Mexican Gays Accuse Police of Laxity in Probing Slayings of AIDS Activist, Others : Crime: Homosexual, women’s and community groups demand a full investigation and assail the press for sensationalistic coverage of the killings.

The slayings of a prominent AIDS activist and at least four other homosexuals have drawn protests from the gay community against a wave of “hate crimes” and charges that police have failed to investigate the incidents seriously.

Dr. Francisco Estrada Valle, co-founder of Ave de Mexico, an AIDS education and prevention organization, was discovered bound, strangled and stabbed last week along with two other men in an apartment in the southern neighborhood of Coyoacan.

On the same day, July 13, police found the battered bodies of two more homosexual men across town in the central Anzures neighborhood. They also had been bound and strangled.

Excelsior newspaper reported a sixth man found in the central Juarez neighborhood on July 16 “assassinated by the same methods used on the other victims,” but police have not publicly confirmed the circumstances of that death.

“These were homophobic hate crimes,” said Jesus Calzada, who founded Ave de Mexico along with Estrada. “The victims were all gay. The homicides were the same.”

About 30 gay, women’s and community groups published a letter to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari demanding a full investigation and assailing the press for its sensationalistic coverage of the slayings.

Mexico, a conservative, Catholic country, generally is a hostile environment for gays. The gay rights movement has had little influence on public opinion--as an example, tabloids asserted the men were killed for spreading AIDS.

“We denounce the vulture-like attitude of the tabloid press that has morally assassinated for the nth time the victims of homophobic violence,” the letter said.

Police are holding two suspects in the triple slaying of Estrada, Rene de la Torre Gonzalez and Javier Rivero Melendez and say they are still investigating the other crimes to determine if they are related.

The suspects, who police and activists have said are gay, are Arnulfo Loya Carpizo and Rodolfo Brindis Castillo.

Officials first called the triple killing a passion crime and now say it was a vendetta for a soured business deal between Loya and the victim Rivero. They said witnesses saw the suspects enter the Coyoacan apartment around the time of the slayings.

The suspects assert that they can prove they were nowhere near the building. Ave co-founder Calzada says that the suspects are “scapegoats” and that police are wrong to look within the gay community for the killers. He said they are trying to get rid of the case because it involves homosexuals.

“They just want to cover their backs and close the case,” Calzada said.

Estrada, 35, made frequent radio and television appearances and gave seminars on AIDS and AIDS prevention--until recently a taboo subject in Mexico. He openly discussed his HIV-positive condition and treated patients with AIDS.

Calzada said Estrada left the Ave de Mexico offices late Saturday night, telling friends he felt ill and was going home. When Estrada failed to show up for a seminar he was to give Sunday morning, friends began to worry and notified police. The bodies were discovered early Monday morning across town.

Calzada said he does not believe Estrada was necessarily the target of the triple slaying, which occurred in De la Torre’s apartment.

But he noted that AIDS volunteers have received obscene telephone calls, including one to a television talk show on which Estrada appeared from a man identifying himself as belonging to an anti-homosexual group and vowing “to do away with all of you.”

Gay activists did not know the other slaying victims, Calzada said.

The killings have prompted outraged letters and editorials in newspapers from actors, friends of Estrada and activists who say that crimes against gays usually go unsolved in Mexico.

“One of the great lies that the police has always used is that they can never solve the assassinations of homosexuals,” wrote director Margo Su in the daily newspaper La Jornada. “They say that is because the victims belong to a ghetto that is very closed, hermetic. They deduce that the crimes are the logical sequence of orgies where passions are uncontrollable and, anyway, it’s not worth the minimum effort because ‘arduous’ investigations lead nowhere.”

She noted that eight men, presumed homosexuals and transvestites, have been killed with high-caliber weapons in the southern state of Chiapas in the last year. Other activists say the figure may be as high as 22. The cases have not been solved.

“The police always say it was ‘a crime between gays,’ ” said actor Tito Vasconcelos, a friend of Estrada. “Then the press says they were HIV-positive, as if this was an excuse.”

Calzada added that there is little public sympathy for AIDS victims in Mexico.

The government’s National Council on the Prevention and Control of AIDS, CONASIDA, reports 4,699 deaths from AIDS and another 4,477 active cases. It estimates that another 300,000 people are infected. Ave de Mexico estimates the numbers to be much higher.

Calzada said that because of discrimination, many people do not report AIDS cases and families have death certificates altered to hide AIDS as a cause of death.