Accused killer of student who vanished after using Chinese ride-share app says he turned himself in 'out of fear'

The main suspect in the killing of a Mexican education student last week has turned himself in, saying he fled the scene "out of fear" and that he and his family had been threatened.

Sergio Gutiérrez was driving a car for Chinese ride-hailing app DiDi last Monday night when he took a request from 23-year-old Paola Bañuelos, who was leaving a bar in the city of Meixcaly, close to the U.S.-Mexico border. That was the last time she was seen alive.

Bañuelos' body was found three days later, on Thursday, with signs of violence, according to the Times of San Diego. Gutiérrez, on his end, told local media that "people don't really know what happened." "They have ideas, they send threats," he said before turning himself in to law enforcement.

Bañuelos' has garnered public attention in the country, where thousands of women are killed as a result of gender-based violence every year. Over 3,000 women were murdered last year alone, but activists claim that the figure is much higher and accused the outgoing government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly known as AMLO) of downplaying statistics.

According to the UN Women, femicides, defined by the international body as an intentional killing with a gender-related motivation, accounts for 25% of the investigations into the killings of women and girls in Mexico.

In 2023, 848 women were confirmed to be victims of such crimes in the country. However, police investigations into gender-based violence have oftentimes suggested suicide or reckless homicide instead of femicide, UN Women added. Because of this, many causes of death could have been wrongly attributed when they could potentially be femicide, according to the international body.

Incoming President Claudia Sheinbaum is set to take office in October as the first-ever woman to hold the country's highest office, but feminist organizations have shown skepticism about this changing the situation for women in the country.

During her time as mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum oversaw harsh police crackdowns on feminist protest movements. She is also AMLO's protegé, making it unlikely she will stray much from the current government's policies.

Sheinbaum has said that cases of femicide dropped significantly during the leadership of López Obrador. "The national femicide rates have gone down more than 40%," then-candidate Sheinbaum said in April 2024 during the first presidential debate.

To substantiate her claims, Sheinbaum presented a graph from the federal Secretary of Security showing a supposed drop in femicide rates. However, the graph compares different months and not years, and is without context, according to fact checkers at Animal Politico. The image also ignores that 2021 was the year with the most femicide victims since 2015.