It was 8 p.m. and Yanelli was returning from work in Huauchinango, Puebla. Because the truck that would take her home did not pass, she decided to board a “colectivo” taxi – which serves several passengers, with different destinations – which was also boarded by two men who turned out to be assailants. In addition to taking her belongings, she was raped.
To this aggression, which occurred in June 2016, is added another, committed in October 2017, when two men came to her house to beat and rape her again, in retaliation for having denounced the first time. Of the four aggressors, only one was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison, of which he has already served six, while of the other three there is no information.
In addition to the revictimization he has experienced during the process of reporting the two violations, due to the lack of personnel to certify his injuries and materials to perform medical examinations, Yanelli accuses that he has been the victim of omissions in the investigations, as he has provided evidence, such as threatening messages he receives through social networks, or the records of the calls made to her from different numbers to insult her, but her accusations have not been taken into account. Nor have they interviewed potential witnesses to expand on the data available to those responsible.
Fearing she would be assaulted again, Yanelli and her family had to flee Huauchinango. “I went to live somewhere else, to start again, because I feel like you don’t heal yourself in the place where you get sick. That meant losing the protective measures that the authorities gave me, and now I don’t even have an answer about how the investigation is going.”
“Six years have passed and the 2016 folder needs to capture an aggressor. Of the one that opened in 2017 there is still no information about either of them, nor are there indications of who they were. They (the authorities) believe that I am going to settle for the fact that there is a sentenced person, but no. I was raped by four people and all of them have to be held accountable,” he claims.
Political Animal consulted the Attorney General’s Office of the State of Puebla about the status of the investigation folders for the violations suffered by Yanelli, without receiving a response so far.
Read more | In five years, only 5 out of 100 complaints of sexual abuse and rape ended in sentencing
A clue and a chance led to the only one sentenced
“On June 8, 2016, when I was the victim of the first assault, my whole life changed. One of the aggressors had a knife and the other a gun, they asked the taxi driver to drive to a lonely and dark area to rape me,” Yanelli said in an interview.
“The truth is that, between the crying, the pain and the shame, all I did was avoid crossing my gaze with the aggressors, but I saw them when they got on, I saw their faces,” he recalls.
According to Yanelli, the assailants asked the taxi driver to stop when they passed by the Huauchinango pantheon and there, inside the unit, they sexually assaulted her. It was at that moment when she learned that one of them was named Erik, who her partner demanded to change shift to harass her.
“When the second of them finished assaulting me, they threatened the taxi driver, told him that he had to wait 20 minutes before we left. However, as soon as they fled, the driver told me to put the lock on the door and it started. I was afraid because I didn’t know if he was going to hurt me too.”
Yanelli did not accept that the taxi driver would accompany her to her home, for fear that she would know where she lived. With his clothes torn, blows to his body and in shock, he walked for 10 minutes to his home. She did not want to denounce, but her family convinced her that it was necessary and they accompanied her to the Public Ministry (MP), where an investigation folder was initiated for the case.
“That’s where the obstacles started. Violence not only affects you when you are living it directly, but then many others go through you,” he says.
First, he had to go more than 16 hours without bathing after the rape, because there was no forensic doctor to certify his injuries; then, a test to detect sexually transmitted diseases could not be carried out at the General Hospital of Huauchinango, due to lack of supplies to perform them. In addition, for being absent due to the procedures and her mental condition, she was run from her work as a nurse.
“I started to be financially dependent on my mom. She and my sister helped me with the issue of my daughter’s care. I tried to commit suicide twice and after that I started psychiatric treatment, at the same time I received terapsychological pia”.
Yanelli began to recover, and in fact thought she would never see the men who assaulted her again. But a month after the assault, while at a bus stop with his sister, he was able to recognize Erik, one of his assailants. Municipal police of Huauchinango had arrested him for a quarrel on a public road and was inside a patrol car.
“I saw it and panicked. I told my sister to leave, that it was him and I was afraid she would realize I was there. We took a taxi to the house and told my mom what happened. She told me that I should go and report, although I didn’t want to,” he says.
Accompanied by her family, she went to the police station to confirm if any of the newly admitted detainees were Erik. With this information, he went to the Justice Center of the municipality and notified that he had identified his aggressor, whom he formally denounced for rape and for that reason he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
“The issue was that, as soon as this person entered the Cereso (Social Reintegration Center), they immediately began to make calls to my house to tell me that they already knew where I lived, that I had a daughter, a sister and that I lived with my mother. They demanded that I remove my complaint, because I didn’t know who I was messing with,” Yanelli said.
In the Prosecutor’s Office, the Public Prosecutor’s Office that was handling his case told him not to pay attention to the calls, that his aggressor was already detained and nothing would happen to him. As a protective measure, they put two police officers to monitor his home, one from the inside and one from the outside, but after the passage of a hurricane that left damage in Puebla, the authorities removed the security personnel, under the pretext that they should join the recovery work for the natural disaster.
Yanelli boarded a taxi and was raped, reported, 1 was arrested. She received threats and then, some subjects entered her house, raped her again and with a knife in her chest they wrote her “whore”. Today he is in @FiscaliaPuebla to continue demanding justice. pic.twitter.com/6wFvhZD1rF
— Alba Espejel (@albaesli) June 8, 2022
Without protection, threats were fulfilled
Yanelli says that, even in the time he had protection from the police, the threats did not stop, “until October 2017, when I noticed that there were suspicious people outside my house. On the 12th I was resting at home with my daughter and when I went out to the street to feed some street dogs in the colony I saw two guys running towards me.”
“I ran in because I suspected they were going to do something to me, and I tried to close the door, but one came in behind me. We got to the dining room struggling and I started throwing things at her, I screamed and tried to pick up the phone, until “Mommy, who is it?” was heard and I saw my daughter peeking out from another room,” she adds.
One of the men beat his two-year-old daughter, took pictures of her and threatened to give them to a person “with a taste for girls” in case she insisted on her lawsuit against Erik. In front of the minor, the subjects beat Yanelli unconscious, tied her hands and feet and raped her again. The last thing she remembers is that she was told that this happened to her “because she was a disobedient dog.”
Hours after the attack, Yanelli was found by her mother and sister, who called emergency services. They were informed that due to the blows he had a fractured nose, jaw and ribs. In this state, the victim asked her family to take her to a hospital before admitting her to the Huauchinango Justice Center, where they had previously minimized their warnings of a possible aggression.
Like the first time, he had to undergo the expert examinations of the forensic doctor, the psychological expert and they reassigned protection, “but everything that could have been avoided had already passed.”
The last Yanelli knew about his two investigation folders for the two assaults was in 2018, when he was notified that Erik had been sentenced to 10 years in prison. Of these, six have already been fulfilled, so he now lives in fear of what may happen when he is free.
“Of the others involved, six years after the events there is nothing. I demanded that the taxi driver’s testimony be sought, but they never did. For all this I had to leave Huauchinango, I lived in great fear… and yet, I’ve continued to receive threats on my Facebook account. The only reason I don’t close it is because for me that is evidence that I provide to the authorities so that the aggressions continue,” he laments.
“This year it has been quiet, but I think it’s because I’m no longer in Huauchinango. My address is reserved and they do not have access to it, but whenever I return to visit my family or my friends I have to do it secretly, because now I have to live displaced. Being there is not safe for me.”
In six years, sexual crimes increased 146% in Puebla
According to data from the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (SESNSP), between January 2016 and April 2022, 13,488 investigation folders have been opened in Puebla for crimes against sexual freedom and security.
If the first four months of each year are compared, the number of reports of these crimes increased 145.99%, going from 437 reported between January and April 2016, to one thousand 75 that were registered in the first quarter of 2022.
Between January and April 2022, the crimes with the highest number of investigation folders were sexual abuse (309), simple rape (153), equal rape (135), sexual harassment (78) and sexual harassment (16). In addition, 384 complaints were filed for “other crimes that threaten sexual freedom and security”.
In the quarterly comparison, the crime that has increased the most between 2016 and 2022 is that of equal rape (365%), followed by sexual harassment (136.36%) and sexual harassment (33.3%).
Yanelli has gradually regained her life, thanks to the psychological therapy and psychiatric treatment she receives. “Without them I would not have been able to return to reality, I think I would have killed myself … I stopped eating, I didn’t sleep and I went into a state of complicated depression, which prevented me from even taking care of myself or my daughter, but little by little I understood that it was not my fault, and that I had to be fine. Since I left Huauchinango I danced again and started my life again.”
She is currently a certified lecturer on issues of violence against women, and accompanies the process of several victims who, like her, are in search of justice.
As a result of her case, she devoted herself to studying gender and human rights issues. “After a while I was looked for by other women who were going through situations of violence and I began to accompany them. Then I started studying, to date I have 19 diplomas on sexual violence, violence prevention, child sexual abuse and I am studying the law degree.”
“I don’t know if it was my life mission, but it has definitely also served me and helped me heal, to be able to give other women what I didn’t have. But regardless of all that, justice has not yet arrived. The fact that I no longer have marks or no longer see myself as a victim does not take away everything that happened. The state owes me a very large debt for its omissions and irresponsibility. I’m not going to forget it,” he says.
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