Femicidal Tendencies

by Pamela White

Working in a maquiladora is hard and often unfair. The women who spend their days in these U.S.-owned assembly plants make only $55 a week for their labor. They live in colonias, or shantytowns, and must walk long distances and take long bus rides to reach their jobs. If they arrive even three minutes late, they are punished by not being allowed to work that day.

But for the women in Cuidad Juarez, a city of 1.5 million across the border from El Paso, the worst part of working in a maquiladora is the murder rate.

In Boulder, one murder creates an uproar.

In Ciudad Juarez, scores of women have been murdered, most of them maquiladora workers 18 and under. Since 1993, more than 270 women and girls have been found murdered, with about 450 women still missing. The figure is so staggering it bears repeating: 270 women murdered and 450 still missing.

Bodies have been found in garbage dumps, in ditches and in the desert. The victims had several things in common. Most were poor, between the ages of 14 and 18, pretty, and thin with long black hair. Most had been raped. Many had suffered mutilation of their sexual organs. (Because some of the remains found were skeletons, it is impossible to determine whether all the victims had been raped and mutilated, but investigators believe most had at the very least been raped.)

Although a handful of men, including a bus driver and an undocumented immigrant living in El Paso, have been arrested and have reportedly confessed to some of the murders, women continue to disappear.

The city's police-inefficient, inept and corrupt-are part of the problem. The families of the murdered women have long since given up hope that their police force is capable of catching the real killers. Some think the murders are the work of a gang that has turned to rape and murder as a diversion from drug-smuggling. Others think they're the work of killers and copycat killers who have started raping and killing women because they know they can get away with it. Others think the murderers might be Americans who use their wealth and mobility to cross the border and kill with anonymity.

The situation has earned Ciudad Juarez the title "Capital of Murdered Women." For years, fear has been the companion of the women who live there, a living, breathing force. Reminders of the butchery are everywhere-in posters of missing women put up by relatives still clinging to hope, in crosses that dot the landscape where bodies have been found, in ads that warn young women to beware.

Yet, desperate for work, young women continue to flock to the city, living in shantytowns, or colonias, in conditions most Americans would find unbearable. They work for some of the wealthiest companies in the world-Du Pont, GE and Alcoa to name a few-earning enough to feed themselves, but not enough to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

The situation has resulted in the creation of several women's rights organizations, both in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. One group, the Coalition on Violence Against Women and Families on the Border, consists of members from both the United States and Mexico. The Coalition, like other groups, has marched, held vigils and made demands, hoping to prompt the Mexican and U.S. governments into taking the murders seriously.

Coalition members have demanded that U.S. officials join Mexican officials to create a bi-national task force to bring justice to the murdered women's families. They've also demanded that the United States supply forensic experts and open U.S. labs to Mexican investigators to help solve the murders. And they want a reward fund established for informants who help police catch the rapist-killers.

These are reasonable demands, not only because Ciudad Juarez is next to a U.S. city, but because murder on a such an extreme scale deserves extreme attention. To ignore the situation in Ciudad Juarez or to dismiss it as an internal problem best left to Mexican authorities would be to disregard the value of these women's lives. And because the the city of El Paso and Congress have done so much to promote maquiladoras in Ciudad Juarez, it's only right that they take an interest in the lives of those who work in the factories.

So far the politicians and the El Paso Chamber of Commerce have ignored the situation, despite repeated invitations and entreaties from coalition members.

"If there were all these bodies appearing in El Paso, all those politicians would be screaming their heads off," says Victor Muñoz, a coalition member. Because the victims are women-poor Mexican women-no one seems to care, he says.

But the situation demands something else as well-action on the part of the maquiladoras themselves. Many of the victims have been taken on their way to or from work-waiting for buses in the dark, walking to bus stops, leaving work after buses have stopped running. One victim, a 17-year-old, was kidnapped after her supervisor turned her away for being two minutes late. Her body was found with seven others in November.

So far, these unbelievably wealthy companies have remained silent, apparently having little to say about the rape-murders of their valued employees. Their indifference is intolerable. These companies have taken advantage of NAFTA to flee U.S. labor and environmental laws in search of people who will work for next to nothing. Moving to Mexico has increased the profits enjoyed by their shareholders and upper-level management. It's right that they give something back to the communities they so willingly and shamelessly exploit.

The very least the maquiladoras can do is provide door-to-door shuttle service for their female employees. For these companies, shuttle service is a matter of a few thousand pesos-not a drip in their oversized buckets. But for the women of Ciudad Juarez, it's a matter of life and death.

Copyright 2002 Boulder Weekly