Outrage in Mexico as autopsy shows police broke woman’s neck during arrest
- Victoria Esperanza Salazar let out a scream on Saturday afternoon as a female police officer knelt on her back to cuff her hands behind her
- ‘Salazar was brutally murdered by Tulum police officers in Quintana Roo, Mexico’, said El Salvador President Nayib Bukele
Outrage grew in Mexico and El Salvador as Mexican authorities said on Monday that an autopsy of a Salvadoran woman who died in police custody confirmed that police broke her neck.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador flatly said that Victoria Esperanza Salazar was murdered by police in the Caribbean resort of Tulum.
Victoria Esperanza Salazar let out a scream on Saturday afternoon as a female police officer knelt on her back to cuff her hands behind her. Salazar was face down on the street and barefoot. Her feet flailed. A couple people passed slowly by on a bicycle. There were food stands a few yards away.
Clips of video cobbled together give no sense of how much time elapsed. Then three other officers are seen standing around her motionless body still facedown, chatting casually. Later, three officers lift her still handcuffed body into the back of a police pickup truck and drive away.
Video circulating on social media does not show events before Salazar was face down on the street with the officer on top of her.
An autopsy concluded that Salazar died from a broken neck. The examination found, “a fracture of part of the upper spinal column produced by the rupture of the first and second vertebra which caused the loss of the victim,” Quintana Roo State Prosecutor Oscar Montes said in a video.