Hotel verde

A cowboy discovers a skull in the Valle de Juárez, and then a spine. The forensic team asks to dig further because one scapula doesn’t match the other. That’s when more remains begin to emerge: more remains, many remains—so many that, with at least 21 skeletons found to date, it is now considered the largest clandestine cemetery of women in the history of Ciudad Juárez, or possibly all of Mexico.

The Hotel Verde, located at the intersection of Mariano Samaniego and Ignacio Altamirano streets in downtown Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is the place where young women, aged 13 to 22, who disappeared between 2008 and 2010, were held by a human trafficking gang affiliated with the Aztec Cartel.

The women were captured in the streets of downtown, at bus stops, and, in some cases, under the pretext of job interviews, with local business owners being part of the criminal group.

The women were taken to the Hotel Verde, where they were drugged against their will and forced into prostitution and drug dealing. Months after their abduction, they were murdered in Arroyo del Navajo, in the Valle de Juárez, where the remains of twenty-six women were discovered between January 2012 and today. All had disappeared from the downtown area and exhibited the same cause of death.

The investigation into the abduction and murder of these young women began in 2012, thanks to the testimony of a 16-year-old survivor who managed to escape from the Hotel Verde, aided by a customer of the establishment. The trial for eleven of the twenty-six cases took place in June 2015. Six members of the criminal group—Manuel Vital Anguiano, César Félix Romero Esparza, José Gerardo Puentes Alva, Jesús Hernández Martínez, José Antonio Contreras Terrazas, and Edgar Jesús Regalado Villa—received sentences of 695 years in prison.

The testimonies in the trial reconstructed the last days of these women’s lives at the Hotel Verde and their tragic deaths.

Around 155 people testified in the trial, stating they had seen the young women alive around the hotel and in other parts of the downtown area. However, when they went to the authorities, they received no response.

It was reported that the criminal group collaborated with local municipal and state police to mobilize and force the prostitution of the women in private homes and the jails of Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez.