Man handed 50 years in jail for murder of public official wife
Guatemala City, Oct 11 (EFE).- A court in Guatemala sentenced Jorge Zea Mejía to 50 years in prison on Tuesday for the 2021 femicide his wife Luz María López, a public ministry worker.
“I am satisfied because they gave him the maximum sentence and this can serve so that the violence that exists in Guatemala is not ignored,” the victim’s mother Ada Morales told reporters after hearing the court’s sentence.
The Second Femicide Court handed down the maximum sentence of 50 years in prison against Zea, who had been in preventive detention since January 2021.
The court described his crime as “despicable”: López was strangled by her partner and her body was burned with gasoline while she still had vital signs, according to the sentence read by Judge Héctor Rosales.
The body of López, 25, was found on Jan. 22, 2021, in a drain near her workplace in downtown Guatemala City.
She worked as an investigation technician in youth and childhood cases in the Guatemalan Prosecutor’s Office.
At the discretion of the court, the public ministry was able to determine, through the collection of security videos, the movements of Mejía’s vehicle on the day that López disappeared.
Morales said that her three-year-old granddaughter, daughter of López, is the reason for her strength to move forward and close this cycle after the conviction.
In Guatemala, 401 women were murdered between January and August 2022, a figure that represents a 20 percent increase compared to 2021.
During the first eight months of 2022, the Public Ministry registered 45,996 crimes against women and girls in the Central American country. EFE
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