Murders Keep Americans North Of Border
El Paso, Texas
Karla Gaspar de Alba's friends hardly go over to neighboring Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, anymore.
News reports about a string of horrific murders of young women are keeping them on the US side of the border.
"I tell them it's okay to go as long as you're careful," says Gaspar, 23, an El Paso bartender who grew up in Juarez and continues to cross the border twice a week. She says she knows better than to walk alone on the streets of her hometown or to accept a ride from a stranger.
"I'm not saying it couldn't happen to me, but it's more likely to be the girls from the factories," she said.
Several factory workers have been among the scores of women killed in Juarez since 1993. Many disappeared en route to their shantytown homes from the foreign-owned assembly plants known as maquiladoras.
Juarez has seen at least 54 sex murders, among many more slayings of women, in the last six years. Most victims were strangled or stabbed and then dumped in the surrounding desert.
A flurry of newspaper and television reporters over the past few months has drawn international attention to the killings. Just recently the murders made their way into newspapers across the US when Mexican police arrested five men, four of them bus drivers for maquiladora workers.
Four of the men, including one from El Paso, were ordered last week to stand trial on murder and rape charges in the deaths of seven women.
The case is hardly closed: All of the men say they were tortured into confessing, and prosecutors have said more killers likely are out there.
The publicity has some Juarez restaurant managers and merchants worried that fewer Americans will cross the border to dine and shop.
"That's a concern that we all have," said Luis Estaco, a vendor at the City Market, a giant warehouse with aisles and aisles of blankets, jewelry, leather goods and handmade crafts. "Any negative output affects us greatly."
Guillermo Quinones, floor managers at the tourist-oriented Chihuahua Charlie's, said these days his restaurant is less crowded after dark.
"At night we all have fewer tourists," he said.
Unlike people from across the border, Quinones said, locals are accustomed to violent crime.
It wasn't long ago that a drug war engulfed the city, resulting in the deaths of at least two dozen people in 1997 and early 1998. In one shooting at a restaurant, gunmen brandishing semiautomatic weapons killed six people.
As for the women's murders, Quinones said: "The tourists don't need to worry because nothing will be done to them. The people who have turned up dead, it's a cycle of a lower class."
Copyright 1999 The Associated Press