Sisters of Shame

One Sunday morning last January, three weeping mothers rushed into the police station in the sun-baked city of Leon in central Mexico. Breathlessly, they told the police chief of a tip on the whereabouts of their long-missing teen-aged daughters. A young girl who had escaped from a brothel had informed them that their children were being held captive on a ranch somewhere near Leon. Nosing around a ranch in the area two days later, the police chief accidentally stepped into some soft earth. To his horror, out popped a woman's arm-the first clue in one of the ugliest chains of crime in Mexican history.

From 14 to 25. Storming into the ranch house, police found 19 teen-aged girls, including the three for whom the search was started. They were prisoners in what Mexican newspapers called "a concentration camp for white slaves," complete with tiny cells and grisly torture devices. In the house, police arrested two notorious white slavers, Delfina Gonzalez Valenzuela, 55, her sister Maria de Jesus, 40, and a handful of their helpers. A few weeks later police picked up a third sister, Eva. Further search at the ranch and at two brothels owned by the sisters uncovered the remains of 17 young women and five babies.

Over the next few months, the police pieced together evidence of at least 35 murders (some said that the total exceeded 100), and a picture of a ruthless white-slave ring that had been trafficking in young girls for at least ten years. The girls, ranging in age from 14 to 25 and all from poor families, were lured by promises of jobs as maids in upper-class families. Then they were raped by a ring employee and hustled off to a training brothel in the farming town of San Francisco del Rincon. At least 2,000 girls had passed through the ring since 1954. Most of them were sold to brothel owners throughout Mexico at $80 per girl; the rest went into the sisters' own establishments. Said one 14-year-old: "When a girl would get sick from not being given enough to eat and being beaten so badly, she would be taken from the room where we were locked up, and we would never see her again. We were told that she was taken to the hospital."

The Royal Bed. The "hospital" was, in fact, the ranch near Leon where the sick were sent to die and rebellious girls were sent for discipline. "Some died of hunger, some of sickness, and others couldn't take the punishment with the stick," admitted one helper. The sisters' undertaker described how she "sprinkled the bodies with kerosene and set them on fire. Then we would call our gravedigger." A girl told how she was left alone without medical care while giving birth to her child, which then died and was buried in the ranch yard. The most feared torture was what the sisters called the cama real (royal bed), a narrow board onto which girls were placed and wrapped in barbed wire so that even the slightest movement caused a cut. Sessions on the cama real lasted for days at a time.

Last week, in a San Francisco del Rincon courtroom cleared of spectators to guard against attack, the three sisters were found guilty of first-degree murder, white slavery and assorted other crimes and sentenced to the maximum penalty under Mexican law: 40 years in prison.

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