Numerous Killings Of Mexican Women Unsolved
by Marion Lloyd
CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO
In this violence-riddled Mexican border city, to be young, slim, and pretty is not always a blessing.
It could just as well be a curse.
Since 1993, more than 80 women have been raped, tortured, and killed in one of the world's most horrific serial murder cases. The victims were not chosen at random: All were young, thin, and glamorous, with shoulder-length dark hair and brown eyes. A majority were migrants from rural Mexico who came to work in the city's maquilas, the word in the local vernacular for the US assembly plants, and disappeared on their way to or from the factories.
The victims also were all poor, a factor women's activists say explains why despite multiple arrests the killings have continued in this corrupt, teeming metropolis of 1.5 million people across the river from El Paso; Ciudad Juarez is the largest city in the state of Chihuahua.
"They have no families to fight for them. They see us as their only hope," said Esther Chavez, who opened the battered women's shelter Casa Amiga soon after the first mutilated bodies were discovered in the desert around the city.
She and other women's activists have since found themselves in a face-off with successive governments in their effort to put a halt to the murders.
"We do not attack just to attack. We want the killings to stop," said Victoria Caraveo, who heads a consortium of 13 women's groups. "We need the government to understand that this is not political. It's human. It's about the right to life."
Patricio Martinez, the governor of Chihuahua, is considered a strong candidate to lead the Institutional Revolutionary Party's bid in the 2006 presidential elections. But to win votes, he will have to solve the killings.
So when the bodies of eight more women were found in a vacant lot in the city's industrial center in November, authorities shifted the investigation into high gear. Within three days, they arrested two bus drivers and said the case was closed.
But many believe the police have the wrong men. Skeptics point to the lightning arrests as proof of the lengths to which the government is willing to go to improve its image.
As with several previous arrests in connection with the deaths, this latest investigation is raising questions. There are also accusations - including some made by past suspects - that the accused were tortured for their confessions.
In the weeks following the arrests of Victor Garcia Uribe, 29, and Gustavo Gonzalez Meza, 28, the state government repeatedly broadcast on local television stations a 30-minute video recording of the men confessing to the most recent crimes.
The suspects describe in detail how once a month they would get drunk and high and then set off in search of their next victim. They would rape and kill her and then dump the body at the site, which lies across the road from the main maquila exporters' association.
The video included testimony from two women who said they were raped or attacked by Garcia. The bus driver was arrested in 1999 in connection with earlier killings but was released for lack of proof.
Critics point to the absence of hard evidence linking the suspects to the murders.
"They need to show me proof. They're closing the case, but I say no," said Celia de la Rosa, whose 18-year-old daughter Lupita disappeared in September 2000. Authorities identified the young college student as one of the victims whose skeletal remains were discovered in November.
But de la Rosa is not convinced.
"The facts don't add up. They [the suspects] named her as the third victim, but she would have had to be the first," she said, referring to the timing of her daughter's disappearance.
"It's just the not knowing that is so horrible," said de la Rosa, whose family offered a $10,000 reward with half the money put up by the state government, but still had no leads.
State officials deny irregularities in their investigation and defend the arrests of the two men.
"The attorney general's office has no intention of looking for scapegoats. What we want to give Ciudad Juarez is the peace and security that it deserves," Jose Manuel Ortega, the state's assistant attorney general, said in an interview last month.
Ciudad Juarez is home to about 450 mostly US-owned factories that employ an army of more than 250,000 people - mostly young women who live in the teeming shanty towns that stretch into the desert. The city also is known for the notorious Juarez drug cartel, which is blamed for most of the more than 200 murders recorded each year, compared with 20 per year in neighboring El Paso.
Maquila workers are especially vulnerable because women often must make long treks in the dark through rough areas to catch the bus to their factory, said Alfredo Limas, head of the cultural studies department at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez.
"To be a maquila worker is to be vulnerable, day in and day out," said Limas.
There have been several high-profile resignations in the case. First, prison director Carlos Gutierrez was replaced after he released a doctor's report suggesting the suspects had been tortured with electric prods.
Next to go was the chief of the city's transportation department, who provided Uribe's defense lawyer with urine samples showing his client had come up clean in recent drug tests. And on Jan. 3, the state police forensics chief stepped down for personal reasons. Investigators close to the case, however, said Maynez refused orders to plant evidence.
Copyright 2002 The Boston Globe