Juarez Center Fights For Forgotten Women
Advocate wants justice for scores of slain females
By Tessie Borden
republic Mexico City Bureau
JUAREZ, Mexico - It's 9:30 a.m., and Esther Chavez Cano's daily personal war with the unwanted problems of this largest of the border cities has begun.
She rushes into her office at Casa Amiga, the rape crisis center that grew out of the violence that has claimed the lives of more than 200 young women here in the past nine years. Close behind is a staff member describing this morning's emergency: a neighbor found two girls, 8 and 10, wandering in the city's El Chamizal park the previous night. They told the woman they were running away from their father's beatings.
Chavez Cano immediately calls the local district attorney's office, and one gets the feeling she has done this hundreds of times. In a firm but friendly tone, she calls on the attorneys there to take charge of the children and investigate what they say.
"The authorities just don't do anything," she whispers while on hold.
Chavez Cano's Casa Amiga is the only center of its kind on the Mexican side of the 1,950-mile line that separates the country from the United States. Established in February 1999, it receives funding from both U.S. and Mexican organizations.
Chavez Cano, 66, a diminutive, retired accountant whose mild manner causes listeners to lean in just to hear her, is perhaps the most outspoken and militant voice here on violence against women.
In 1993, she noticed a trend among crimes committed in Juarez: dozens of young women were turning up slain in the surrounding desert. The bodies showed evidence of beatings, rape and strangulation. Many of the women fit a distinct profile: tall and thin, with long, dark hair and medium skin, between ages 11 and 25. Often, they came from the ranks of workers who yearly swell Juarez's population from other parts of rural Mexico to work at border assembly plants, or maquiladoras.
Prodding the police
"They try to pretend these are not serial crimes," Chavez Cano said of the local authorities. "It just brings your rage out. It makes you boil."
Chavez Cano and others formed the Liga 8 de Marzo, an awareness group that collected data about the slayings and prodded police to give the murder investigations high priority - often by picketing the police station, holding crosses bearing names of victims.
No one agrees on the exact number of killings that are related.
Chavez Cano says about 230 women have been found in the past nine years, the most recent in November when eight bodies were discovered in a shallow pit. Some slayings have been traced to jealous husbands or drug traffickers. But a large number share characteristics that make investigators believe a serial killer and perhaps copycats are at work.
After raising awareness of the problem to a national level, Chavez Cano decided someone should work to prevent the deaths, rather than just clean up after the murderers.
Help from elsewhere
With start-up money from the Maryland-based International Trauma Resource Center, the Texas Attorney General's Office and the Mexican Federation of Private Health and Community Development Associations, Chavez Cano opened Casa Amiga near the city center. A paid staff of four and an army of volunteers served 318 clients in Casa Amiga's first year, providing a 24-hour hotline, counseling and group therapy.
Last year, the center added three staff members and served 5,803 clients, of which 1,172 were new cases.
Chavez Cano now worries about a troubling side issue: child sexual abuse and incest. Fifty-seven of her clients in the first year were raped children. So among her most successful programs is a puppet show that teaches children about "bad" touching and instructs them, in a gentle way, to respect their bodies.
The center takes most of her attention, but Chavez Cano does not let the police off easy when it comes to the slayings of women in the desert. They, in turn, have lashed out at her.
An attitude of disdain
Arturo Chavez Rascón, Chihuahua state's former attorney general, came in for some of her sharpest barbs because of his comments implying the victims contributed to their own deaths through their dress or lifestyle. It's an attitude shared by police officers on the beat, who Chavez Cano says discourage families from associating with Casa Amiga.
The center used to receive about $3,000 a month from Juarez for rent and salaries, but that stipend has been cut, Cano said. Now, the center relies on money it gets from donations and showings around Mexico of the hit play The Vagina Monologues.
Tragedy close to home
Recently, the center suffered a blow of a different kind.
In December, Maria Luisa Carsoli Berumen, an abused mother who had become a client and then a staff member at the center, was killed in front of Casa Amiga, witnesses say, by her husband, Ricardo Medina Acosta. The two had had a long and violent history that led to Carsoli Berumen leaving him. A court granted custody of their four children to Medina Acosta. She stayed in town, planning to wait until after the Christmas holidays to resume the custody fight.
On the morning of Dec. 21, the pair argued and struggled outside the center, and she was stabbed twice in the chest as she tried to flee. A black bow at the door expresses the staff's grief. No one has been in arrested in Carsoli Berumen's death.
Fighting for respect
"The death of Maria Luisa forces us to work more intensely to instill respect in children, men and women, and to sensitize the authorities to the grave risk for families and all of society that domestic violence represents," Chavez Cano wrote in a column in the local newspaper.
"Rest in peace, Maria Luisa, and watch over your children so they remain united and sheltered by your loved ones who lament your absence."
Copyright 2002 Arizona Republic