By EFE
13 Jul 2024, 07:51 AM EDT
Mexico City – Paola Andrea Bañuelos, a 23-year-old woman who was the victim of femicide after boarding a taxi in the city of Mexicali, Baja California (northern Mexico), died from strangulation, the Forensic Medical Service (Semefo) determined on Friday.
The cause of death was “asphyxiation by strangulation,” the coroner said, without giving further details.
After missing for almost four days after boarding a Didi car last Sunday night, the young woman’s body was found on Thursday morning near an irrigation canal on abandoned farmland south of Mexicali.
Baja California Attorney General Maria Elena Andrade confirmed in an interview with Milenio that the result of the autopsy was “asphyxiation by strangulation, obviously due to the force imposed on the young girl.”
The official said that “forensic work is continuing” on the young woman’s body, and that there are other people involved in the crime.
He also said that the main suspect in the femicide, the driver of the taxi that the young woman boarded, identified as Sergio Daniel N., turned himself in “because he was surrounded,” since he has an arrest warrant, and not because he had received alleged threats, as the accused claims.
“In addition, we have sufficient evidence in the (investigation) file to consider him a suspect in the commission of these acts that truly shook our community in Baja California and the country,” said Andrade.
The prosecutor also stated that they have evidence “of acts of violence that this person has previously carried out, such as domestic violence, exercised against his own mother.”
Young people are asked “not to go out alone”
Baja California’s prosecutor sparked controversy by recommending that young women not travel alone in app-based taxis and asking the community to be more vigilant to avoid similar situations, statements that have been criticized for placing the responsibility on the victims instead of focusing on preventing and punishing the aggressors.
“As parents, we must be vigilant, as friends and as a community, to ensure that young girls do not travel alone for any reason,” Andrade said at a press conference on the case.
Paola Andrea Bañuelos Flores was a Psychology student at the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC) who went out for a drink with a cousin last Sunday. When she left the place, she called a taxi from an app to go home, but she was murdered on the way.
Her relatives, in an effort to find her, shared photographs and details about her disappearance on social media, causing shock and outrage in the country that is experiencing a crisis of disappearances and violence.
The murder of Paola Andrea is reminiscent of similar cases such as that of Debanhi Escobar, who also disappeared after boarding a taxi two years ago in the northern state of Nuevo León.
Both were young students, and in both cases, their bodies were found in remote and abandoned places, such as the cistern of an abandoned motel in Nuevo León, where Debanhi was found, whose case remains unpunished.
In the last six years, 16,570 intentional homicides of women and 5,556 femicides have been recorded, according to data from the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (SESNSP).
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