Men Killing Women In Juarez, Mexico, With Impunity
Women run a gauntlet from the maquiladoras to the slums where they live. For many women, the greatest crime is official neglect. Whether it is a demented serial killer or an angry husband, a woman's killer in Mexico is likely to live on in freedom.
"I think there are 200 or 300 men out there who have killed women"
by John Stackhouse
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico -
The most famous investigator in northern Mexico comes into her office, an hour late. Suly Ponce is special prosecutor in one of North America's biggest serial murder cases - six years of killing sprees that has claimed 182 women's lives in Ciudad Juarez.
Which may be why so few people in this, the most picturesque of Mexican border cities, take her seriously. The 35-year-old lawyer is considered a political flunky, a lightweight who got the job of ending the gruesome Juarez murders because of her close ties to the attorney-general of Chihuahua states. "Frivolous," is how one of the city's leading activists, Esther Chavez Cano, describes her. "This city is in constant violence," says Ms. Chavez, who runs Juarez's Rape Crisis Centre.
The critisms matter little to Ms. Ponce. She says she has cracked the murder mystery and put a group of men who were responsible behind bars. Juarez, she says confidently, is once again "a safe city for women".
Such conviction has alternately bewildered and infuriated women's groups, who believe the killings have not stopped. In addition to a serial killer, perhaps several, whom they believe are at large, there are any numbers of other attackers, products of Juarez's geography and macho culture.
Most of Juarez's female victims came from another place, drawn to the city by its flourishing maquiladoras, the export-processing zones that create up to 30,000 jobs a year. The factory workers are paid better and enjoy safer working conditions than they would almost anywhere else in Mexico, but at the end of each shift they must run a gauntlet of danger and sexual harassment back to the teeming slums where most of them live.
Many of the murder suspects also come from elsewhere, attracted to Juarez by its bright economic lights and then frustrated by the fact that no one gets rich, unless they're part of its $10-billion-a-year narcotis cartel.
A long stone's throw across the Rio Grande from Texas and New Mexico, the Mexican boomtown remains the model of machismo in a New World setting.
When the serial murders first emerged, local police blamed the victims for wearing short skirts and makeup, even though Ms. Chavez found the 74 per cent of the murdered women were wearing trousers. Downtown, strip joints line the main street, and only men seem to walk freely, usually in cowboy hats, jeans, and stretched corduroy shirts that make most of them look like overweight Mexican Marlboro men.
In overcrowded, ramshackled shantytowns cut into rock and dirt, gunfights are routine. Even in well-heeled restaurants, where assassinations are not uncommon, diners are advised not to sit with their backs to a door or window.
Narco-traficantes are celebrated in local music, as are narco-murders, the slaying of small-time traffickers and turncoats who run into the hundreds every year.
For many women, though, the greatest crime is official neglect. Whether it is a demented serial killer or an angry husband, a woman's killer in Mexico is likely to live on in freedom.
"I think there are 200 or 300 men out there who have killed women," says Ms. Chavez. "There's impunity, so it's attractive. It's easy to do. There is no law to protect women."
The dangers for Juarez's women are known all too well to 22-year-old Guillerma Gonzalez Torres, a former maquila worker. Her younger sister, Sagrario, was killed in April 1998 - raped, strangled and stabbed five times - on her way home from the morning shift at a General Electric factory, where she worked alongside her father and five sisters.
After the 17-year-old's body was found in the desert, two weeks after she disappeared, Ms. Gonzalez left the maquilas and former her own organization, Voices Without Echo, to campaign for justice. She said she has yet to see it.
"The cases we took up have not progressed one inch in terms of the investigation," Ms. Gonzalez says, sitting in her family's small house in the hills outside Juarez, overlooking the Rio Grande. "When we went to police as individuals, they accused the victims of acting irresponsibly. They said the victims did wrong things, like going out dancing at night. I can say in my sister's case, that is absolutely false. She did not know what the inside of a nightclub looked like."
Juarez's extraordinary violence is of great interest north of the border, to FBI agents and criminologists such as Candice Skrapec, who has been assisting Chihuahua officials in their investigations.
Research by the Calgary-born Ms. Skrapec, who is an expert at California State University, shows that of the 182 recorded victims, as many as 75 were sexually assaulted before their death. More than 30 were raped and killed by a group of three or four independent serial killers, she believes.
Over the last six years, Juarez has been rocked by a series of grotesque killings of women, an average of two a month. Scores were abducted while going home from work and taken to the badlands outside the city, where they were raped and strangled with belts, ropes, and shoelaces.
Some had their breasts slashed. A few were found tortured with sticks or poles. Several corpses were mutilated with acid or burning tires, and left to hungry coyotes.
The most bizarre theory behind some of the killings involves an Egyptian immigrant, Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif. Mexican police last March arrested four Juarez bus drivers and a narcotics trafficker and charged them with killing young women on behalf of Mr. Sharif - who is accused of ordering the murders by phone from his prison cell.
In October 1995, police arrest Mr. Sharif, a chemist, after a local prostitute had accused him of raping her in his Juarez home. He had moved from Egypt to the United States in the 1980s and worked for several oil companies before he was convicted twice of sexual assault in Gainesville, Fla., and sentenced to 12 years in jail for beating and raping his housekeeper.
Released after six years in prison, he moved to Juarez, and, according to police, became involved with a cocaine-trafficking gang known as the Rebels. After his arrest, Mr. Sharif was charged with 17 murders, and another six gang members were charged on related counts. State prosecutors bungled the evidence, however, and could only convince a judge to convict Mr. Sharif on one murder charge. More embarassing for the police, the killing spree continued while he and the other Rebels were in custody.
Only in 1998, just months before a state election and a full five years after the serial killings were first detected, did the Chihuahua government form a special crime unit to handle the cases. The new unit went through three directors in the first six months, before Ms. Ponce was appointed by a new state government.
After her arrival, authorities continued to play down the murder wave, referring to the culprits as "multiple murderers" rather than serial killers. But as local political pressure and international interest in the crimes grew, the government took action. The special prosecutor was given a staff of five lawyers and 20 police. Advice came from Ms. Skrapec, who spent last summer in Juarez, and the FBI, which sent a group of criminal profilers.
The investigation alleged that Mr. Sharif, using a cellular phone in prison, was able to continue his killing vicariously. After his arrest and closed trial, he allegedly paid a group of bus drivers - through Victor Rivera Morano, a drug trafficker known as El Narco - to rape and kill young women at random.
His is accused of paying each of the drivers $1,200 (U.S) if they killed at least two women within a month and sent him the victims' underwear and copies of newspaper articles describing the crimes.
"He wanted to shift the blame," says prosecutor Julia Yanez. "If he was in jail and the killings were still going, people would think there was another killer." The drivers are charged with seven murders, although more may be added as the investigation continues.
Ms. Ponce describes Mr. Sharif as a psychopath, adding that the four bus drivers, all in their 20s, were drug addicts. "Sharif, you have to understand, has been categorized as a highly intelligent person who uses his intelligence for destructive causes," she says.
The Mexican authorities have come this far on the smallest of budgets and little training - police here are required to provide their own bullets - but it is probably safe to say that little of their evidence, drawn mainly from statements given during police interrogations, would be admitted by a Canadian court.
Ms. Ponce's staff, for example, has not been able to produce conclusive evidence linking Mr. Sharif to the bus drivers. Four years after the chemist was taken into custody, the state still cannot show any evidence from his back accounts that he paid upwards of $10,000 (US) for the killings, nor any proof of incriminating cellphone calls.
In the case of the four bus drivers, the government's strongest evidence is a statement given by a 15-year-old girl who identified one of them as the man who raped her on her way home from work. She told Ms. Skrapec, the criminologist, that once all the other passengers had left the bus, the driver continued into the desert beyond her shantytown, claiming he needed to find a gas station.
She says he beat her, strangled her and left her for dead in the wastelands, where she did not regain consciousness until 4:30AM and staggered to a solitary shack on the horizon, where two men helped her get to the police.
Whatever the truth, dozens of deaths remain unexplained, including many that appear to be the design of one or two more serial killers who will probably strike again, Ms. Skrapec believes. "Serial killers don't stop. It's so unlikely," she says. "The vast majority of times, they stop when we stop them." Meanwhile, Ms. Gonzalez continues her fight for justice.
As she speaks, she glances at the nightly television news playing over the sounds of the living-room window, a plastic sheet flapping furiously in the cool desert wind. Tonight, the TV reporter says, police have discovered possible mass graves outside Juarez, over the hills behind the Gonzalez shack, with remains of the victims of a turf war in the Juarez cocaine cartel.
The scope of the investigation, with helicopters hovering overhead, FBI forensic experts on site and the world's media gathering around, leaves Ms. Gonzalez speechless for a moment. Then she returned to her sister's case.
"We don't believe they're investigating it at all," the young woman says, anger bubbling in her voice. She used to travel by bus to Ms. Ponce's office every week to ask for an update. Now she goes only once a month.
"After the arrests [of the bus drivers], the authorities said the case was closed," Ms. Gonzalez says. "My sister's case, we believe, was just put in a filing cabinet and locked away."
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