The Fate Of A Mexican Girl
March 3rd, 1999
Times Editorial
The death a few days ago of Irma Angelica Rosales deserves attention on both sides of the border, but it won't attract much notice in the United States. Though she was just 13 when she was raped and killed, she was a Mexican, a rural girl who moved north for a job in Ciudad Juarez. Even in Mexico, her case likely will disappear in the horrendous string of unsolved sexual murders that haunts Juarez.
That is bad enough. But her death is troubling in another way as well. It illustrates yet another social consequence of the factory settlements, called maquiladoras, that have cropped up just over the border in Mexico, rooted in an industrial ethic of human exploitation.
Juarez, directly across the border from El Paso, Texas, is a cheap-labor mecca. Its maquiladora zone for foreign, mainly American-owned factories thrives on $4-a-day workers and lax enforcement of Mexico's weak labor and environmental standards. Impoverished workers from southern Mexican cities and neighboring Latin American countries migrate there desperately seeking cash income -- and perhaps the savings to pay a smuggler's fee for passage into the United States.
Ms. Rosales arrived in Juarez in January and moved into a mud shanty with her brother. A New York Times account said he paid $20 for papers that showed her age as 16. These enabled her to get an assembly job at Electrocomponentes de Mexico, owned by the International Wire Group of Mishawaka, Indiana.
Unable to adjust to factory discipline, she was let go on Feb. 16. At 9 a.m. she started to walk out of the desolate industrial zone, where dozens of young factory women have been attacked. Her body was found in a ditch a mile away six hours later. She had been raped and smothered with a plastic bag.
The crime is not the fault of International Wire. It is just part and parcel of the desperate circumstances of the maquiladoras. A feminist organization has urged the industries that feed off the cheap labor to provide buses for secure transportation to and from work. That request has gone unheeded. Concerned companies easily could finance safe transport, but it's an unnecessary expense.
That small, neglected request contrasts sharply with the bold, largely unfulfilled promises Mexican and U.S. officials have been making for years to improve labor and environmental conditions at border factories.
Our governments should cooperate to do much more. They should encourage higher local taxes on border factories to finance clean water and sewers, adequate public housing, schools, day care and police and environmental protection for their workers.
That would require genuine concern and, by reflecting their true human costs, might make locating factories in Mexico less lucrative. It might even reduce the flood of textile and assembly jobs that have gone Mexico's way since NAFTA took effect five years ago.
But the jobs there would be safer, the ones here more secure, and workers like Ms. Rosales less vulnerable to exploitation -- or worse.
This editorial appeared in The Times & Free Press on Wednesday, March 3, 1999.