Heart of darkness: women dare not walk alone in central Mexico

Ecatepec, Mexico

Guadalupe Reyes clings to thoughts of her daughter one day flying a plane, a dream for the 18-year-old girl.

Until the teenager vanished 10 months ago in central Mexico.

Mariana is the latest in a growing number of girls and women who have disappeared, or worse, in the populous State of Mexico, which has become the most dangerous region for women in a country that is all too used to violence.

The authorities believe they found Mariana's remains and buried them in a common grave without the presence of her family. But like many Mexicans looking for their missing kin, Reyes has little trust in the authorities. Late last month, the desperate mother convinced officials to exhume fragments of skull and bones to conduct her own DNA tests.

The willowy, black-haired girl, who took violin lessons online, left her home on September 17 last year to make photocopies of documents she needed to get a pilot scholarship. She never came back.

The devil's curve 

In the 1990s, Ciudad Juarez became infamous as the bodies of hundreds of murdered women turned up around the desert border city. But the State of Mexico, a region known as Edomex that surrounds Mexico City, at the heart of the country, has eclipsed Juarez.

Mutilated, burned or half-naked bodies have turned up in fields, abandoned lots or sewage waters in the state of 15 million people.

According to the national statistics institute, 14 of every 100 murders of women took place in Edomex between 2008 and 2013, compared to 13.5 in Chihuahua, the state where Juarez is located. 

The Edomex prosecutor for gender crimes, Dylcia Garcia, said the murders are due to domestic violence or sexual assaults. But the president of the Justice, Human Rights and Gender organization, Rodolfo Dominguez, said the homicides come in the context of a brutal drug war in which 80,000 people have died and another 22,000 have gone missing.

Maria de la Luz Estrada, director of the National Femicide Citizen Observatory, said two women disappear every day in Edomex.  Several bodies have been found in the De Los Remedios river, in which sewer waters are dumped in the city of Ecatepec. That's where Mariana's alleged remains were discovered.

Never walk alone 

The journalist Humberto Padgett, in his book "The Dead of the State," wrote that 1,997 women were murdered in Edomex between 2005 and 2011 -- a period during which Enrique Pena Nieto was governor of the state. He is now the country's president. 

Many women live in fear in Edomex. A group of young women walking along a busy pedestrian bridge recalled how a neighbour disappeared two months ago. "We are never alone. We try to go in groups wherever we go," said Ayde, 17.