24 hours and thirty minutes. That is the time that separates the report of the disappearance of Edith Guadalupe Valdés Zaldívar from the inspection by Mexico City police of the building where her family indicated she was. From the beginning, the family said that the 21-year-old had disappeared in an apartment tower, where she had gone for a job interview, and from where she had shared her location before ceasing to give signs of life. The police found Valdés Zaldívar’s body in the basement. The femicide already has one detainee, a security guard about 25 years old who works in that building, but this case has cast enormous doubt on the Mexico City Attorney General’s Office and its investigation, both for the lost time and for the accusations made by the family that they were asked for money to start looking for the murdered young woman.
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It was on Wednesday, April 15, when Valdés Zaldívar stopped answering her phone. According to the testimony given by her parents, she had left her home that afternoon in the Magdalena Atlazolpa neighborhood, in the Iztapalapa borough, on her way to a job interview in Benito Juárez. A security camera recording shows the 21-year-old arriving by motorcycle, ordered through an app, at Torre Murano, a family housing building at number 829 Revolución Avenue. She went, according to the family, to a modeling agency. Before entering, she sent her location to a cousin. When night fell and they still knew nothing of Valdés Zaldívar, they filed a missing person report at one in the morning on April 16.
This report reached the capital’s Prosecutor’s Office, with information about that last location. According to what the family declared to several television news cameras, the feeling that the authorities were not doing everything possible to find Valdés Zaldívar led them to hire a private detective who obtained the footage where she is seen entering Torre Murano, and which they later handed over to the authorities. They also reported that the police told them they had to wait 72 hours to start the search because “she could have gone with her boyfriend or friends,” but that if they gave them money, perhaps they could look for their daughter sooner. Almost at nightfall, Valdéz Zaldívar’s family and friends blocked Eje 6 Sur avenue to protest the Prosecutor’s Office’s inactivity. The images show about twenty people, in front of a long line of trucks and cars.
A few hours later, at 1:30 AM on April 17, police officers entered Torre Murano, “checking floor by floor, and tower by tower, the common areas of the building,” explained the capital’s prosecutor, Bertha Alcalde Luján. There they first located “various personal objects possibly linked to Edith and hours later a lifeless woman in the basement of the building under a mound of sand,” the official added. An “investigation by the Internal Affairs Unit to investigate possible acts of corruption reported by the victim’s relatives” was also announced. For the family, these 24 hours of delay between their report with a last known location and the search of the building are serious negligence, and they accuse that the delay was deliberate and reduced the chances of rescuing Valdés Zaldívar alive.
After noon, Valdés Zaldívar’s aunt, Magdalena, declared to several television channels, at the door of the Prosecutor’s Office, that the agency “did nothing.” “We did everything, it was with our own means, the Prosecutor’s Office should not take credit, they always wanted 72 hours, that’s why we investigated and got to where we got,” she said, visibly angry and criticizing the institution’s lack of professionalism: “We found her with a private investigator.”
At night, the Prosecutor’s Office announced the arrest of a security guard from Torre Murano. In the video that captures the moment his rights are read to him, a man who appears to be about 25 years old, with curly black hair, wearing a black sports sweatshirt, is seen. Bloodstains were found in the building’s entrance booth, and the autopsy revealed that the young woman had been murdered with a screwdriver, although she also had injuries from blows. Nothing has been said about the motive. It was also announced that “the personnel involved” were “separated from their duties while the investigations are underway.” Valdés Zaldívar’s body was handed over to her relatives, and on Saturday morning, she was mourned under a yellow tent on a street in the Iztapalapa borough.
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