The Tamaulipas Prosecutor’s Office has reported the arrest of Jorge Luis Ponce Ortega, director of the Marina Doenitz Militarized Academy, in Ciudad Madero, Tamaulipas, where 13-year-old Dafne Zapata died on July 16, in a case being investigated as femicide. The man’s arrest occurred on Saturday night in the city of Altamira. Hours later, early this Sunday, authorities arrested Estrellita Mora Díaz, a member of the institution’s teaching staff, responsible for caring for the boarding girls, also in Altamira.
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This brings the total to three arrests of people allegedly related to the death of the 13-year-old girl. Last week, Danna Yanina N, who served as Estrellita Mora’s assistant instructor at the summer camp, was arrested. The investigations are being carried out by the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for the Investigation of the Crime of Femicide and Intentional Homicide of Women.
Dafne Zapata’s case has caused national uproar and has brought the operation of militarized academies in the country into focus. On July 16, four days after the camp began, Zapata’s mother, Alejandra Quintos, received a call from the militarized academy staff: they informed her that her daughter had collapsed while bathing and that she “no longer showed vital signs.” However, Quintos has stated that the autopsy indicates that the cause of death was asphyxiation by submersion.
The mother assures that Dafne Zapata died “tortured, in a horrific way” and points out that her daughter’s case uncovered a series of complaints from former students about physical abuse, mistreatment, and extreme punishments within the school. “They tortured her for four days non-stop until they handed her over dead. It’s a femicide because she’s a woman. She had too much water in her lungs, so much that it was stuck in her trachea. What have they done to her? Not with my daughter,” she said in an interview with N+.
Dafne Zapata was going to spend the summer in the military course her mother enrolled her in to strengthen her character and autonomy. The boarding school, which was supposed to last three weeks, from July 13 to 31, cost 25,000 pesos. The Marina Doenitz Militarized Academy boasted of being linked to the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena), but the agency has disassociated itself from the school and clarified that “it has no relation to any other facility of that type.”