For the past three years, Candela Jalabert has been searching for audio recordings to hear her older sister’s voice again. Agostina, 31, was murdered on February 18, 2023, in an apartment in Playa del Carmen that she shared at the time with her partner, Juan Manuel Reverter. The Argentine model’s body showed signs of torture and sexual violence, yet the Quintana Roo Prosecutor’s Office treated the case as a suicide for months.
Reverter—who was never even questioned—vanished. It was Agostina’s family that fought tirelessly to have the case investigated as a femicide, that filed a complaint against the Quintana Roo prosecutor for negligence, and that spent three years tracking the trail Reverter left across the United States, where he had fled after the crime.
This summer, the Argentine man was arrested in Oregon during an operation involving Interpol. Because his immigration status was not in order, he is currently being held at an ICE detention center in Tacoma—near Seattle—awaiting transfer to Mexico to finally face justice. “It was what we always fought for. For her,” said Candela Jalabert.
The police file was a jumble of clues and a trail of errors. The Quintana Roo Prosecutor’s Office ignored Reverter’s history of violence against Agostina; it disregarded the signs of torture and sexual assault on her body; it overlooked the implausibility of a 1.66-meter-tall woman hanging herself from a one-meter-high towel rack while her feet touched the floor; and it failed to process the scratches and signs of a struggle visible on Juan Manuel Reverter.
Nor was any alarm raised by the accounts of security guards and neighbors who reported a fight lasting hours and the sound of blows—“as if someone were throwing a person around and things were breaking.” Despite all this, the state agency classified the case as a suicide, took a brief statement from Reverter—in which he claimed Agostina had “mental health issues”—and let him go.
“It was very hard,” Candela Jalabert recalls now. “I was alone in Mexico, and the whole process was a nightmare: falsified statements, or obvious details of great importance that were simply glossed over. They were trying to cover up what had clearly happened by labeling it a suicide.” The family never had any doubts: Reverter had killed Agostina.
