Reign of Terror Against Juarez Women Continues
by Kent Paterson
Like a nightmarish sequel to a horror movie, macabre scenes of the killing or disappearance of young women in Ciudad Juárez continue to haunt the border city.
The latest victim, 17-year-old Lilia Alejandra García Andrade, was discovered raped and murdered on Feb. 21, in an empty lot situated in a well-traversed section of the city. García, a single mother of two young children, was last reported seen leaving work in the afternoon one week earlier on Valentine's Day. Similar to many other victims, she worked in a maquiladora export plant.
The García killing, which bears the characteristics of dozens of other sex-linked murders in Juárez since 1993, rekindles fears that a serial killer or killers are still preying on Juárez, in spite of several earlier arrests of men that authorities link to many of the killings.
"I believe that a grave danger for women exists in each point of the city," says activist Gullermina González, whose 17-year-old sister, Sagrario González, was murdered in 1998. "I believe that the simple fact of being a woman here is a grave danger," adds González, who coordinates the victim relatives group Voices without Echo.
Theories about the motives behind the killings abound, with suspects ranging from porno snuff film rings to satanic cults to angry machistas driven to rage by the fact that so many women in Juárez, in a break with tradition, are out of the house and competing in the workforce.
More than a few investigators--including the authors of the U.S. Department of State's most recent human rights report on Mexico--conclude that the killings could not have gone on for so long without the connivance or incompetence of police.
Some knowledgeable observers lay the blame on the rapid growth experienced by Juárez, which has quadrupled in population during the past 30 years from about 300,000 to 1.2 million residents, and the social upheavals caused by its low-wage, export-based economy, accompanying family breakdown and constant migration.
"We have not heard testimony about similar incidents in other places," notes Judith Galarza, head of the Venezuela-based Latin American Federation of Associations of Relatives of Detained and Disappeared Persons. "The cases in Juárez are exclusive to the region, which borders the United States and whose main population is made up of campesinos and indigenous people who come from the south and are made up of a great number of women who are going to work in the maquiladora industry," she says. "There's negligence on the part of the authorities, who haven't done an adequate investigation, due to the fact the victims are young and poor."
Others add that a sinister undercurrent of discrimination, violence, and impunity is rendering the population insensitive, and allowing victimizers of women to operate without fear of being caught.
Sandra Luz Gallegos, a former Juárez resident and current press officer for California Assemblyman Tony Cardenas, says she got a taste of the terror this climate foments while driving alone early one morning in 1998 in the Juárez Valley south of the city, a place where murdered women have been discovered. Noticing a car overtaking hers, Gallegos initially thought the vehicle was going to pass her. But much to her dismay, the driver tried to force Gallegos off the road. She managed to evade the aggressor and finally escape, Gallegos says, but not before glimpsing a chilling grin from the man in the car. He had a crazy face, she recalls.
Figures compiled by the Office of the Special Prosecutor for Women's Murders in Ciudad Juárez and reports in the local media indicate that at least 230 women have been killed in Juárez between 1993 and February 2001. While most were slain in domestic disputes or crimes of passion--an alarming statistic in its own right--scores of the killings bear the hallmarks of sex-abuse serial killings.
Lorena Mendoza, a California television producer and activist who has been researching the crimes for five years, claims that an additional 100 women disappeared during the same time period.
The Sharif Marionette theory
But Suly Ponce, Special Prosecutor for Women's Murders, maintains that he main threat to women in Juárez has been neutralized. Ponce defends a controversial position put forth by the Chihuahua Attorney General's office that numerous murders were stage-managed by a jailed Egyptian engineer, Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif.
Ponce says that following his 1995 arrest for the murder of a young woman, Sharif paid two groups of killers, Los Rebeldes and Los Choferes, detained in 1996 and 1999 respectively, $1,200 for each killing, in order to distract attention from his own guilt.
While Ponce admits that she has no paper trail to prove how the money was transferred and distributed from Sharif's prison cell, she insists--not without xenophobic overtones--that the former maquiladora employee is the intellectual author of numerous murders.
"Perhaps Juárez had the bad luck of receiving a foreigner, an Egyptian, a man who evidently hated the female sex, a sick man, a psychopath," says Ponce. "Perhaps the bad fortune that we had in Juárez was to attract an individual who never deserved to step on Mexican soil."
Last year, a Chihuahua judge reversed Sharif's conviction. The Chihuahua state government filed additional murder charges and the Egyptian national remains in prison--though in a more secure lock-up in the state capital, and far away from his original Juárez jail cell, where Ponce and other local authorities claim he dictated murder commands like a mad puppeteer.
Five members of Los Rebeldes arrested in 1996 have been released from prison. Several others of that group and of Los Choferes are still in prison awaiting sentencing.
Investigations questioned
Late last month, U.S. news media flashed sensational headlines that announced the detention in Dallas, Texas, of a suspect in 200 murders in Ciudad Juárez. It turned out that the suspect, José Luís Rosales, had been arrested once before, in 1996, as part of the Los Rebeldes raid, and then was freed by a judge. A second suspect connected to the Los Rebeldes cases was reportedly arrested in Phoenix, Arizona, also in February.
Yet the original detentions of Los Rebeldes and Los Choferes have been long criticized by human rights organizations, women's rights activists, and even former officials of the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission. In addition to their allegations that confessions were extracted under torture, critics charge that the probes were marred by sloppy police work and political expediency designed more to quell public discontent than to solve the cases.
A 1998 report by the Mexican government's National Human Rights Commission recommended that the Chihuahua state attorney general and mayor of Juárez be investigated for negligence.
Blaming the victims
Activists and family members of victims further complain that state and local authorities rubbed salt into the wounds of surviving relatives by downplaying the incidents or suggesting that the slain women were somehow responsible for their own deaths.
Former Chihuahua Gov. Francisco Barrio, who is currently serving as President Vicente Fox's anti-corruption czar, is remembered along the border for his comment that the number of murders of women in Juárez was not abnormal for a city of its size.
Evangelina Arce of the Independent Chihuahua Human Rights Committee, a nonprofit NGO, pounded on the doors of many a police office after her own daughter, 27-year-old Sylvia, who worked as a cosmetics saleswoman, vanished in 1998. Arce asserts that she encountered little help, snide insinuations, and unprofessional conduct.
"Since Sylvia disappeared, the only information that's known about her has come about because of the investigation I've continued to carry out," says Arce. "I found out that another young woman who accompanied Sylvia disappeared with her too. Later on, the authorities were saying that Sylvia was a stripper, a drug addict, and a provocative dresser," Arce adds. "She had a husband and three children, and all this is a lie."
In response to the frequent criticisms leveled against her office, Special Prosecutor Ponce concedes that the investigations were in a state of disarray when she came aboard in November 1998. Compounding the problem was the lack of basic tools for collecting evidence, such as paper bags. Things were so bad, recalls the Juárez lawyer, that government personnel were socializing and smoking near recovered corpses.
But Ponce contends that significant advances have been made under her watch. Trainers from the U.S. FBI and El Paso Police Department were enlisted to assist local police in acquiring investigative skills. Computers and digital maps were obtained, and DNA testing equipment is scheduled to be added to Ponce's inventory later this year.
"We now have sufficient resources to move forward with these investigations," she adds optimistically.
Most importantly, Ponce says, 38 out of the 52 reported women's murder cases that occurred between 1998 and early February 2001 have been solved.
"We're conscious that copy-cats are going to imitate the same (murder) patterns and we're going to be ready," concludes Ponce. "In very little time, I'll have the pleasure of openly saying that in Ciudad Juárez there is not one sex crime."
Only days after Ponce made her remarks, the raped body of Lilia Alejandra García was recovered.
And the beat goes on
Though Ponce stresses that from March 1999 to early February 2001 the rate of murders of women in Juárez declined, at least four young women who fit the profile of victimized women reportedly vanished from the Juárez streets last year. Their names are María Elena Chávez, Veronica Martínez, Elizabeth Nuñez and Guadalupe Luna de la Rosa.
A 19-year-old student at the Technological Institute of Ciudad Juárez, Luna de la Rosa was last believed to have been in the same general area of Juárez where Lilia Alejandra García disappeared and was later found dead.
After Luna de la Rosa disappeared around noon on September 30 of last year, friends, relatives, and fellow students organized a search and demanded that authorities find their loved one. More than 2,000 students and staff from the women's school staged a march last fall through Juárez streets.
Brigades scoured the city's main thoroughfares, passing out flyers bearing Luna de la Rosa's picture. A police helicopter responded with a desert fly-over, and a specially trained dog was called in to sniff remote places on the edge of Juárez where other bodies previously had been found.
Months later, the young woman's parents are heartbroken with no news.
"There's nothing," sighs Guadalupe's father, Epitasio Luna. And Celia de la Rosa de Luna, Guadalupe's mother, says her family was the target of extortion attempts in the wake of Guadalupe's disappearance. Inferring that another daughter would be the next disappeared victim, one anonymous caller demanded $10,000. The distraught mother is baffled as to why her young daughter vanished when her life was just beginning.
"We didn't have money, we didn't have enemies," she says. "I never thought this could happen in the middle of the day on a Saturday."
Once publicized to the world, the Juárez killings attracted the attention of Amnesty International and the UN. Hunger strikes, marches, and legislative resolutions protested the murders. But beginning last fall, nongovernmental groups on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border joined up to initiate a new round of mobilizations.
Meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in early November, members of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice staged a loud demonstration in front of the city's Mexican Consulate. Several weeks later, members of the Border Regional Coalition, a group of activist groups from Texas, Chihuahua, and New Mexico, sponsored a march and ceremony in downtown Juárez, in memory of the victims. And early this year, a coalition of California groups organized a public protest and news conference in Los Angeles. Representatives of long established organizations, including Mothers of East LA, Carecen, and Hermandad Mexicana, pleaded for justice in the murder cases.
Some now hope that Mexican President Vicente Fox will act on the Juárez violence.
"We expect a response from him," says Juana Gutíerrez, co-founder and president of Mothers of East LA.
Meanwhile, in Juárez, organizers now plan to put the issue of the murdered women on the agenda for a major binational summit scheduled for this coming summer in the border city, where a wide array of intergovernmental groups are expected to gather.
Micaela Solís, a Juárez performance artist who has choreographed a skit about the femicide in her city, traveled to Albuquerque to protest the killings and carry the call for justice across borders.
"It's been said that Ciudad Juárez is the laboratory of modernization and globalization," says Solís. "The city is growing in a monstrous way without any planning. It's being filled with poor people who don't have anything to eat in the rest of Mexico. Many arrive with the hope of working in the United States, which is a big risk itself, since many die here too.
"Many of the daughters of these families who are just in search of something to eat are being murdered. Nobody is stopping it," she notes. "It's a monster that has one thousand heads and none at the same time. It's still not known where this phenomenon is coming from."
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