Madame versus people of Mexico

Published on Saturday 18 April 2009 20:03

THREE years ago, morning news programmes in Mexico broadcast the arrest of a Frenchwoman and her Mexican boyfriend in a police raid that rescued three kidnapping victims from the ranch the couple shared.

The woman, Florence Cassez, was convicted of kidnapping and other crimes and was eventually sentenced to 60 years in jail. Case closed, it would seem.

But through it all, Cassez, 34, has maintained her innocence. Her boyfriend, Israel Vallarta, who confessed, said she knew nothing. And the television images of police officers storming the ranch? The raid turned out to have been staged the day after the couple was arrested and the hostages released.

The case has climbed back into the headlines because President Nicolas Sarkozy of France wants her home – and all but said so in a state visit to Mexico last month. In France, television news shows and prison interviews have been spinning a tale of a love-affair-turned-nightmare in the murky workings of Mexican justice.

Under an international treaty, Cassez could waive her right to further appeals and ask to return to France to serve her sentence. But there is almost universal opposition in Mexico to sending her back. Under the treaty, France could change her sentence, and the suspicion is that once home, she would quickly be released from jail. And few people in Mexico believe her protestations of innocence.

Cassez's case has become ensnared in Mexicans' trauma over kidnapping, a crime that has become emblematic of the country's wave of insecurity.

"In a general climate of impunity, society becomes very conservative," said Guillermo Zepeda, a security expert at the Centre of Research for Development, a Mexico City policy group. "They want the few cases that are resolved to be exemplary."

In fewer than 2% of crimes does a suspect ever appear before a judge, Zepeda said. In large part, that is because Mexicans have so little faith in any aspect of the criminal justice system that only 12% of crimes are ever reported.

Believing that somebody is guilty in Mexico, Zepeda said, "is an act of faith".

The strongest evidence against Cassez was the testimony of the three victims, none of whom could see the faces of their captors.

The most vivid account came from Cristina Rios Valladares, who was rescued along with her son, then 11 years old, and a young man named Ezequiel Elizalde, the day of Cassez's arrest after 52 days in captivity. In a letter that Rios released to newspapers, she described Cassez threatening her in a French-accented voice "that still drills into my ears today".

Agustin Acosta, Cassez's lawyer, said that Rios did not identify Cassez as one of her captors in her first police statements immediately after her rescue. But Elizalde did, based on her auburn hair, and said that she threatened to cut off his ear or his finger.

The victims' testimony and the fact that Cassez lived at the ranch is evidence enough for most Mexicans. That includes one of the country's most influential voices on the issue of crime and punishment, Alejandro Marti, a businessman whose 14-year-old son was kidnapped and killed last summer.

"The prosecutor has overwhelming evidence," said Marti, who set up a foundation to work for police and judicial reform after his son's murder. "Where the devil can we draw the conclusion that the famous Madame Cassez is innocent?"

Marti acknowledged the problems with the Mexican criminal justice system. But Cassez's case, he said, is one of the easy ones. The police re-enactment for the television cameras is a technicality, he said, that does not change the basic facts.

The man who admitted staging the raid, Genaro Garcia Luna, is now the secretary of public security and a central player in President Felipe Calderon's crackdown on drug cartels and organised crime.

Acosta, the defence lawyer, said that the bogus raid on television set the tone for Cassez's prosecution. "The first image, the one of a kidnapper, is very difficult to change," he said. "The media impact is very, very strong."

Along with Marti and other citizens' groups formed by the families of victims, Mexico's bickering legislators have united to urge Calderon not to allow Cassez to return to France. Sarkozy and Calderon have agreed to hand the decision to a binational panel that would study ways the case could be resolved under the treaty, known as the Strasbourg Convention.

Cassez, who spends much of her time in jail reading letters of support from France, will wait for the report from the commission before deciding whether to file her last appeal in Mexico or ask to return to France, Acosta said.

She has stuck to the main details of her story. She arrived in Mexico in 2003 to live and work with her brother, who was then there with his Mexican wife. Through him she met Vallarta the following year. The pair began a difficult relationship that alienated her friends, who sensed that he was trouble. She spent the summer of 2005 in France, but Vallarta called her and she returned to Mexico to live at the ranch. She found a job in a hotel and looked for an apartment closer to her job.

Although she said in her police declaration that the couple had broken up, she described eating meals with Vallarta and socialising with his family in the days before the arrests. During that time, she said, he had left her alone at the ranch while he took a trip.

The kidnapping victims were found in a separate one-room cabin on the grounds of the ranch.

In his statement, Vallarta said that he had taken them there from another safe house because his accomplices were threatening to hurt the victims. The police never arrested anybody else in the kidnapping ring.