By ANDY SOLTIS
A hero to the end: Fearless Mexican mayor who survived two assassination attempts is murdered
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| TRUE COURAGE:As mayor of the town of Tiquicheo, Maria Santos Gorrostieta defied the area’s drug cartels, once baring her scars from two assassination attempts to rally support for her war on drugs. Her body was found mutilated in a ditch this month, days after she was abducted. |
Gorrostieta, dubbed a “heroine of the 21st century” for her refusal to be cowed by the ruthless cartels that rule much of Mexico, was kidnapped in broad daylight this month after leaving her home in the town of Morelia.
She was driving her daughter to school when thugs in another vehicle blocked her white van. They pulled her out and began kicking and beating her in front of passers-by.
The 36-year-old mother begged the men to spare her girl and appeared to get into the thugs’ vehicle voluntarily, witnesses said.
Gorrostieta, mayor of the town of Tiquicheo from 2008 to 2011, had previously had a police escort and government security assigned to her.
But despite the two ambushes — which killed her husband and left her horribly scarred — her protection was pulled after she left office.
“No one could do anything to help her,” newspaper El Universal said of her abduction two weeks ago.
Her relatives waited for a call from the kidnappers, hoping they would trade her for ransom.
No call came. The family alerted police, who launched a search.
Five days after her disappearance, farm workers found Gorrostieta’s body — stabbed, burned and beaten — in a roadside ditch in the town of San Juan Tararameo.
Her relatives identified the body of the mother of three the next day.
Parts of Mexico have become a no-man’s-land, where legal authorities fear to tread and death comes cheap.
Over the weekend, 19 bodies were found in the northern border state of Chihuahua, including those of eight people who had been tortured and killed on Friday.
Many of the dead have been victims of the drug cartels, which have increasingly included elected and appointed officials.
Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a war on the cartels six years ago, about two dozen mayors have been murdered.
Gorrostieta was one of at least seven women who were willing to serve as mayors or police chiefs.
Two of them, Hermila Garcia Quinones and Silvia Molina, were assassinated. A third, Erika Gandara, was kidnapped and is feared dead, and a fourth, Marisol Valles Garcia, 21, left her job and fled to the United States.
Gorrostieta, a doctor who studied medicine in a university in Morelia, began getting threats after she ran for mayor of Tiquicheo and was elected as a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party in 2008.
She ignored the threats — at her own peril. In October 2009, her car was attacked by gunmen in the town of El Limone. Her husband, José Sanchez — who had escaped a showdown with an armed mob that year — died in the fusillade.
Gorrostieta was seriously wounded but soon returned to work, as defiant as ever.
Three months later, in January 2010, she was attacked again, this time on a road between the states of Guerrero and Michoacan as she headed to a meeting.
Gunmen with assault rifles fired 30 bullets at her van. Three hit her, leaving serious wounds. Her brother and a reporter were wounded.
But Gorrostieta sought to use the publicity to get the public to join her war on drugs. She bared her scars in photos that appeared in a local newspaper.
“I wanted to show them my wounded, mutilated, humiliated body because I’m not ashamed of it,” she said, “because it is the product of the great misfortunes that have scarred my life, that of my children and my family.”
The wounds left her in near constant pain. She had to wear a colostomy bag.
Gorrostieta, a devout Catholic, said she couldn’t understand why she had been marked for death.
“I have a clear conscience,” she said.
“I have never had any issues of any kind, be it money, family or crime related, and I have never had any fights with any neighbors or residents of my town or any other town.”
After the second attack, she considered quitting — but couldn’t. She said she had an obligation to her town of 13,000-plus people as well as to the memory of her slain husband.
“At another stage in my life, perhaps I would have resigned from what I have, my position, my responsibilities as the leader of my Tiquicheo,” she said.
“But today, no.”
“It is not possible for me to surrender when I have three children whom I have to educate by setting an example,” she said.
“And also because of the memory of the man of my life, the father of my three little ones, the one who was able to teach me the value of things and to fight for them.”
She admitted to being plagued by the memory of the two attacks.
“I struggle day to day to erase from my mind the images of the horror I lived, and that others who did not deserve or expect it also suffered,” she said.
Nevertheless, Gorrostieta rebuilt her life. She married again, to Nereo Delgado Patinoran. She switched political parties.
After her stint at Tiquicheo was over, she ran in an election for Mexico’s legislature, the Congress of the Union, but failed to win a seat.
Her death is being investigated by Mexico’s Anti-Kidnapping and Extortion Institution.
The unit has another task: Gorrostieta’s second husband, Patinoran, vanished when she did and is still missing.
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