Death Comes to the Maquilas: A Border Story
Nineteen victims in the Juarez area constitute the biggest mass sex-murder case in Mexican history - with young women working the factories made easy prey.
by Debbie Nathan
On a scorching day in August 1995 in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a trash picker combing an illegal dump site discovered the half-naked corpse of a young woman. Police eventually identified her as Elizabeth Castro, a 17-year-old from a poor neighborhood who had last been seen alive downtown a few days earlier. Since then in the same desert area - just a few miles south of E1 Paso, Texas - eleven more female bodies have been found. Most were adolescents as young as 14. All were slender and darkskinned, with shoulder-length hair. Many bodies are too decomposed to determine the cause of death, but the better-preserved victims were raped and strangled or stabbed. Most were partly unclothed, with their underpants torn. Some had their wrists bound; on some, a breast was mutilated or severed. Of the victims police have identified, all came from impoverished families. Last spring, seven more bodies turned up in another desolate part of town. Again, they were half-naked, bound and mutilated. They had slim figures and longish hair, and the identifiable ones were poor.
These nineteen victims constitute the biggest mass sex-murder case in Mexican history, and the nation is horrified. In Juarez, everyone has responded - from a conservative mayor embarrassed by the violence, to womens activists, who have played it up to bolster campaigns against more common forms of sexual assault. Several suspects have been arrested, yet in the public mind the murders remain a mystery. Partly this is due to police corruption and ineptitude. But more deeply, the continuing whodunit reflects a lack of understanding of how sexuality and violence intertwined for the victims, whose lives and deaths centered around their work on the global assembly line.
Many of the dead young women had jobs in maquiladoras -or maquilas, as they're popularly known - transnational assembly plants that have blanketed Mexico's northern border since the mid-sixties, displacing jobs from the United States and recycling them for wages that currently equal about $23 a week in take-home pay. Some 170,000 Juarez residents have jobs in the plants. Half are female, and most are so young (as young as 14, even though Mexican law says they must be 16) that inside the factories and outside, they are still called muchachas - girls.
Six days a week, thousands of them leave their shantytown neighborhoods, cram into aging buses, transfer downtown and eventually reach vast industrial parks. There they put in forty-eight-hour weeks soldering electronics boards, plugging wires into car dashboards, binding surgical gowns and sorting millions of cosmetics discount coupons mailed by North Americans to P.O. boxes in El Paso. The work they do is highly repetitive and requires little training. Their labor is easily replaceable, and turnover is astronomical, often 100 percent a year or more.
These are the girls of what author Jeremy Seabrook calls the "Cities of the South" - those sprawling new enclaves of Third World capitalist glitz, surrounded by slums full of workers who feed the local neon and the consumer appetites of the North. Navigating this territory, factory girls are subject to unprecedented sexual harassment and violence, of which serial killing is only the most horrific extreme. It has always been risky for women to move through cities on their own, and in Juarez, everyone acknowledges the connection between work and danger. But few talk about work and pleasure, few recognize that when maquila girls shifts end, they are loosed to sample freedoms their mothers never imagined.
Miles from their neighborhoods and with paycheck in hand, they have access to urban diversions that their brothers always had but that "proper" girls used to be denied: public nightlife, friendship based on affinity rather than kin and, most momentously, sex. According to University of Chicago sociologist Leslie Salzinger, who has worked on Juerez assembly lines, even girls who still live at home with their parents enjoy these pleasures.
Indeed, Salzinger says, many girls have told her that they take maquila jobs not for survival but for independence: to buy clothes with their own money and to get out of their houses and socialize. (Affluent kids do this at school, but for the working class, education is a luxury. Mexico guarantees public schooling only to sixth grade.)
So poor teens go to work. But unlike their older North American sisters, who dress for the assembly line in no-nonsense T-shirts and sneakers, most maquila girls don miniskirts, heels and gobs of lipstick and eye shadow. Their flashiness is hardly incidental to their jobs. Instead, it is a fundamental feature of those maquilas that make a priority of hiring females: the reinforcement and updating of a rigid version of "womanhood."
The process begins even when a girl is still looking for a job. Se Solicita Mano de Obra Feminina - Female Labor Wanted - blare the newspaper want ads. Managers say that females have more nimble fingers, deal better with boredom, and are more docile" - i.e., less inclined to engage in disruptive behavior, including union organizing. When maquilas first came to the border, men were virtually excluded as line workers. Labor shortages have since led to their hiring, but in many plants women still predominate, particularly in electronics assembly.
While gentle hands and natures are a plus for transnational exploitation, fecundity is a minus. Typically, maquilas will hire women only after they've taken a pregnancy test (this is implicitly illegal, according to Mexican labor law) that comes out negative. In many plants, management inspects workers' sanitary napkins for monthly menstrual flow. Meanwhile, in-plant health services are sparse except for generous provision of birth-control pills.
There are also discriminatory job classifications. At an electronics plant Salzinger worked in, stuffing computer boards is a task exclusively assigned to women, cabinet assembly and screen installation are reserved for men because the company deems this "heavy" work. Meanwhile, almost all technicians, supervisors and managers-who make the most money - are men.
Identification numbers distinguish men from women. So does work clothing, with women assigned light blue smocks and men navy. Women are monitored more rigorously than men, by Mexican supervisors who pace the assembly lines, staring, flirting and asking for dates. The foreign manager also walks the lines and chats up his favorites. Invariably they are the youngest, prettiest girls, and under their smocks, they are usually dressed to the nines. These girls are groomed for annual industrywide "Senorita Maquiladora" beauty contests, complete with evening gown and swimsuit competitions.
This sexualization of factory life, as Salzinger calls it, creates a dense web of intrigue. Dating, boyfriends, clothing and gossip about whom the manager has the hots for are constant sources of conversation and palpable tension. Indeed, sexualization allies workers with management and alienates them from one another. It also makes horribly tedious, draining work bearable, as the maquila becomes a fantasy world.
Not surprisingly, eros overflows the plants, especially on week-ends after work. Instead of going straight home then, many employees stop at a strip of downtown bars with names like Alive, La Tuna and Noa Noa. Several clubs advertise free admission for girls, as well as "Most Daring Bra" and "Wet String Bikini" contests with prizes of $30 to $45 - more than a weeks pay on the assembly line. Others feature Chippendale-style male striptease dancers. All provide huge sound systems, and dance floors are packed with couples doing everything from disco slamming to la quebradita, which mixes the two-step with pelvis grinding, techno-tango gyrations.
Prostitutes do business in some bars, and in more casual fashion, so do many maquila girls. This is hardly novel for industrial workers in Dickensian circumstances. A century ago, New York Citys factory girls were roaming dance halls and amusement parks, picking up unknown young men and trading sexual favors for romance and the "treats" - like clothing and entertainment - they couldn't afford.
In Juarez, police investigating the first serial murder wave determined that several victims had frequented the downtown bars. A break in the case came when a teenager revealed that she had met a man at one and gone home with him, where he tried to rape her and told her she would end up like the women in the dump. He was arrested, and after his picture appeared in the news, witnesses told police they seen him with some of the girls later found in the desert.
The suspect, jailed since October 1995, is Sharif Abdel Latif Sharif. A 50-year-old Egyptian, he has lived most of the past two decades in the United States. "Give me a fucking break!" Sharif snorts in English, to the delight of Juarez reporters. He indignantly denies any connection to the corpses in the dump, but Sharif also says he has come to know "all the prostitutes downtown" since he moved to Juarez two years ago. Before that, he racked up an extensive record for violent sexual assault in the United States, including six years in a Florida prison for savagely beating and raping a woman. Following another charge in 1993, Sharif fled Midland, Texas. He had been working there as a chemist, and he beat his rap by helping his employer set up operations across the border. He relocated to Juarez and settled in a posh neighborhood.
With his athletic build, olive skin and dapper mustache, Sharif looks like a Spanish-language soap opera star-the kind who plays the rich, handsome father. Police say Sharif befriended his victims in the downtown bars, then cruised their workplaces or bus stops, offering them rides in his shiny white Grand Marquis. Maquila workers tell me its common to accept such propositions, even from strangers, to save car fare and the dreary bus trip home. And for girls whose families and friends can barely afford seventies junkers, tooling around in a late-model vehicle is a thrill, especially with an attractive man.
Witnesses also saw some victims chatting or taking rides from young Mexican men dressed in cowboy hats and boots, this led investigators to suspect that Sharif had accomplices. took a long time to figure all this out, though, because the victims' parents had no idea their daughters frequented bars, and their friends were loath to admit it. In Mexico, the thinking goes, good girls don't go to bars or watch male strippers or display their bras for money. And they would never think of leading la doble vida - the double life of assembly work by day and casual prostitution by night.
Parents who harbor these beliefs are clinging to memories of their youth, when poor but decent Mexican daughters were still cloistered until marriage. Understandably, they are comforted by industry's characterization of the maquila as a chaste, surrogate "home" for their daughters. But U.S. organizers seem equally naive. A few summers ago, when I helped with a solidarity tour for North American union women who'd lost their jobs to transnational flight, one guest expressed dismay at the girls, makeup and high heels: "They sure don't look like they're working," she huffed. "They don't even look poor."
Disapproving of girls, involvement with night life and sex constitutes "hypocritical moralizing," says Esther Chavez. An accountant in her 50s, she is spokeswoman for Juarezs Coalition of Non-Governmental Womens Organizations, which does groundbreaking work to combat sexual and domestic violence. Like Chavez, some coalition leaders are affluent. Some are former maquila workers who were blacklisted for trying to unionize, but who continue their organizing efforts from outside the plants. Others are human rights advocates who've spent years protesting police brutality and torture.
Chavez and other activists understand casual prostitution as a response to poverty, and they see the serial killings as the spectacular tip of an iceberg of sexual assault against border women. In October alone, there were thirty-two reported cases of rape and molestation. According to Chavez, Juerez logs the highest rate of these crimes in Mexico, and authorities think they are a mere twentieth of the total. Only a fifth go to prosecution. Most victims are 18 or younger.
Many coalition activists attribute the high sexual assault statistics to gender inequality, and some mention the maquila industry's complicity in fostering it. However, coalition organizers focus far more narrowly. Even before the first of the mass murders surfaced two years ago, Juarez feminists were petitioning the city and state administrations for kiosks where the public could report sexual assaults and for a woman-staffed sex-crimes unit in the district attorney's office.
It's easy to see how a crime as revolting as serial murder could inspire a law-and-order approach. Thats what has happened in Juarez, particularly since the second group of bodies - many of them freshly dead - began turning up last spring, after Sharif had been locked up for months. The populace was terrified, and the women's coalition sprang into action. It organized marches, held press conferences and sent the United Nations a report describing the killings as a violation of womens human rights.
Feminists weren't the only ones pressing for a resolution to the case. Juarez police answer to a mayor and a state governor who are members of the Catholic-based, conservative National Action Party. The PAN has gained power in Juarez and other northern Mexican cities recently, but the infamous and powerfull PRI - the Institutional Revolutionary Party - is constantly looking for ways to discredit its rival. By spring, the local PRI was noisily mocking PAN leaders, failure to protect the city's women. To make matters worse, the Panista Attorney General failed to win even one murder indictment against Sharif; a judge ruled there wasn't enough material evidence.
Finally, late one Saturday night in April, a phalanx of police surrounded several maquila-worker bars and arrested more than 100 people, including dozens of underage girls. Police now claim that nine young men, members of a gang called the Rebels, committed the murders along with Sharif. Most wear cowboy clothes, some worked as male strippers and musicians in the bars, where they are said to have done a brisk business in illegal drugs, bootleg liquor and pimping. The police allege that they were paid by Sharif to recruit and kill victims - even after he was jailed, when he calculated that new corpses would make him look innocent.
A rich foreign boss, a crew of native-born male supervisors, a high-turnover supply of females. Is this a true-crime scenario or a maquila-saturated citys freaked-out, global-assembly-line fantasy: mass production as mass murder? Serial killers are popularly portrayed as lone, Ripper-style offenders, but multiple murderers may actually account for as many as a fifth of all cases, according to Penn State history professor Philip Jenkins.
A Sharif & Co.-type enterprise is thus imaginable, and there are indications that some of the accused may have been involved. One purported Rebels member was seen visiting Sharif in jail. Tests done on anothers car supposedly have found blood. The gang's so-called leader, a beefy 26-year-old who police say is nicknamed "The Devil," was seen at a bar with a victim, and authorities say bite marks on her corpse match his dentition. At least two women have reported that they were kidnapped and/or raped by gang members but managed to escape.
On the other hand the case is seriously flawed. The biggest problem is the inability of the police to identify most of the dead women so they can investigate possible connections. Speculation is that these Jane Does were newcomers to the city: poor girls who journeyed north to work in the maquilas or cross to the United States. Artists, sketches of facial reconstructions appear in the papers, along with itemizations of victims, clothing that constitute inventories of the globalized textile market these girls both worked and consumed in. ("Lee jeans size 3, Hanes panties," reads one list. To the sad bemusement of garment-worker organizers, police surmised that another victim was Central American because a label in her clothing said "Made in Honduras.")
More disturbing is that in addition to the nineteen bodies associated with the serial murders, the womens coalition recently tallied old press items and police records and discovered that fifty-three other raped and murdered female corpses have been found scattered about Juarez in the past three years. Are their deaths related? Are there other sex murderers?
Even the "hard evidence" is fraught with problems. Mexican police have claimed they found blood and semen in suspects' cars, but authorities in El Paso, where the vehicles were sent for testing, have denied detecting body fluids. A representative of the Mexican Human Rights Commission reports that suspects were arrested without warrants, denied lawyers and injured during questioning; defendants say the police beat them, stuck their heads into toilets, held pistols to their heads and threatened to kill them unless they confessed. Bar habitues report being kidnapped by cops and subjected to the same treatment to force them to incriminate suspects. The human rights commission finds these claims credible since Mexican police are notorious for using Inquisition-style methods. The police insist the Rebels were freely confessing until the human rights representative gave them legal advice. At a recent indictment hearing, a judge agreed - and finally charged Sharif with the murder of Elizabeth Castro, the teenager whose corpse started the case.
Feminists like Chavez wonder uneasily whether they've opened a Pandora's box of false accusations and sexist moralizing. But they're reluctant to criticize the investigation. One reason for the activists' silence is their reluctance to fuel PRI squabbles with the PAN. More significant is that their outcry about the murders has finally achieved gains from the government, including the woman-staffed sex-crimes unit in the district attorney's office and discussions about opening a state-run battered women's shelter. So activists who were once vocal critics of police brutality - including against women maquila workers trying to unionize - are now quiet.
Left in the lurch, maquila girls have their own opinions. Some are common-sensically skeptical: "I don't believe the police," one factory worker comments. "They keep contradicting themselves." Others are frighteningly ignorant about sex murderers: "The young men they've accused can't be guilty," opines another, heavily made-up young woman, "because they're poor and the killer is probably rich." There are wild conspiracy theories in which the killers are military or police or organ traffickers. And of course, that they are foreign maquila managers-because, as another worker notes, "they know so much about the victims' habits."
Managers do know the girls, at least better than labor unionists and feminists do. Organizers need to catch up. They might start by campaigning to abolish discriminatory hiring, job classifications and everything else based on M and F - including the pregnancy tests. They could work with women's advocates to organize mother-daughter classes in sexuality and self-defense. Such actions would recognize young maquila womens right to equality, dignity and pleasure. They would also help sever the link between murderous sexual assault and the more insidious - and far more widespread - violence of work on the global assembly line.
Copyright 1997 The Nation | found at www.eco.texas.edu