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A hotel worker in Mexican tourist hotspot Tulum died after cops pinned her to the ground with a knee on her neck in a case being compared to the harrowing death of George Floyd.
Victoria Salazar, a 36-year-old mother of two teenage daughters, died March 27 when four officers arrested her for disorderly conduct, with an autopsy showing her neck had been broken.
Images of her final moments show her face down on the street with two of the officers leaning on her back and neck, El Pais said. A video published by news site Noticaribe also showed her writhing and crying out as she was pinned to the ground.
The case drew quick comparisons to the shocking death of 46-year-old dad Floyd in Minneapolis last May — although so far it has yet to spark similar outrage or mass protests, El Pais noted.
However, it quickly triggered a diplomatic spat with El Salvador, its Central American neighbor outraged at the death of one of its citizens, who fled gang violence there to move to Mexico five years ago, the outlet said.
On Saturday, all four officers — including one female cop — were charged with femicide, or the killing of a woman because of her gender.
Salazar died after “being subjected to excessive and disproportionate force” by the cops, the attorney general’s office of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo said. All four will remain behind bars for the duration of the trial, the prosecutors said.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Salazar had been subject to “brutal treatment and murdered” after her detention.
On Sunday, the day after the charges were announced, Salazar was laid to rest in a somber ceremony attended by around 50 of her friends and relatives in colonial Sonsonate in her homeland.
“We want justice! We hope this is resolved because everyone saw how my sister was murdered,” said one of Salazar’s brothers, Carlos Salazar.
Another brother, René Olivares, told El Pais that the family only found out how their loved one died after seeing Facebook videos of the fatal arrest, which he initially thought “could be a scam, a bad joke.”
Now, “when I see the video I feel immense pain, a lot of helplessness that I was not there to help her.
“But even though I feel bad that it is being shared, it is necessary for people to see it. We don’t want something like this to happen again,” Olivares told El Pais.
Other footage showed Salazar in an agitated state when the officers arrived, with witness Amelia Magaña saying she saw her “throwing herself at cars.”
“I just know that no matter how she was acting, she didn’t deserve to die that way,” Magaña told the outlet.
With Post wires
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