Activist Marisela Escobedo, 52, was shot and killed while demanding justice for her daughter’s murder in Chihuahua City on December 19, 2010.
In an alarming indicator of the level of impunity in that state, Escobedo was shot at 8:00pm on a busy street in front of the Government Palace, the office of Chihuahua’s governor. Below is the footage of the act, captured by a security camera across the street and narrated by Mexico City’s La Reforma news agency.
After the August 2008 murder of her 16-year-old daughter, Rubi Marisol Frayre Escobedo, Ms. Escobedo became a leading activist for judicial reform in the country. Despite the fact that her daughter’s boyfriend confessed to the crime and took police to the location where he burned the body, a judge released him. Recently, an appellate court convicted him of the murder charges, but he remains at large.
Escobedo was at the Government Palace carrying a sign protesting the fact that a recent case involving the murder of Chihuahua’s governor, Cesar Duarte, was resolved in four months and resulted in a sentence in less than a week of trial.
The sign allegedly read: “Justice: the privilege of the governor. And for my daughter, when?”