The trial that
never ended

This case is almost always told with a single truth. There are two, and the second does not erase the first.

The first: a young woman, a saxophonist, was attacked with acid at her home in Huajuapan de León, Oaxaca. She survived. She turned her body into a cause and her cause into a law. Nothing in this investigation questions that. The very judge who acquitted the defendants found the attack proven.

The second: a man has been jailed for more than six years without a final verdict. A judge acquitted him after a three-month oral trial. Forty-six minutes later, the state's Governor called that judge a criminal. That same night, a substitute judge who had not seen a single piece of evidence voided the entire trial. The acquitted man never walked out of the prison gate.

When a State has to break due process to keep an accusation alive, it does not protect the victim. It leaves her without a verdict and with a case file that can collapse on any review. That is exactly what now sits before the full bench of Mexico's Supreme Court.

And there is a third layer, a new one. The victim is now a political figure: Morena registered her in 2024 as a candidate for alternate federal deputy. She travels to New York for United Nations forums. And since October 21, 2026, she faces two complaints before the United States government for alleged visa fraud. That layer has nothing to do with the acid. It has to do with another country's immigration law, which does not distinguish between causes.

What follows is neither the prosecution's version nor the defense's. It is what the trial judge found proven in his ruling of August 14, 2024.

On Friday, September 6, 2019, at 3:46 p.m., a man called from a cell phone and booked an appointment with her for Monday the 9th at ten in the morning. That Monday he arrived at her home with a blue folder and a container. She attended him seated at her desk, her back to him. He opened the container and poured its contents over her face and body while shouting at her to die. She broke free and called for help. Her mother came to her aid.

The prosecution's medical experts disagreed on the extent of the burns. One report said fifty percent of body surface, another forty, another twenty-eight. Based on cross-examination, the judge concluded something that later decided the ruling: with the medical care she received, she was never in real danger of death. The attempted femicide charge fell on that technical point.

She rebuilt her life in public. Her nickname, Malena, named the acid violence reform Mexico City passed in 2024, later replicated by other state legislatures. She became the voice of a movement.

Three men were tried for the attack: Juan Antonio Vera Carrizal, named by the prosecution as the mastermind, and Ruvicel Hernández Ríos and Rubén Loaeza Charrez. A son of the former legislator, Juan Antonio Vera Hernández, has an outstanding arrest warrant and remains a fugitive. I note it because any honest account of this case must include it, even if it is uncomfortable for the people who hired me.

Juan Antonio Vera Carrizal is a former PRI state legislator in Oaxaca and a gas station owner in the Mixteca region. He has been a United States citizen since 1996 and lived in East Harlem, New York.

The prosecution's theory was that he ordered the attack and that the motive lay in the personal relationship the two had.

Attributed account

His version, as his family gave it to me in writing, is this. They met during the 2018 campaign, when he ran for a federal seat. She handled his social media, photographs and schedule. They had a relationship. It ended months before the attack and he went back to his businesses and his family. He denies any role in the attack.

It is an interested party's account and I present it as such. What is a public document is what the judge wrote: that the prosecution failed to prove the mechanics of the events it attributed to the defendants, or that they took part in them. The ruling says those propositions "were drawn through very particular inferences and assumptions of the official prosecutor."

The victim holds the opposite and has said so in every forum: that Vera Carrizal is the mastermind and that his acquittal was the work of judicial corruption. That is her right, and her version belongs in this text with the same weight.

He was arrested on April 6, 2020. On April 10 a judge bound him over for trial in criminal case 533/2019. He has not set foot outside since.

Pretrial detention is not a sentence. It is a measure to make sure the defendant does not flee or obstruct the trial. That is why the Constitution puts a ceiling on it: two years, unless the delay is due to the defense. When that ceiling is broken by more than three times, the problem stops being the defendant's and becomes the system's.

January 2023: the first order

On January 21, 2023, Judge Teódulo Pacheco Pacheco declared the end of pretrial detention and ordered him to continue his case at a home, on health grounds. On January 23, Governor Salomón Jara announced on video that the defendant "will remain deprived of his liberty in Tanivet." On January 25, the State's Legal Counsel, Geovanny Vásquez Sagrero, said the State lacked the tools to monitor him. The transfer was never carried out.

That same January 25, the press reported that a judge had revoked the measure. On March 13, the then President of Mexico said at his press conference that the judge in the case had been accused of corruption. According to the defense chronology, the next day the Criminal Chamber revoked the order for good.

A judge decides. The Executive announces it will not be obeyed. The court corrects the judge. Keep that sequence in mind. Eighteen months later it happened again in a single afternoon.

Today he is hospitalized in custody, with a heart condition his doctors describe as serious. She has said publicly that he is not as ill as the authorities claim. Both statements are on record; the first comes with a medical file, the second does not.

The oral trial lasted three months in Tlaxiaco. On August 14, 2024, Judge José Gabriel Ramírez Montaño announced his ruling. What followed was recorded by the officials themselves, on their official accounts, and later in ten notarial certificates.

She answered that day in three words: "Corruption won." It was said by a woman who had waited five years for a verdict. It is understandable. But the legal question is not whether the ruling was welcome. It is whether a Governor, a Prosecutor and a Judicial Council can undo in hours what a judge decided after three months of evidence.

Signed analysis

To challenge an acquittal there is an appeal. It is filed, processed and decided by a higher court that reviews the ruling. What happened on August 14 was not an appeal. It was the disappearance of a ruling by suspending the judge who issued it. If that is valid, any acquittal in Mexico lasts as long as it takes a Governor to post.

The full record, from the 2018 campaign to the October 2026 complaints. Drag the line.

On May 14, 2026, the full bench declined to take the case, five votes to three. Eight days later, Chief Justice Hugo Aguilar Ortiz requested it again. On August 12 the Court ruled against the defense on motion for reconsideration 212/2026. And on October 19, at the request of the Chief Justice and Justice Loretta Ortiz Ahlf, the full bench exercised, by majority, its power to take over the case, number 566/2026, over the amparo appeals.

According to the defense's reading, what the Court will decide is not whether he is guilty. It is whether a substitute judge could void a trial that had ended in acquittal. Its decision will be final.

Signed analysis

The Court cannot do what nobody appealed

My position, published October 20 in the Diario Geopolítico: the takeover runs against Articles 23 and 107 of the Mexican Constitution. Article 23 bars trying anyone twice for the same crime. The August 14 acquittal was never reviewed on appeal: it was voided administratively. A Court that uses its takeover power to revisit the facts would be doing what no appellate court did. The only live question in the file is whether that voiding was valid.

On October 21, 2026, I filed two complaints under my own name. One with the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, through its visa fraud form. The other with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, USCIS.

Complaint filed · not resolved

What the complaint alleges, in its own terms: that in the visa process for a child in her family, a minor, María Elena Ríos Ortiz presented herself as his mother, when his mother is another person. That two birth records exist for the same child, with different parentage. And that this documentation was used before the United States consulate.

The complaint also asks for a review of the respondent's own visa. Her previous one, issued in 2012, expired in June 2022. In March 2026 she posted from New York about her participation in the 70th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. In other words, she now travels on a later visa. The question the complaint asks is what she declared to obtain it.

The complaint also includes a file that third parties provided about a travel paperwork agency she allegedly ran: school letters, bank statements and employment letters bearing stamps of banks, schools and authorities which, according to those who provided it, were produced so clients could obtain visas. That file has not been validated by any authority. I submitted it as an exhibit so the competent authority can validate it or discard it.

What I do not know, and I say so: whether the State Department or USCIS opened an investigation. The authorities have not said whether they did, and as a rule they do not tell the complainant. Nor do I publish the child's name or any detail that identifies him. If the complaint is true, he is the least to blame for any of this.

Uncorroborated testimony

What follows is the written account of a son of Juan Antonio Vera Carrizal. It is the testimony of an interested party. It has no independent corroboration and I know of no criminal complaint over these events. I publish it with that label and with room for reply.

According to his account, as the case against his father was beginning, a sister of the victim approached him to "settle this matter." She met him in downtown Huajuapan. She asked how much he was willing to pay for the case to end and told him many politicians backed them and his father would never get out. The figure, he says, was fourteen million pesos, and she attributed it to a prior conversation with "Malé."

He answered that he did not have that money and asked whether, in that case, she would testify before the prosecutor or a judge that his father had not been involved. According to his account, the answer was no: everything would be done "under the table," quietly, because of what feminists, the government and those who gave them financial support would say.

There was, he says, a second meeting, which he attended with a lawyer. There the figure went up. With her fingers she signaled a three and an eight: thirty-eight million pesos.

If the account is true, it describes extortion. If it is false, it describes slander. Either way, it is not for an essay to decide. It is for a prosecutor. That is why the natural place for this account is a criminal complaint with a name and a signature, not just a document handed to a journalist.

On January 24, 2025, at the opening of the Mitla Tehuantepec highway and in front of President Claudia Sheinbaum, María Elena Ríos took the microphone: "I give up, Governor. You and Juan Antonio Vera Carrizal win."

Oaxaca's Executive is not financially neutral either. On August 24, 2022, the state government reported it had spent 2,692,263.41 pesos in emergency support for her and her family, under the General Victims Law and following CNDH Recommendation 28/2022. It is spending the law requires and I do not question it.

I note it for another reason. The same power that pays for the victim's care is the one that, two years later, publicly discredited the judge who acquitted the defendant. In this case file, the government is not the referee. It is a party.

And the weakest party in that equation is her. A victim whose cause depends on the Governor is at the Governor's mercy. She said so herself in Mitla, with a borrowed microphone.

The text of the complaint is not published: it contains a minor's data. It is provided to the competent authority or to anyone with a legal interest.