Death by machete in Orange Walk

It was one of those weekends when you hope there’s a new roll of paper in the fax machine, as the lines from Police headquarters in Belmopan were buzzing fast and furious. The most dramatic news involved a case of murder in Orange Walk. Twenty five year old Guatemalan Martha Magdalena Garcia told police that on Saturday night around seven thirty three men came to her home, located on a farm on the San Lorenzo Road. They asked for her husband, a Mexican named Marco Cruz. She claims that when Cruz refused the visitors’ request to go to a neighboring village to buy some weed he was viciously chopped in the head and face, and later died of his injuries. But this case is a little more complicated than an argument over drugs. Details are sketchy but it seems that one of the assailants was Martha’s former common law husband, Mexican Arturo de la Cruz Hernandez. Police are looking for the three men but believe they may have slipped across the Mexican border. According to Martha Garcia this was the third time that a man living with her has been murdered.