142.
As to the activities of the interested parties, the Commission finds nothing whatever in the
record to suggest that the relatives obstructed the proceeding or could be blamed in any way for the delay. On
the contrary, despite it being an investigation that the State had an ex officio obligation to pursue, the family
participated actively in the process by providing statements, suggesting lines of inquiry, and repeatedly
complaining about the delay in the proceedings and about the long periods of procedural inaction. It is worth
noting, in fact, that the special inquiry procedure was activated at the family's behest.
143.
As to the conduct of the judicial authorities, the Commission has already established in this
report that there was a breach of the obligation to act with due diligence in all the proceedings instituted. In
that regard, the Commission reiterates the above-described omissions and inactvity. Specifically, what limited
steps were taken in the first months following the disappearance grew progressively fewer thereafter and
eventually slumped into prolonged bouts of inactivity. Thus, there was minimal follow-up in 2001 and for the
whole of 2002 and 2003 the prosecutor assigned to the case simply enumerated pending measures which,
based on the record, do not appear to have been carried out. For 2004, there is only a police report that
mentions a new possible line of inquiry connected with discoveries of alleged corruption at the University
Between 2005 and 2007, the prosecutor again merely reported a number of pending measures without any
record that they were actually carried out. Apart from the attempt to locate Ms. Gutiérrez's supposed former
partner and the multiple continuance requests by the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman for submitting
its report, which were granted over the course of many years without any oversight whatsoever, there is no
evidence in the record of any follow-up until 2013, the report on the special inquiry procedure was issued, 12
years after it began. At this writing, the investigation remains open without any significant progress made.
144.
The Commission finds, based on the preceding paragraph, that it is clear that neither the
criminal investigation, nor the habeas corpus petitions, nor the special inquiry procedure were conducted
with the due diligence required of the authorities in charge of the domestic proceedings in this case. The
IACHR recalls that in cases of alleged disappearance, only if the State has made every effort necessary by all
available means to uncover the truth of the victim's fate and whereabouts, will it be considered that an
effective remedy has been provided.192
145.
The lack of due diligence in the case was not only exposed on multiple occasions by relatives
of Mayra Angelina Gutiérrez,193but also by state authorities and external actors. For example, the Commission
notes that on May 24, 2000, the Chief of the Juveniles and Missing Persons Section of the National Civil Police
admitted that “a lot of information has leaked, which has hampered the investigation.” Likewise, the
Commission draws attention to the report of the Human Rights Ombudsman of July 31, 2000, in which he
concluded that "the omission on the part of the relevant authority in failing to guarantee the the missing
woman’s safety constitutes a violation of human rights." Consequently, the Ombudsman said that the State
bore institutional responsibility and he demanded that it “organize all the government apparatus (…) to
ensure their ability to determine [her] whereabouts and if there should be anyone to blame for any
wrongdoing, that the full penalty of the law be applied to them.”
146.
Regarding the fourth element, the Court has said that, in the analysis of reasonableness of
time the adverse effect of the duration of the proceedings on the judicial situation of the person involved in it
192 I/A Court H.R., Case of Ticona Estrada et al v. Bolivia. Merits, Reparations and Costs. Judgment of November 27, 2008. Series
C No. 191, par. 80. See, also, IACHR, Report No. 111/09, Case 11.324, Merits, Narciso González Medina, Dominican Republic, November
10, 2009, par. 225.
193 Thus, Ms. Gutiérrez's relatives said that since presenting their complaint, the State had not taken the minimum steps to
establish her whereabouts, uncover the facts, and punish those responsible in keeping with lines of investigation that logically followed
from the statements and reports contained in the judicial record. In that respect, the IACHR notes that on May 18, 2000, a sister and the
daughter of Ms. Gutiérrez announced, following a meeting with the Prosecutor General, that there had been no progress in the
investigation and that the Public Prosecution Service and the National Civil Police had acted independently without coordinating their
efforts. Furthermore, Mario Polanco, the representative of Ms. Gutiérrez's relatives, stated in a hearing before the Criminal Division on
December 7, 2000, that the Public Prosecution Service had not provided them with information about the investigations pursued. He
added that the only hypothesis that the authorities were considering was that Mayra Angelina Gutiérrez had supposedly run off to
Mexico.
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