Report Urges More FBI Involvement to Solve Border Slayings
LOS ANGELES -- The Mexican government should seek more help from the FBI to end the killing of hundreds of women in the rough border town of Ciudad Juarez, according to a report released Tuesday by the University of California, Los Angeles' Chicano Studies Research Center.
The report said Mexico City should expand its invitation to the FBI to include its participation in investigations, moving beyond just training Mexican law enforcement personnel.
"It's imperative to end this deadly epidemic of violence against women and girls on the U.S.-Mexico border, and to get at the root of the silence that has protected the perpetrators for 10 years," said professor Alicia Gaspar de Alba, author of "The Maquiladora Murders, Or, Who is Killing the Women of Juarez, Mexico?"
The report analyzed the deaths of more than 320 women who were kidnapped and murdered in the border town across from El Paso, Texas, over the past 10 years.
The report also examined the murder count discrepancies tallied since 1993. The Chihuahua state attorney general's office estimated that 252 women were killed from 1993-2002, while an investigation by the El Paso Times found that 320 women were slain during the same time period.
The actual number of victims may be more than twice as high, Gaspar de Alba said, since the El Paso, Texas-based Coalition against Violence toward Women and Families on the Border estimates that at least 400 additional women are still missing in Juarez.
"This discrepancy in the numbers adds to the general confusion that surrounds the crimes, which mystifies activists and authorities alike, increasing the sense that these cases are impossible to solve," Gaspar de Alba said.
The study also focused on Mexico's penal code definitions of rape and sexual abuse and concluded that if rape laws were strengthened more of the murders would be considered rape cases as well.
The report said that 98 of the slayings have been classified as rape-murders by Mexican authorities.
More than half of the victims worked or were seeking employment at a border manufacturing-for-export plants known as maquiladoras, according to the study. Gaspar de Alba called on the Maquiladora Association and U.S.-owned companies in Juarez to implement more security for workers.
Amnesty International earlier this month released a report accusing Mexican police of falsifying and mishandling evidence and using torture in its investigations of the sexually motivated killings. Chihuahua state prosecutors denied the torture allegations and promised to investigate how evidence has been handled.
Bodies have been found left in the desert after being strangled, mutilated and even torched. Many remains were mere skeletons when they were discovered, making those cases harder to solve.
There have been more than a dozen arrests over the years, but only one man has been convicted, for killing one of the first victims.
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