Pubdate: Sat, 01 Jun 2013
Source: Arizona Republic (Phoenix, AZ)
Copyright: 2013 The Arizona Republic
Contact: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/sendaletter.html
Website: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/24
Authors: Richard Ruelas, Anne Ryman

JAILED MOTHER A CAUSE CELEBRE

Media Blitz Helped Get Arizonan Freed

After spending more than a week in a Mexican jail facing 
drug-smuggling accusations, the woman who had become the center of a 
social-media and news-media storm returned home to metro Phoenix even 
as her case turned into a political lightning rod.

Early Friday morning, she and her family crossed the border into 
Arizona. There, by day's end, a congressman had called for an 
investigation into the case, suggesting someone planted the 12 pounds 
of pot that was found under the woman's seat on a Mexican bus, and a 
Mexico governor had apologized for the incident.

The woman at the center of it all, Yanira Maldonado, 42, smiled 
frequently and looked vibrant during an interview Friday night, but 
her eyes welled with tears at times as she recalled her nine days in jail.

"It's a situation I wouldn't wish on anyone," she said. "You don't 
have control. You're behind bars. You don't have your freedom."

Maldonado, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day 
Saints, said she passed the time in jail praying and reading 
scripture with other inmates from a copy of the Book of Mormon she 
found at the jail. On Sunday, she said, she also led several other 
inmates in a fast.

Maldonado told and 12 News that she credited her release to a 
combination of public pressure, evidence "and the heavenly father."

"The heavenly father is the one who answered my prayers and the faith 
that I had," she said.

The couple's first wedding anniversary was last Saturday, a day she 
spent behind bars.

"We'll have to make it up," her husband, Gary Maldonado, said at a 
Friday news conference.

Maldonado was freed Thursday evening in Nogales, Sonora, walking into 
Gary's arms for an extended embrace on the jailhouse steps.

The two live in Goodyear and have seven children between them from 
previous marriages. The couple said they had traveled to Mexico for a 
funeral. On May 22, they were returning to Arizona by bus. At a 
military checkpoint in Hermosillo, Sonora, soldiers entered the bus 
to search it. All passengers were ordered off, and their luggage was X-rayed.

Soldiers reported finding taped-up bundles of marijuana attached with 
metal hooks to the undersides of two seats. The people sitting 
closest to the bundles of drugs, the soldiers determined, were the 
Maldonados, the only two U.S. citizens aboard. At first, authorities 
arrested Gary. Then, he said, they came to his cell and told him he 
was free to go because they suspected his wife, instead.

What followed was the stuff of tourism nightmares: The couple were 
caught up in another country's unfamiliar legal system that offered 
no easy path out.

While a Mexican court weighed the case, a crescendo of public opinion 
grew on the U.S. side of the border.

The Maldonados turned to the media - social and traditional - to get 
the word out. Relatives spread word through Twitter. Yanira's 
children and relatives gave interviews, at first locally, then to 
national networks.

The cause also enlisted Arizona politicians. U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon 
and U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake provided telephonic diplomacy. Calls from 
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer kept Maldonado in a detention center near the 
border, an official said, rather than being moved to one farther in-country.

Salmon, who had been a member of the same LDS ward as relatives of 
the Maldonados near Washington, D.C., said mutual friends of the 
family alerted him to the case last weekend.

Salmon, who is the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on 
the Western Hemisphere, said he figured it was his role both as 
friend and congressman to do something.

He worked the phones starting Monday, calling the U.S. ambassador to 
Mexico and, the next day, the Mexican ambassador in the U.S.

"I told (the Mexican ambassador) that I know the family very well, 
they're good people," Salmon said. "I don't understand why your 
people have arrested her. And I'm demanding you personally insert 
yourself and find out what the problem is and help us out."

On television, the stories were accompanied by luminous wedding 
photos outside the Mormon Temple in Mesa.

A break came eight days later. Family members said surveillance 
footage shown to a judge Thursday captured Maldonado boarding the bus 
carrying her purse, a blanket and some water bottles, with no bundles 
of pot in sight. The judge granted her release hours later.

Salmon said public pressure - the news coverage, the tweets, the 
phone calls from U.S. officials - led to Maldonado's move into cozier 
quarters near the jail warden's office and to her eventual release.

Salmon said the incident had the earmarks of a set-up, that maybe 
Mexican law-enforcement agents wanted to arrest U.S. citizens so they 
could arrange bribes. Salmon said that he had no evidence of this but 
that he has heard similar anecdotes from several Arizonans who have 
traveled through Mexico.

Salmon said he wants to hold a hearing on the congressional 
subcommittee he chairs.

"I'm going to do everything I can to expose this. It stinks to high 
heaven," he said. "I want to hear from anyone in America pulled over 
and shaken down by police (in Mexico)."

In the Friday interview, Maldonado said that she didn't believe she 
was framed but that Mexico's justice system "needs to be fixed somehow."

The U.S. State Department addressed Maldonado's release in its Friday 
briefing in Washington. "We appreciate the efforts on the part of the 
Mexican authorities to ensure that a decision was made in accordance 
with Mexican law," said Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman.

The State Department does issue travel advisories to Mexico. The one 
on its website Friday advised tourists that "Sonora is a key region 
in the international drug and human trafficking trades and can be 
extremely dangerous for travelers."

It also cautioned against driving off main highways or at night. It 
did not offer caution about buses.

The governor of Sonora, Guillermo Padres Elias, was in Phoenix on 
Friday for a previously scheduled event with Brewer. He used the 
occasion to apologize for the incident.

"We're very sorry that that happened to her, that she was in the 
wrong place at the wrong time," Padres Elias said. "She can always 
come to Sonora. I'd like to meet her and tell her personally that 
we're sorry that happened to her."

Padres Elias said that tourists from Arizona will still be welcomed 
and protected. "We see you as family, so we want to continue with 
that," he said.

Some posts on social-media sites, including Twitter, had urged people 
to boycott Mexico until Maldonado was released. Had she been 
convicted, she faced 10 years in prison.

Padres Elias said the soldiers boarding the bus are fighting drug 
trafficking and are not in the business of planting drugs. He said 
that in this case, it just took some time for the evidence to come 
out and Maldonado to be released.

"I can't judge the judicial systems or how our constitutions operate 
in each country," he said, saying he had seen friends spend months in 
U.S. jails for less serious matters.

Padres Elias said he also feels the tightness of security at the 
border when he crosses into Arizona. "I get my car torn apart and put 
back together," he said. "And I understand that you're protecting 
your country, that's your laws, and I understand that."

Brewer said she was "very grateful" that Mexican officials moved the 
case "so swiftly and quickly."

"As Americans, we all know that our precious constitutional rights 
don't extend beyond our nation's border," Brewer said.

Maldonado was met by a mob of media as she walked out of custody on 
Thursday evening. She gave an impromptu news conference in front of 
the detention center. And then another 2:30 a.m. news conference by 
the pool of a Nogales, Ariz., hotel.

On Friday night, she set up brief one-on-one interviews with a bevy 
of television crews at a hotel conference center in Avondale.

She said she plans to go back to Mexico in the future but not right away.

"My family is still there," she said. "It wouldn't be fair" not to go back.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom