Rosa Franco Sandoval strode through a suburban grocery store, picking through shelves and checking prices. She looked, in her own estimation, unremarkable — a 62-year-old, a mother, a grandmother, an immigrant.
They could not know that, just the night before, Franco was honored by the Guatemalan government and received a formal apology from the country’s president for the role of officials in delaying and botching the investigation into her daughter’s disappearance.
Franco fled her home country out of fear of retaliation after years of agitating for improvements to the Guatemalan justice system and its handling of violence against women and girls. She now lives in the D.C. area with her two adult sons and their families.
Franco’s story is little known in the Washington region, where she has lived for three years. But in her home country — and in Central American human rights circles — the case that spurred her to action is widely recognized.
“It’s been 23 years, and every year has been difficult,” Franco said in Spanish. “There are so many adverse situations that I have had to go through with my family to seek justice for our María Isabel.”
María Isabel Véliz Franco was 15 years old when she went missing. She left to go to work at a clothing store on Dec. 16, 2001, her mother recalled. Franco never saw her daughter alive again.
When the girl didn’t return home as expected, Franco reported her daughter missing to the police. She later said officials told her not enough time had passed to merit an investigation. She called them back more than a dozen times, she said, begging someone to do something. Two days later, the teenager’s mutilated body was found.
The gruesome memory of her daughter’s remains — the last image she has of her child — still weighs heavily on Franco and her family. She has mentally carried it with her to testify before governments and to champion the creation of the 2016 Isabel-Claudina alert — a national alert system instituted to respond to the disappearances of Guatemalan women and girls more quickly. The alert, which is sent out six hours after a disappearance, is named after Franco’s daughter and another teenager, Claudina Velásquez Paiz, who was 19 when she was killed in 2005.
Denise Woods, the founding director of Food Justice DMV, a volunteer collective that provides food and other essentials to immigrant communities around the D.C. area, said she met Franco the way she meets most of her clients: via text message. Franco reached out asking for help feeding her family.
“A fight like this has consequences,” Franco said. “I graduated in my country as a lawyer. Here, I have nothing. That makes me sad — not just for me, but for my children, and my family, who also had to start over.”
As Franco’s story unspooled, Woods said her own disbelief grew.
She went online to search for Franco’s name, and found story after story detailing the grieving mother’s crusade. In 2021, after nearly 20 years, Franco witnessed her daughter’s murderer sentenced to 30 years in prison.
“This woman won Woman of the Year in Guatemala a few years ago and now here she is texting me, asking for food,” Woods said. “It just didn’t make sense. I was flabbergasted.”
On Tuesday, Woods accompanied Franco to the government ceremony. She snapped pictures of Franco as she sat at a long cloth-draped table at the Organization of American States office in the District. Woods cheered through her remarks and marveled at the strength it clearly took to sit flanked by government officials from a country Franco has said she was forced to flee for her own safety.
“The Rosa and Goliath story was playing out right there in front of my eyes,” Woods said. “There was the literal president of Guatemala apologizing to her and her family, saying she not only fought for justice for her daughter for 20 years, got her perpetrator locked up after decades and then got the government to apologize. I have literally never seen anything like it.”
In an act signed by Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo, who spoke in person at the ceremony as part of his diplomatic trip to Washington, the Guatemalan government offered an official apology to Franco and her family. The public acknowledgment satisfies part of a 2014 Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling that condemned Guatemala for violating the human rights of Franco’s daughter and ordered the nation to apologize to her family.
But Arévalo said the apology was not “a forced act, a simple act of compliance with a sentence.”
“This is a sincere act, an honest act, particularly aimed at dignifying the historical memory of the victims as well as those of their families,” Arévalo said in Spanish. “The extent to which human rights are respected and considered fundamental to all institutions of the state is how we are building a true democracy.”
For Franco and her family, the apology — 23 years and seven presidential administrations after the crime occurred — was not enough.
“At least we saw a good attitude from the president and the government, yes. But there is a lot more to do,” Franco’s son, Jose Roberto Franco, 33, said in Spanish. “There’s really nothing they can say that will give back or replace my sister’s life, right? So at least this was something that calms our souls a little, that honors our María Isabel, and honors the family, too.”
According to the Washington Office on Latin America, an independent research and advocacy organization, Guatemala has the highest rate of femicides in Central America and despite recent reforms, including those led by Franco, more than two-thirds of those cases remain unsolved. Advocates like Franco remain at risk of retaliation and imprisonment, experts said, and more than a dozen women have been forced into exile for their anti-corruption work.
“A series of intolerable practices by various officials of past governments accounted for misogynistic practices, gender-based stereotypes and attacks on freedom and life that, in turn, constituted discrimination and neglect of constitutional obligations,” Oswaldo Samayoa, the executive director of the Presidential Commission for Peace and Human Rights said in Spanish at the ceremony. “Ms. Rosa, I know that you have been part of this fight. … Here we are. We will never forget, and we will continue working.”
Franco, too, plans to continue working.
Much of her continued advocacy for human rights improvements in Latin America is remote — though she has also begun getting more involved in helping migrants in the Washington region. She is taking English classes and has set her sights on finding a foundation to join or, she said, perhaps starting an advocacy group of her own.
“I have been consumed by so many emotions this week,” Franco said. “Nostalgia and sadness, feeling satisfied that after 23 years, as a mother, I have done everything I could do, and I still have time left. But I am also sad always because my daughter is not here.”
