Nayra Rivera and Víctor Osorio/Agencia Reforma
Saturday, February 04, 2023 | 09:05
Mexico City.- Charged by two guards, María Luisa Villanueva Márquez was taken by force from the Atlacholoaya prison, Morelos, where she was serving a sentence for an alleged kidnapping. The woman was reluctant to leave the prison because she considered that the benefit of early release that she was granted did not recognize her innocence.
Villanueva, who was seeking to be acquitted, was expelled this Thursday from the prison where she spent 25 years. Her release was announced on Monday, January 30, the day on which she was summoned to a meeting with the President of the entity’s Superior Court of Justice, Jorge Gamboa Olea, and five years after serving her sentence.
“Did you like it here or do you have nowhere to go or is it some kind of tantrum you throw?” was Gamboa’s response to Villanueva’s refusal to leave the penalty.
She told him that she would not accept a benefit that she did not request and that in a few days the investigation that would prove her innocence would be brought to justice.
“Is it fair to you that I have been tortured, imprisoned for 25 years, have left an 11-month-old child and another 8-year-old and come to accept a benefit for a crime that I did not commit? I would rather die than accept that benefit” , he claimed.
Given this, the guards threw two plastic bags with their belongings at the entrance, Villanueva told Grupo REFORMA.
Nine years ago, the woman denounced that she was unjustly detained, tortured for four days, linked to a crime she did not commit and sentenced based on fabricated evidence, for which she demanded that her innocence be recognized before leaving.
KIDNAPPING
On June 22, 1997, a 12-year-old girl was kidnapped in Huajintlán, Morelos, for which her family delivered a batch of jewelry as a ransom.
In December of that year, the then Attorney General, Carlos Peredo Merlo, offered a press conference in which he presented a criminal gang, men identified by the minor’s father, who accepted having been the kidnappers and who were confiscated. the jewerly.
However, on January 6, 1998, when María Luisa was 21 years old, she was kidnapped by hooded police officers along with her then partner, Catalino Martínez, while they were in a restaurant in the town of Galeana, in Zacatepec.
The woman heard that the men were demanding a large sum of money from Catalino to let them go. Not understanding what was happening, she was placed in a safe house and tortured for four days.
On January 10, she was presented at the then Attorney General’s Office, now the Prosecutor’s Office, where the captors omitted the arrest made on January 6 and reported that that same day she had been captured on the highway.
“They made me declare that I had kidnapped a minor, I had been coming out of a huge trauma due to torture and they told me that I had kidnapped someone, I did not understand what was happening, even with the torture I denied all the facts,” Villanueva said. , who received a sentence of 30 years in prison.
“Already in the process they sentence me to pay for some jewelry that was never confiscated from me, that never happened, they already had the jewelry since 1997, they force me to pay for those jewelry that I never had in my possession,” he said.
The woman, he said, seeks to set a precedent with his case to avoid a repeat.
“It has been an emotional, physical and psychological drain for the truth to be clarified, I have every right to know it and for society to know that they left me 25 years in prison, that I lost everything due to an injustice and it remains as a precedent so that no one woman suffer something like me again”.
“I only ask for justice and that my innocence be recognized, I want to see this society and my family face to face,” said Villanueva.
The hardest thing, he considered, was having been separated from his children when they were so young.
“My children were left alone, with a woman who was not their family, my children lost their identity, they suffered bullying (…) it has been something that I have been carrying.”
A LEGAL BATTLE
In 2014, María Luisa underwent the Istanbul protocol, applied to people who suffered torture, in which the humiliation that had been committed against her was demonstrated.
Between 2014 and 2019, her lawyers fought for the Morelos Prosecutor’s Office to accept the torture complaint and the evidence that the woman did not participate in the kidnapping.
For this, it was necessary for a judge to order that the complaint be admitted and for a human rights organization to declare that the FGE was obstructing justice.
After being forced to investigate, a dialogue table was held and another one would be held on February 15 to prosecute the investigation folder.
“In addition to freedom, we were waiting for the recognition of her innocence, now we will continue fighting so that Maria Luisa is recognized as innocent,” said her lawyer, María Elena Medina Vargas.
