Mother’s Will Breaks Down Wall of Influence

The well-connected father and grandfather of a 9-year-old girl who was raped and killed were arrested Wednesday in a shocking case that has pitted wife against husband and outraged even violence-ridden El Salvador.

Carlos Miranda, 58, a former lawyer for the once-powerful treasury police, is accused of raping and killing his granddaughter, Kathya, during an overnight stay at the family’s beach property in April. Edwin Miranda, 32, an army captain who was a presidential bodyguard until last year, was in custody for allegedly abandoning and failing to protect his daughter.

“We are innocent,” the elder Miranda told the throng of reporters who accompanied the arresting officers. Two caretakers were also arrested for allegedly covering up the events of the night of the crime.

The case has become a test of the ability and willingness of the Salvadoran police to confront influential people accused of abusing children, and human rights activists credit the child’s mother, Hilda Jimenez, with bringing the slaying to the attention of the public, which responded with sympathy for her and demands for justice.

“The crime against my daughter could not go unpunished, not only for her and for me, but also for all the mothers, all the children who are abused or killed every day in this country,” Jimenez said in an interview after the arrests.

By Wednesday, local newspapers were covering every development in the investigation with multiple pages of articles and photos. Coverage of the arrests contrasted sharply with the two-paragraph mention--among assorted Easter holiday accidents--that Kathya’s death received in the days after her body was found.

Even in this country, where nine killings are committed every day on average, according to police statistics, public indignation reached such a pitch that national police Chief Mauricio Sandoval promised in November that the crime would be solved in two weeks.

“This shows that Salvadoran society has not lost its capacity for outrage,” said Pedro Cruz, legal attache at the Human Rights Institute of the University of Central America, a college closely identified with the struggle against abuses here. “People were moved by the horrendous nature of the crime and the courage of a mother.”

The public was also outraged at the prospect that a tradition of impunity for members of the armed forces--which flourished during military dictatorships and weak civilian governments that ruled during most of this country’s history--might continue, Jimenez said.

Besides the military connections of her husband and father-in-law, she said, her brother-in-law is a police detective.

“I knew that this was not going to be an easy struggle,” she said, “but it was my duty as a mother and my right as a mother to get justice.”

Kathya’s death was first thought to be a drowning until an autopsy revealed that she had been raped and smothered on the sandy beach before being tossed into the ocean. Months after the child’s death, Jimenez--frustrated by the lack of progress in the investigation--contacted the Human Rights Institute and the media to press for a resolution.

Under pressure from investigators, family members who were at the beach the night of April 4 contradicted Carlos and Edwin Miranda’s version of what happened, as told in depositions and interviews. The two told police and reporters that Kathya and her 8-year-old sister, Marcela, had slept in a tent with their father, according to police and published reports.

The father and the caretakers said that they felt liquid on their faces, then remember nothing. Carlos Miranda told reporters they had been drugged.

But Marcela insisted that her father did not sleep with them. Edwin Miranda told reporters that because he went to sleep later and awoke earlier than Marcela, she must have thought he hadn’t slept there.

After a meeting with Jimenez earlier this week, the other relatives present that night told the police that the girls’ father did not sleep in the tent, Atty. Gen. Belisario Artiga said at a news conference Wednesday.

“This brought us to the conclusion that Capt. Edwin Miranda was not at the scene of the crime and, thus, the accusation of abandonment,” he said.

Jimenez said she also heard Carlos Miranda promise to take Kathya fishing that weekend. She speculated that the little girl had wakened and went to ask her grandfather whether it was time to go fishing.

Police made the arrests Wednesday, Artiga said, because they had information that Carlos Miranda was emptying his bank accounts and preparing to leave the country. The grandfather countered, “I don’t even have a passport.”

Although she had always suspected a family member of the crime, Jimenez said the latest turn in the investigation still hurts deeply, saying, “A mother always trusts her loved ones.” With her mother dead and her father and sisters in the United States, she said, “they were the only family I could rely on.”

But Salvadoran sociologist Zoila Gonzalez said that a 1995 study by the prosecutor’s office here concluded that most abuses against children are committed by relatives.

“This is a clear case of a problem that exists, actually pervades, our society: the abuse of innocent creatures by their own relatives,” Gonzalez said.

Last year, 126 rapes of children were reported to the police, according to the prosecutor’s office, a spokeswoman said.

But many abuses are never reported, much less pursued with the vigor that Jimenez has dedicated to her daughter’s slaying, said Cruz, the legal attache.

“This is a struggle against mistreatment and abuse,” Jimenez said. “I want other mothers to come forward and talk.”