
Guerrera “was one of the links we had with [Óscar] at that time, and she seemed to have successfully established an empathetic line of communication with him,” the state of Mexico’s prosecutor’s office confirmed to me in a written statement. “His pets were really the only thing he cared about.”
There was just one problem: the police had shot Gronda dead on the night of the search. If García found out, it seemed possible that he might stop talking, or worse. The strategy Guerrera and the authorities came up with largely consisted in her stalling for time – keeping García interested in talking to her while the police attempted to track him down by trying to locate his mobile phone, IP address, or any other method.
For the next three weeks, Guerrera hardly ate or slept. She felt she had to answer García immediately whenever he got in touch, which he did nearly every day. He was by turns joking and arrogant, lauding his “superior intelligence” and the police’s ineptitude, then furious and impatient for news of his pets. He often launched into tirades about how much he hated his mother.
“There were times I wanted to scream at him,” Guerrera told me. “I would speak to him harshly, tell him, ‘You sound like an idiot. Why don’t you behave like what you are? You’re a man. You’re a killer. So behave like one.’” Guerrera ran on instinct: she would let him talk, playing to his ego, then switch gears and scold him, matching his all-caps tirades with her own, as if it were a screaming match between a mother and her teenage son.
After a few days, García’s messages grew bolder. He boasted about his supposed skills with women and mocked their stupidity for falling for him. “Are you in love with me yet?” he taunted Guerrera. He referred to the women he claimed to have murdered as mis perras – “my bitches” – and told Guerrera he’d make her his bitch, too. “Why do you defend those whores?” she said he asked her. “You should defend animals. They’re loyal.”
As García opened up, he told her he’d always wanted to be a serial killer, like kids dream of becoming basketball players or president. He said his first victim had been his father, when he was 16. He also mentioned two other names: Mónica and Tomas. If García claimed to have killed six people, as he said in his first Facebook message, then these could be the other three. But with no other details besides their first names, Guerrera had little way of finding out who Mónica and Tomas were. She pressed him for details, but he offered nothing more.
Holding up her end of the bargain, Guerrera started tracking down García’s pets. The authorities had separated them in different shelters around the area. She found Paz, the cat, first. When I asked Guerrera how she felt shooting cat videos for someone who claimed to be a killer, she shrugged. “The animals were blameless,” she said.
She was in the middle of filming Paz when a storm of Facebook notifications erupted on her phone. García was sending her furious messages about his pets’ supposed mistreatment. It turned out the prosecutor’s office had just sent García pictures of his pets in cages on the night of the house search. (When I asked them about it, officials confirmed they sent the pictures “at an appointed time”.)
García swore he would seek revenge, and threatened to kill another woman. He said he’d already chosen his next victim. Guerrera tried to calm him down. She told him that she was with Paz at that very moment, and begged him not to do anything rash. She sent the cat video. But he didn’t see it. He had already logged off.
García was silent for two days. When he got back in touch, Guerrera says he told her he had killed a woman. Then he thanked her for the cat video.
While Guerrera was messaging García, an unprecedented feminist uprising was sweeping the country. In August 2019, the alleged rape of a young woman by four police officers in Mexico City sparked what became known as the Glitter Revolution, so called because protesters doused the capital’s security chief with pink glitter during a demonstration. Three months later, thousands of Mexican women occupied Mexico City’s central Zócalo Square, where the presidential palace is located, and chanted “The rapist is you”. Then, in September 2020, an alliance of mothers of victims and young anarchists stormed Mexico City’s Human Rights Commission to convert it into a women’s shelter. They have occupied the building ever since.
Paradoxically, even when women’s killers are caught and prosecuted, the category of femicide has made it harder to convict them. “When you have a homicide, the only thing police need to prove is, ‘A murdered B’. But when you have a femicide, they need to prove that, ‘A murdered B because of C’,” says Ana Pecova, director of the women’s rights organisation Equis. A recent investigation by the NGO Mexicans Against Corruption found that out of 15,000 violent deaths of women between 2012 and 2018, only 3,056 were investigated as femicide cases, even though they identified an additional 2,700 as fitting the criteria. And out of those, only 739 men were ultimately sentenced.
For the families of victims, the state’s mix of apathy, incompetence and misogyny is devastating. “I felt so powerless,” Marta Leticia Gonzalez, a Mexico City resident whose 26-year-old daughter Iocelyn went missing in November 2019, told me. “I could see the authorities weren’t doing anything. I could see they don’t look for women.” After the case was passed around from investigator to investigator, Gonzalez’s daughter’s severed head was discovered and her identity confirmed by a DNA test in late December. A few weeks later, Gonzalez was sent a piece of her skin and her hair to bury. She spent the next few months requesting the rest of her daughter’s skull. They sent it to her in April 2020, and she was finally able to properly bury her daughter. The case into Iocelyn’s murder has stalled. No arrests have been made.
Two weeks after Guerrera first started talking to García, she redoubled her efforts to find out more about Mónica and Tomas, the two other people he claimed to have murdered. But García wouldn’t talk. He insisted on seeing pictures of his other pets, especially Gronda, his favourite. Guerrera started panicking. There was no way she could admit the dog had been shot and killed. She tried to buy time by sending pictures of the other animals. She told him Gronda missed him so much she wouldn’t eat and had fallen sick, and that was why she couldn’t take her picture. She couldn’t tell if he bought it.
García asked Guerrera to make another deal with him. If Guerrera would take his pets home with her and care for them as her own, he would turn himself in. Once she accepted, he finally agreed to tell her who Mónica and Tomas were, and asked Guerrera for her email. On 2 December, she received a message with a Word document attached, in which García claimed to detail how he had murdered Mónica Chávez, a former classmate, in 2012. Mónica had ignored him, he wrote. So he had slipped into her house to kill her, but ran into her father, Tomas, instead. He killed him first, stabbing him with a knife, he said. When Mónica returned home later, he said that he had kidnapped her, taken her to Villas Santín and kept her alive for 17 days before murdering her. He later tossed her body in a ditch.
By 5 December 2019, García had been on the run for 38 days. At 2.45pm, he wrote to Guerrera on Google Hangouts, asking her if she’d received his email. It was the last message he would ever send her. Guerrera, who was in a meeting, didn’t check her phone until 3.30pm. By then, García was in police custody.
He had been eating a sandwich near the National Polytechnic Institute at the northern tip of Mexico City when police surrounded him. (The prosecutor’s office did not disclose how, exactly, they located him.) García put up a fight and threatened to eat a piece of poison-laced candy he carried in his pocket. He didn’t have time. The police were on him. In a video from the local press, you can see García being led away by a patrol tightly surrounding him. With his black outfit and crew cut, he is nearly indistinguishable from the men arresting him.
Guerrera regrets not having been there. “I wanted to see his face and tell him, ‘Your dog’s dead’,” she told me, and for the first time since we’d started speaking, laughed.
In the days following García’s arrest, Guerrera met with the families of the other women García claimed to have murdered: Martha Patricia Nava Sotelo, Adriana González Hernández and Mónica Chávez. They all told crushingly similar stories of their daughters disappearing, suspecting García and telling the authorities as much, and getting ignored, rebuffed.
Martha Patricia’s brother, Giovanni, told me that from the very start he had suspected García was behind his sister’s disappearance. García would occasionally drop by their neighbourhood to see his mother, who was Giovanni and Martha Patricia’s mother’s neighbour. He would shout, “Paty, I love you!” whenever Martha Patricia walked by. When she went missing on 9 February 2019, Giovanni says he traced her phone to García’s house in Villas Santín – just as the Jaramillos would eight months later.
When Giovanni told the police that he believed his sister was being held captive by García, the police replied that they needed a search warrant first. Months passed, and no warrant was ever issued. Like the Jaramillos, Giovanni investigated on his own. All the time and effort he put into trying to find his sister and bringing García to justice cost him his job as a baker, plunging his young family – he has two children – into financial precarity.
Then, eight months after his sister had gone missing, Giovanni got a call from the prosecutor’s office saying they had found her body buried in the back of García’s house. “If they’d listened to me,” Giovanni told me, “Óscar would be in prison and Jessica Jaramillo’s life would have been saved.”
Documents shared with me confirm that García was on Mexico State authorities’ radar before Jessica Jaramillo went missing. A description of the evidence supporting the search warrant includes the statement, “Óscar García Guzmán is connected to the disappearances of two women by the names of Adriana González Hernández and Martha Patricia Nava Sotelo.”
“This is the worst part of all this,” Guerrera told me. “Óscar García Guzmán’s name was known by the authorities since 2012.” She claimed that Mónica’s mother had told police back then that she suspected García in her daughter’s disappearance.
At present, Jessica Jaramillo’s femicide case is making its slow way through the courts. To this day, Guerrera does not know if García was telling the truth when he claimed he had killed another woman, a seventh victim, after Jessi. In a public Facebook post before he was caught, García promised to “continue killing women for the mistreatment my pets suffered from the authorities”. He added that it was the authorities’ “mistakes” that had allowed him to get away with six murders already. “And that’s why I love MEXICO,” he wrote.
As she waits for the verdict in García’s case, Guerrera continues to update her spreadsheet and blog, those grim testaments to sexism and violence in Mexico. On 12 February, she wrote that the body of an unidentified woman between 25 and 30 years old, with multiple stab wounds, was found in a drainpipe off a highway in Chihuahua. Earlier that same day, she logged the death of a 12-year-old girl, who’d been shot in Michoacán. She tweets it all. She still attracts criticism. She knows it. “They’ve called me crazy,” she wrote on 31 January. “Friends, partners, exes, strangers. It’s their absurd way of discrediting the truth. We’re crazy because we don’t shut up and it’s easier to call us unhinged.”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/feb/25/mexico-femicide-frida-guerrera
