TIJUANA -- At the age of 17 she is addicted to the tranquilizers she takes to deal with the pain of having been sexually abused for five years by a trusted family friend.

A state-ordered psychological evaluation determined that she showed symptoms of an emotional disorder.

Even though she told her mother about the abuse, the woman never believed her daughter.

The teen-ager reported the crime with a friend's help. In her statement she said that the abuse became more intense over time until it included rape. She stated that her abuser at times beat her and forced her to drink alcoholic beverages laced with tranquilizers.

José Luis Guevara López, 55, was arrested July 11 in the low-income, eastern barrio of El Pípila and charged with sexually abusing the teen for five years.

This is one of the 109 rape cases the state Attorney General's Office has logged during the first six months of the year in Tijuana, 43 more than the same period last year, a 39.4 percent increase.

Deputy prosecutor Martha Imelda Almanza, who heads the agency's Tijuana office, said in an interview that it's not clear if the increase is due to victims feeling safer to come forward to denounce their tormentors or if there have been more rapes.

The city's east side – made up of fifty impoverished neighborhoods that have a population of about a million people – has registered a 26 percent increase in serious crime in the first six months of the year, including robbery and rape, state authorities reported.

Just last week, authorities announced the arrest of a U.S. citizen who was accused of raping two women in eastern Tijuana.

Almanza acknowledged that the number of rapes reported does not reflect the frequency of the crime saying, "there is an unknown dark figure."

The state Attorney General's Office has stepped up outreach in the city's east side and has seen the number of rapes reported there go up, particularly by women who had been afraid to come forward or felt that nothing would be done, Almanza said.

The victims are mostly young, although in some cases women in their sixties reported having been raped. The rapist is generally a person who has a relationship with the victim, who is a family member, caretaker or friend.

That's one of the reasons victims are afraid to report the crime for fear that the rapist will harm a loved one, said Almanza.

She said that rape cases are often related to neglect or even homicide.

For two years, state authorities have analyzed cases of sexual abuse and rape in Tijuana to identify patterns in the attacks, common characteristics of the aggressors, areas of greatest risk and the hours victims are most vulnerable, among other factors, to be able to warn the population and to help in investigations.

And investigators need all the help they can get since authorities in Mexico have a maximum of three days to file a rape charge, unless the suspect is caught in the act.

Almanza said that her office has a 97 percent rate of conviction in rape cases that are investigated and prosecuted, with sentences ranging up to 17 years in prison (the maximum penalty is 22 years).

omar.millan@sandiegored.com