She Was Kidnapped and Found in a Trash Bag. Now the Government Says She Made It All Up.

MEXICO CITY—When her body was found wrapped in a black trash bag on a piece of gravel-strewn wasteland on the outskirts of Mexico City, María Ángela Olguín could have been just another number in the thousands of women who go missing or are murdered in Mexico each year. 

But Olguín, aged 16, was very much alive. 

Photos of the 16-year-old when she was found—48 hours days after going missing from a local metro station—circulated via police sources on Twitter, and showed her slight frame wrapped in a foil blanket. She was wearing just underwear and socks, and her hands and feet were tied. “She had masking tape tied around her stomach which means she had a lot of pain in her back. She was really desperate. She wanted the binds off her,” the transport police officer who found her, Itzel Álvarez said to local media. Olguín’s body showed signs of abuse, according to her lawyer.

But it’s unknown who dropped Olguín on the ground of the Las Aguilas neighborhood, surrounded by abandoned and decaying fairground rides. The wasteland is part of the sprawling, working-class Nezahuacoyotyl (also known as Neza) municipality that curls around the eastern edges of Mexico City.

And what happened to Olguín in the two days between 5:20 p.m. Thursday January 19th as she waited outside a train station bathroom for her mother, and when she turned up on the outskirts of the city 30 km away from where she went missing on Saturday 21st at 4 p.m. is now a matter of opinion. Olguín says she was kidnapped, but the government says she wasn’t taken against her will. 

Her case serves as an example of how missing or murdered women can be treated by the authorities in Mexico. Few live to tell their tales, much less to defend themselves from the posthumous victim-shaming that can be a standard part of government responses to cases of violence against women, as well as deeply-flawed or non-existent investigations. Olguín’s survival threw shade on official attempts to minimize and discredit her experience.

The city authorities and Rocío Bustamante, Olguín’s mother, agree that it was at around 5 p.m on the afternoon of Thursday Jan. 19th, in the gritty Indios Verdes metro station that the teenager went missing. She was waiting for Bustamante outside the bathrooms. When she came out of the toilets, her daughter was gone, said Bustamante.

“In the metro, my daughter told me that she felt something prick her in the arm, “ Bustamente told Spanish-language newspaper El Pais. “I looked at her arm but it was normal. We carried on chatting, we went out to the bathrooms and afterwards I don’t know what happened and why this guy took her.” 

In the hours following her daughter’s disappearance, Bustamente and supporters staged protests in the metro station, disrupting traffic. 

But the Mexico City prosecutor's office said Olguín wandered off.

“The teenager’s absence was voluntary—she wasn’t the victim of a crime,” Ulises Lara, a spokesperson for the capital's prosecutors office told local media a few days after Olguín reappeared. CCTV footage pieced together by the authorities suggested, he said, that Olguín went to the city’s historic center after leaving her mother at the metro station. There, she allegedly hung out with a feminist activist group, which has a stall in a central park, for a couple of days. Lara said that she was never snatched, as she and her mother claim.

Olguín’s own account of what happened to her in those few days was that she was taken against her will and locked up in a room with two other young girls. After she was found, Olguín went underground with her family after her case attracted acute local media attention. The lawyer representing the teenager and her family, Maricruz Garcia, told VICE World News the girl’s version of events. 

“The girls she was being held with had been held for a while,” said Garcia, and that she could have been held by a people trafficking ring. The Mexico City government later discounted the theory that a human trafficking ring is operating where Olguin was found. 

In the last year alone, local governments around Mexico have blundered the investigations of high-profile murders of women, and questioned the victims movements before they were killed. In Monterrey, the murder of teenager Debanhi Escobar captivated the nation. A first official autopsy made by Nuevo León’s state authorities claimed that Escobar died after accidentally falling into an abandoned water tank. But a second autopsy, produced by independent forensics and ordered by Escobar’s family, contradicted the government’s version of events, and presented evidence that the teen was “repeatedly beaten.” A third claimed she died of suffocation.

Ariadna López’s death in October 2022 was initially declared accidental alcohol poisoning by the Morelos state authorities. Forensics working for the Mexico City government later changed the cause of death to murder as a result of head injuries, contradicting the Morelos findings. The suggestion that she had been drinking heavily before she was killed remained in the public conscience. It later emerged that a top state investigator may have colluded in covering up López’s murder. 

In Olguín’s case, the photos and videos that the government circulated of her following her abduction were blurry and taken from a distance. The girl in the footage bears little resemblance to other photos of Olguín, taken before she went missing and circulated on social media by her family. Those pictures bore the image of a young, slender woman with a nose ring. The girl in the government pictures was shorter, rounder and wearing glasses. 

The feminist collective that Olguín allegedly hung out with, called Proyecto Fenix, told VICE World News that the girl stayed with a contact of theirs on the Thursday and Friday night of her disappearance, before she was found on Saturday. But they also said that the girl who joined them in the Zocalo and appeared in government-supplied photos looked different to photos of the girl who was found in Neza: Maria Angela Olguín. 

Norma Rosas, 46, remembers looking out of her kitchen window and seeing Olguín being wrapped up by the transport police who first attended to her when she was left on the strip of land that divides two streets. “There was a moment when they uncovered her face and I could see it was her.” By “her,” Norma meant the family’s photo version of Olguín. 

“The woman that they left here isn’t the woman in the photos that the city government is circulating,” said Rosas. 

Olguín’s lawyer, Maricruz Garcia, also said the government circulated photos and videos of a girl who is not her client. That the images depict two different girls. She added: “Maria Angela never mentioned a feminist collective—not in her conversations with me or with the prosecutor’s office.” 

“Things aren’t as the prosecutors are saying,” Garcia said. “She was taken and abused.”

The case became an opportunity for the Mexico City government, argues political analyst Jose Alberto Márquez Salazar. “What mattered little was finding Maria Angela, safe: the essential was to win political capital via the exploitation of a dramatic event that dozens of women live daily.” Such public statements, he argues, re-victimize survivors like Olguín. In efforts to play down the dangers to women in the capital, the authorities question those women’s version of events.

What Olguín’s lawyer Garcia couldn’t explain was why—if Olguín was held by human traffickers—she was released at all.

“We want the city prosecutor to apologize for saying what it has about the case, and pay damages.”

But nearly two months later, matters are no clearer. The Mexico City prosecutor's office hasn’t retracted its statement about Olguín’s case. It also remains silent on any advances in the investigation. 

Weekly interview requests to the prosecutor’s office between the time Olguín’s reappeared and the publication of this article for clarification on the case by VICE World News were not granted. 

Rogelio Velázquez contributed to reporting.