Girl's Fate Raises Questions About Factories, Police Resolve, and Those Arrested
by Molly Moore
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - Only hours after Irma Angelica Rosales left work, a boy playing in a garbage-strewn lot spotted something poking from beneath dead brush, next to some old tires: a little hand.
Within the hour, television news reported that another young woman had been killed in Ciudad Juarez - the sixth in six weeks, and by official count, the 209th in six years.
Her description fit the pattern of many of the slayings: young, thin, long black hair, dark complexion - and an assembly-plant worker. The victims were raped, smothered with plastic bags and left in an abandoned lot, this time just behind one of the big maquiladoras, factories that produce consumer goods for American companies.
Suly Ponce, prosecutor for the women's killings in Ciudad Juarez, grimaced at the latest report. Two days earlier, on Feb. 14, 1999, the bones of another woman had been found on the desert fringe of this manufacturing city that shares a border with El Paso, Texas.
The killer or killers were preying on the young, female work force created by the maquiladoras. Now, in addition to churning out exports, Cuidad Juarez was producing corpses.
Ponce, 35, had been appointed special prosecutor by a new state governor who had promised to end the killings. After three months, she had no substantive arrests to her credit - only more bodies.
'Where's Irma?'
Yadira Garcia worried all day, from the moment Irma, her 12-year-old sister-in-law, left the U.S.-owned International Wire Group factory where they worked together. Irma said she had been fired. Yadira last saw her heading home alone, to their neighborhood of cardboard shanties and concrete cubicles.
When her shift ended at 4 p.m., Yadira hurried along the rutted dirt roads. She stopped at her sister's house a few hundred yards from her own gray concrete box. She wanted to make sure Irma had picked up Yadira's son, Jesus, as agreed. But there had been no sign of Irma.
Miguel Angel Garcia - Yadira's husband and Irma's older half-brother - was behind their house sweating over the clay oven where he baked bricks. "Where's Irma?" he asked.
Yadira was nervous. Irma, who had arrived from the town of Gomez Palacio in Durango state just a few weeks earlier, could scarcely navigate the city on her own.
By sunset - about 11 hours after Irma left work - Yadira and Miguel had gone to the factory, the jail, the hospitals, the Red Cross and the police. No Irma, no information. With nowhere else to look, they returned home.
At 9 p.m., the television reporter announced the discovery of another slain girl. Yadira's heart froze. They telephoned the police again.
"Yes, we have a little girl here," a woman's voice replied. With the same blouse, jeans and tennis shoes as Irma. The girl, the woman said, had been arrested for stealing.
"I don't care if she is a thief, as long as she is alive," Miguel said. "I will pay the fine and get her out."
When the family arrived at prosecutor Suly Ponce's office, an official told them the girl in jeans, a white Nike blouse and pink-trimmed tennis shoes was not in jail after all.
"They raped her and killed her, and she's here," an official told Miguel.
Blaming the victims
In the beginning, in the early 1990s, police labeled the dead women and girls prostitutes and drug addicts. They blamed the killings on the victims, claiming they had invited trouble by wearing miniskirts and frequenting bars.
Even Ponce partially accepted that view.
One problem with this theory is that it failed to solve the crimes. After more than six years, only one suspect had been convicted of a single murder.
It had taken nearly three years to arrest the first serious suspect: Sharif Abdel Latif Sharif, 49, an Egyptian-born chemist and convicted rapist. Police said they could tie Sharif to at least four slayings, and possibly, they said, he was responsible for most of them.
But within weeks of Sharif's arrest in October 1995, the body of a 15-year-old girl turned up in the desert. Then another, and another.
In April 1996, police proclaimed another breakthrough: Eleven alleged members of a gang called the Rebels were charged with the deaths of seven women. A prosecutor declared the state was working "to see if it's possible to charge them with all of the murders."
Police said Sharif had paid the gang to commit the murders while he was behind bars to prove his innocence, a theory considered preposterous by victims' families.
And still, the killings did not stop.
Resentment of women
Some activists in Juarez blamed the volatile social caldron created by poverty in a city ill equipped to handle the crush of new migrants. There was a culture clash between urban life and the conservative, rural traditions from which most migrants have come.
"Men who fit into the macho culture definitely feel some resentment toward women because they can't dominate them as easily anymore," said Guadalupe Ramirez, head of a small organization that tracks the cases of disappeared women and girls. "The men don't respect women who leave the house to work. They think they can assault them, that they can insult them, that they can walk by and touch them. Women have worked to get ahead and be independent, and men aren't happy about it."
Few of the victims' families got any answers. Irma Perez, 51, has waited years for police to solve the slaying of her daughter Olga, 20, who disappeared on her way home from work Aug. 10, 1995.
A month after Olga vanished, Perez was presented at the morgue with a bag that police said contained what was left of her daughter. "Just some bones that looked like they had been there for a long time," she recalled. "He put the little head back together for me because it was coming apart. He put it together so I could see the jaw, but I couldn't look at it anymore."
'We don't feel guilty'
Business leaders in Mexico denied that the growth of the border factories has contributed to the Juarez killings.
"We don't feel guilty about offering people jobs," said Carlos Rosetti, spokesman for Mexico's National Maquiladora Industry Council. "You can't fault the industry at all. It has nothing to do with the killings."
But Esther Chavez, an activist who has tracked and publicized the killings, and others in Juarez believe authorities weren't pursuing the slayings more openly or aggressively because of the political clout of the foreign companies that owned the maquiladoras and the local politicians who benefited from their presence.
"This is a city that was built for the maquila; it wasn't built for the citizens," said Chavez, who operates a counseling service for abused women and rape victims.
"As the cadavers were appearing, they (police) were looking for someone to take the blame," Chavez said. "They were resolving cases out of thin air."
Juarez Mayor Gustavo Elizondo Aguilar complained that the expanding industries continue to draw people from the countryside that the city cannot afford to house, educate or serve. One of every eight schools in Juarez is built by the government and citizens from cardboard cartons cast off by the maquiladoras. More than 100,000 residents have no running water.
Although exports from the maquiladoras are worth more than $10 billion a year, the mayor said Cuidad Juarez received only $1.5 million last year in support from a voluntary tax paid by the factories.
"In Juarez, we have the advantage that there's work," Aguilar said, "but we have the disadvantage that we don't have the money to respond to the needs we have."
A break in the investigation
A month after Irma died, Ponce needed some leads. Two Mexico City criminologists invited to help solve the slayings had quit, complaining that her investigation was a shambles. Activists criticized her as "frivolous" and ineffective.
Sharif, the Egyptian arrested four years earlier, had been convicted of only one murder. Six of the 11 members of the Rebels had been freed; the remaining five had been in jail for three years awaiting trial.
Then a 14-year-old girl named Nancy Villalba gave Ponce the break she needed. On March 18, 1999, Nancy banged on the door of a stranger's house, bloodied, shaken and crying. She said she had been raped by the driver of the city bus she had taken after her night shift at a maquiladora. The bus driver, she said, then beat her and left her for dead on the edge of town.
Ponce had noticed a trend in some slayings: The women and girls had last been seen with, or near, a bus driver. Irma's family, for instance, reported that she had been seen outside International Wire, waiting for a bus home.
But more than 2,500 bus drivers plied the city streets. Ponce's detectives chased dead ends for two weeks - until, coincidentally, police in Irma's hometown of Gomez Palacio received a complaint about a domestic dispute. A bus driver who worked in Ciudad Juarez had returned home, argued with his wife and beaten her. Jesus Manuel Guardado, 27, had a record of robbery. He was arrested in his wife's assault.
His wife, Maria del Carmen Flores, told police that when she lived in Juarez with her husband, he would come home occasionally with a bloody kitchen knife.
Arrests and confessions
Within days, Ponce announced that five bus drivers had confessed to participating in the deaths of 12 women and girls, including Irma. Most likely, Ponce said, they were responsible for many more. And at least some of them - like the Rebels - supposedly had been paid by Sharif, the jailed Egyptian, prosecutors said.
The alleged culprits confessed an account of Irma's last hours, printed on white legal pages and signed by Jesus Manuel Guardado and his alleged accomplices. The statement described in graphic detail how three of the men raped Irma before one asphyxiated her in the back of a bus.
The men later said police tortured them and coerced the confessions.
Ponce charged the bus drivers with seven of Ciudad Juarez's sexual slayings, although her office continued to leak reports that it believed the men were responsible for 12 or more killings.
Today the bus drivers remain in prison awaiting trial.
And still the killings continue
Mexican labor authorities swept the Juarez maquiladoras in search of underage workers. They announced they had found 90 employees younger than 16 in nearly 380 maquilas.
Many people in Juarez ridiculed the labor department's findings. "The plants are full of little girls," said Maricela Garcia, Yadira's mother, who spent 27 years working in 10 maquiladoras.
And the killings have continued.
In the first five months this year, police recorded 13 women's deaths. Four match the same pattern: killed and left in the desert or abandoned lots.
Slayings of both men and women along the border, particularly in Juarez, recently prompted President Ernesto Zedillo to order additional police and troops to the border.
Prosecutor Ponce, confronting as much criticism as ever, defends her record by citing the bus drivers and other suspects who have been jailed. Their arrests have made the streets safer, Ponce said. Potential copycats "now think 10 times, because they know that we are going to grab them," she declared. "They know that impunity has ended."
However, special United Nations envoy Asma Jahangir recently called international attention to the Juarez slayings with a scathing attack on law enforcement's failures.
Epilogue
"You know, I blame myself because I took her to Juarez," Miguel told his mother, Rosa Maria Lozano, after Irma's death.
"No, son, you are not responsible for that; you are guilty of nothing," replied Rosa, in the little blue house in Gomez Palacio where Irma grew up and where she returned in a pink coffin. "These are God's things, and that old man that ran her over, may God help him."
Miguel could not bear to tell his mother the truth about Irma - about the murder and rape. And he forbade anyone in the family from telling her. But it was a double sin, he thought, lying to your mother, especially a mother so distraught that she sometimes slept atop her daughter's grave.
But does anyone know the truth about the Juarez killings? Irma Perez, whose daughter was supposedly returned to her as a bag of bones, said, "At first, they said the Egyptian was guilty of killing Olga. But a few days later they caught the Rebels, and said that the Egyptian paid them off. So what is the truth? I say there still is no truth."
Copyright 2000 Seattle Times