This entry covers two sisters. Delfina Gonzalez Valenzuela, born around 1912, and Maria de Jesus Gonzalez ran a series of brothels in San Francisco del Rincon, in Guanajuato, from the 1940s. Two further sisters, Carmen and Luisa, were involved at different times. In Mexico they are known collectively as Las Poquianchis.
The business ran on recruitment by deception. Advertisements offered domestic work; young women who answered were taken to the brothel, held, and put to work. Those who became ill, pregnant, unprofitable or defiant were killed and buried in the grounds, along with infants born on the premises and clients who had arrived carrying money.
The premises were protected for years by payments to local police, which is the reason the case ran as long as it did. It ended in January 1964 when a woman who had escaped, and the mother of a missing girl, made complaints that could not be quietly filed.
The excavation of the property recovered eighty-plus sets of remains; the figure carried here, ninety-one, is the number the investigation settled on. Because the burials were shallow, unmarked and years old, the count is an archaeological estimate rather than a list of identified victims, and few of the dead were ever named.
The sisters were convicted in 1964 and each sentenced to forty years. Delfina died in prison on October 17, 1968 after an accident on the premises. Maria de Jesus completed her sentence and disappeared from the record on release.
The case is one of the most widely known in Mexico and has been filmed several times. The part that has stayed in the argument there is not the number but the protection: a house from which women did not come out operated in a small town for something close to two decades.