CONNIE WATSON
Why Brenda Martin is in a Mexican jail
March 18, 2008
Canadian Brenda Martin has been in a Mexican jail for two years. (CBC)
When I first met Brenda Martin last fall, she was escorted into the interview room at the Puente Grande women's prison in Guadalajara wearing an eye-catching, crocheted, hot-pink skullcap. A matching purse set off her short white skirt.
Her finger and toenails were polished a matching shade of bright pink. She had recently been crowned queen of the inmates, at least for those over age 40.
Back then, Martin, 51, was exercising every day. She was also reading a book a day and making her own nutritional food as she waited for her criminal case to make its way through the Mexican legal system.
She's still waiting. But now she is barely hanging on.
In the space of about six months, Martin has become skin and bones. Her sunken eyes are dulled by the drugs she takes to combat anxiety. She says she is having a nervous breakdown and "hanging by a very, very little thread."
She says she cannot concentrate long enough to read, she has to force herself to eat and she has lost her will to exercise — even lost her will to live. She is begging to come back to Canada so she can see her mother and get psychiatric help.
The case drags on
The judge in her case says he knows Brenda Martin is growing desperate with the length of time her legal process is taking. However, because she's a foreigner who requires translation of legal documents and testimony from out-of-country witnesses, her case is taking longer than the one year it would normally take a Mexican charged with the same crimes.
Martin is charged with money laundering in connection with the activities of her former employer, who is serving a 10-year jail sentence in the United States for internet fraud. He has said she had no knowledge of his scheme.
Justice Luis Nunez Sandoval is aware the Canadian government is concerned about Martin's case. The Canadian consul came to see him last week.
Nunez said he told the consul that he could not say whether his verdict would be favourable to Martin because all the evidence isn't yet in.
The court translator has until the end of March to translate the remaining documents. Martin's defence has the next 30 days to respond. Then the judge has up to 30 working days to hand down his decision. So, Martin's verdict should be rendered by mid-June at the latest and may come quicker if political pressure continues to build.
Nunez points out that Martin's criminal proceedings have been at a standstill for the past five months because her Canadian lawyer filed an amparo, which is similar to an injunction in Canadian courts, to have her case thrown out on the grounds her human rights were violated when she was arrested and charged.
Martin was taken from her home by federal police who told her she needed to make one more declaration against her former boss, and that she would be home the next day. Instead they charged her with money laundering and being part of a criminal organization, and she has been in jail ever since.
A gambit that didn't work
Martin's amparo was heard in a separate court system by a judge who ruled her human rights were not violated. The failed legal challenge was a gamble that didn't pay off for Martin and ended up costing her five months of waiting time in jail, while all other criminal proceedings against her were put on hold.
By the end of this week, she and her lawyer must decide whether to appeal that decision to a panel of three justices, or to return to her original criminal case.
The Canadian government says it is pressing the Mexican government to step in and speed up the legal proceedings. But Nunez says he has had no political pressure from his own government at all.
When Martin ventured down to Mexico in 1998, she moved to Puerto Vallarta, where she hung out with the English-speaking ex-pat community in the resort town. She did odd jobs and worked on building up a clientele for her cooking and catering work.
She says she was introduced to her now ex-boss, Alyn Waage, by a mutual friend at a bar
.Shortly after, Waage hired her to be the family chef. She only lasted 10 months before he fired her.
Martin says Mexican authorities are making her out to be the mastermind of an international fraud scam she knew nothing about.
She says she had no idea Waage was doing anything illegal in his Puerto Vallarta mansion. Mexican authorities, on the other hand, state in a court document that Martin had a "close relationship for a fair length of time" with Waage and "this leads to the supposition that she had some knowledge of the criminal activities in which her friend was engaged."
The paper trail
Waage is now in a U.S. jail for defrauding investors of $60 million. He has testified that he never told Martin anything because he was afraid she couldn't keep the information to herself.
As Martin tells it, she and Waage "drank an awful lot." "They would never tell me anything because they were afraid that if I knew, I would be off in some bar in Vallarta telling the tale about what was going on. That's why I was never told. Because they were afraid I would blab."
But it is the paper trail that is convincing Mexican authorities Martin was involved in the fraud.
When Waage fired her, he gave her a year's severance pay. She said she invested $10,000 of that into what she thought was his thriving legal business.
Then he was arrested. When Waage found out she put thousands of dollars into his internet investment scam, he was already in a Mexican jail. From his cellphone inside the prison, Waage told a sobbing Martin that he would give her back her money.
He said he didn't want a paper trail leading to a Mexican bank, in any event. But it was too late by that point.
Taking the money out of her account and putting it into Waage's company, then having it transferred back to her account made it appear to investigators that Martin was laundering the money.
The judge in her case says he is not allowed to discuss the details, nor the evidence Mexican prosecutors have compiled, because Martin has asked that the information not be made public.
Amnesty has long called for legal reforms
Meanwhile, sinking apparently into a deepening depression, Martin asks why the Mexican government seems bent on destroying her. She calls herself "a nobody" who is surrounded by mass murderers, baby killers and drug dealers.
There certainly are women in Puente Grande convicted of murder and drug trafficking, but there are also many others who, like Martin, have never been found guilty of any crime.
Just like her, they, too, are confused by the legal system that assumes they are guilty and forces them to invest time and money to prove their innocence.
It is a system that Amnesty International has been demanding be reformed for the past five years.
Amnesty says it has evidence of Mexicans being tortured into confessing to crimes they didn't commit. In a scathing assessment of the justice system here, Amnesty claims that those with money get better treatment than those who don't have any. And that women and indigenous Mexicans get treated worse than everyone else.
With that backdrop, it is easy to see why Brenda Martin's case is getting almost no public attention down here in Mexico. There are too many others going through the same legal nightmare.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Biography
Connie Watson is CBC Radio News Latin America correspondent, based in Mexico City. She recently completed a lengthy and dangerous posting in Iraq. Previously, she reported from Pakistan and Afghanistan, contributing extensively to CBC Radio's ground-breaking specials, Afghanistan: The Sky Cries Blood and Afghanistan: Threads of Hope. The former won a gold medal at the New York Festival and the prestigious United Nations award for international reporting.
Watson has reported extensively on environmental and scientific issues. Over the past 5 years, she was based in Calgary, travelling throughout the North American west and into the Arctic, to produce stories and documentaries on everything from the effects of global warming to the controversy over oil and gas exploration.
Prior to that, Watson worked as a national political reporter in CBC Radio's Parliamentary Bureau. She specialized in health and legal affairs as well as agricultural and environmental issues. She has also worked as a documentary producer for CBC Radio. She was foreign correspondent for NBC in London, England prior to joining the CBC.
Watson was born and raised in northern Alberta's Peace River country. She has studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and in Chile with the FOCAL fellowship.
