Who Is Killing The Women Of Juarez?
by Tim Madigan
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
Only two years before, Sagrario Gonzalez and her family came north with great hope, fleeing the desperate poverty of the Mexican interior for the deceptive promise of huge foreign factories hiring near the border.
But like the Joads of John Steinback, the Gonzalez family found only heartbreak in the promised land. The teenager girl, her father, and an older sister immediately found jobs at the same Juarez factory, a maquiladora, making electric components for General Electric. But the assembly line paid only $3 a day, not nearly enough to secure decent housing for the family of nine. Their dwelling became instead a four-room shack without heat or running water in one of the hemisphere's worst slums, the lights of bountiful El Paso teasing them from the other side of the Rio Grande.
Then, almost a year ago, on April 16, Sagrario never came home from her day shift. She was last seen downtown, changing buses with an army of other factory workers, many of them teenage girls like herself who were new to the city, walking alone amid the drug pushers and prostitutes down Juarez's most dangerous avenues. Two weeks later, ranch workers found Sagrario's body, lying in a field east of Juarez, still wearing her burgandy maquiladora smock. The 17 year old had been raped and strangled and stabbed five times.
By then, it was a common fate - scores of other girls and young women had been snatched away into the desert in the past six years, raped, tortured, and killed. Their bodies had been dumped amid the cactus, their bones picked clean by the coyotes, and bleached white by the sun. Almost all the victims were poor. Maquiladora smocks often turned up with their remains.
And the scourge continues. Every few weeks, a new body turns up, another dream of a better life transformed into the ultimate nightmare. In the tar-paper dwellings of the Juarez slums, votive candles still flicker at the feet of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of the nation's poor. But in the Gonzalez home, that age-old devotion is overshadowed by the spectral presence of Sagrario, the pretty brown-haired girl whose portrait hangs from almost every wall.
Her family clings to their faith in the Virgin, they say, but only with great effort.
"Sometimes," says Sagrario's older sister, Guillermina, "it's hard not to ask the Virgin, 'Why?'"
Few things convene American journalists like the prospect of a serial killer, and as such crime sprees go, the numbers from Juarez are staggering. Since 1993, Mexican authorities say, 174 Juarez women have been slain, many of them by husbands or boyfriend, pimps or drug dealers. But police categorize about a third of the killings as sexual homicides, crimes typically committed at random, therefore making leads scarce, the type of deeds attributed to the Theordore Bundys of the criminal universe. The Juarez victims range in age from preteens to late 20s. Many other girls and young women are missing.
Police hoped the spree would end in 1995 with the arrest of Sharif Sharif, an Egyptian chemist living in one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods who has a history of sexual violence in the United States. A year later, investigators hauled in seven members of a Juarez street gang allegedly hired by Sharif to commit more killings, part of a plain to deflect suspicion from him, police maintain. Last week, a Mexican judge sentenced Sharif to 30 years in prison for the rape and strangulation of a 17 year old Juarez girl. A similar verdict is expected soon against members of the gang called The Rebels. Investigators believe Sharif and The Rebels are responsible for as many as 17 slayings.
But the carnage has continued since their arrests. More women were killed in 1998 than during any other year since 1993. This year, in early February, the body of an unidentified young woman who had been raped and strangled was found dumped in a soccer field on the edge of torn. One morning late last month, 13 year old Irma Angelica Rosalez Lovano was fired from her job in a maquiladora, then set out alone for her home in a colonia shack. Her body was discovered six hours later near a drainage ditch, her pants pulled to her knees, a plastic bag over her head.
Investigators now concede that one or more serial killers might still be at work. Four criminal profilers from the FBI have arrived from Quantico, Va., to offer assistance. Grieving relatives and women's groups continue to meet one day every month to comb the desert for additional victims. Pressure to solve the crimes from the media and a growing feminist movement remains intense.
Juarez thus continues to be a popular destination for the American press. Reporters from The New York Times have come twice in the past year, joining journalists from Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston, the Cable News Network, and ABC's "20/20", among others. An apocalyptic profile emerges from their stories, one that seems to confirm sinister notions of many Americans toward Mexican border towns: of societies out of control, havens of corrupt poloce, street gangs, warring drug cartels, child prostitutes, and now, serial killers.
"Even the devil is scared of living here," a Juarez fruit vendor is quoted as saying in a 1996 Harper's magazine article.
Yet a delightful man named Angel Villasenor appears in none of the reports. He wears a dirty old fedora over long gray hair pulled into a ponytail, and for 30 years had guided tourists through the white adobe Mision de Guadalupe in the heart of downtown. The chapel was first built by Franciscan missionaries in the 1500s. Villasenor's eyes still sparkle, his voice is still tinged with reverance as he points to the ceiling of the mission, to the ornate mahogany beams carved by the Indians hundreds of years ago.
The sprawling city, now estimated at 2 million residents, eventually grew up around the mission, which is now adjoined by a newer, larger cathedral built of red stone. But the church plaza remains a hub of Juarez life, a place of Old World energy that bustles from midday well into the evening. Farmers in straw hats, happy schoolgirls in their uniforms, young lovers, clerks and office workers, mothers with their children hurry back and forth across the grassy plaza. A few miles east, there are luxurious hotels and department stores and fine restaurants.
American film legend Steve McQueen died here in 1980 while seeking alternative treatments for cancer. Elizabeth Taylor has come to Juarez to avail herself of quick and cheap divorces.
Yet on the international bridge leading back to El Paso, a succession of sad-eyed Indian children, some of them barely more than toddlers, pleads for pesos from passing motorists. The slums sprawl. Street gangs flourish. Narcotraficantes, celebrated in popular music, are role models for a generation of Mexico's young. Scores of families grieve for slain daughters and sisters.
To visit Juarez is to grapple with a disorienting combination of charm and heartbreak, good and evil, all in great measure.
Those who don't know them would assume from appearences that the two are related. By now, young Guillermina Gonzalez doesn't need to knock when she enters the house of Irma Perez Franco, doesn't ask where she grabs a soft drink from Irma's refrigerator. At 22, Guillermina is about the same age as Irma's dead daughter, one person who make the older, grief-striken woman smile.
Yet until just last year, they lived in very different worlds. Irma raised her daughter, Olga, in a small, blue stucco house a few blocks from the church plaza, cooking and selling hamburgers at night on the sidewalk of the graffiti-scarred neighborhood. Guillermina grew up a long bus ride south, in the state of Durango, moving to Juarez with her family only two years ago when the forestry jobs finally played out and the agricultural economy continued to crumble.
Her father built their shack on a hill in the wretched colonia called Lomas de Poleo on the west side of Juarez, and the family went to work in the maquiladoras. Then Sagrario was killed, and almost immediately, Guillermina and her family were absorbed into a growing community of grief.
Irma Perez Franco was long a member by then. In 1995, the tennis shoes of her 20 year old daughter, Olga, were found in the desert with a young woman's skeletal remains. Eight other bodies turned up in the area about the same time.
The growing cluster of grieving relatives came to call themselves Voces sin Eco (Voices Without Echo). Each of them, it seemed, had a story of horror, heartbreak, and frustration - of police incompetence, or insensitivity, or indifference. Investigators seemed inclined to blame the victims for their own deaths, or the victims' families, the relatives said. So every Monday they gathered at police headquarters at the southern edge of the city, sitting in the lobby in quiet demonstration beneath large photographs of the dead.
Many gather more informally almost every day. On a sunny winter afternoon a few weeks ago, Guillermina and Irma sat together in the parlor of Irma's house, Guillermina listening respectfully while her older friend spoke of Olga. A small crucifix hung over the door. The face of Olga dominated the whitewashed walls - the smiling girl in her white dress for first communion; Olga in cap and gown for her high school graduation - just as Sagrario's face lined the walls of the Gonzalez dwelling.
Olga had disappeared from a political rally on Aug. 10, 1995, only 11 days before she was to start college classes at a prestigious local university. A month later, Irma saw her daughter's blouse and tennis shoes at the city morgue but could not bring herself to look at the bag of bones that police said were Olga's remains.
More than three years later, Irma's eyes remain deadened by grief, her face sagging with sadness. In her parlor that day, she spoke just above a whisper. Then, as Irma talked of Olga, Guillermina's worried parents, Jesus and Paula, suddenly appeared at the front door. Paula greeted Irma, hugged her daughter, and briefly scolded Guillermina for not saying where she would spend the afternoon.
The arrival a few minutes later of a fifth person, Bertha Marquez, seemed to brighten them all. She is a cheerful, vibrant woman with short dark hair and a luminous smile. Bertha's joking caused even Irma to giggle while the five of them posed for a group photograph.
But a similarly grim truth explained Bertha's presence at the impromptu gathering, explained her connection to Irma and Gonzalez family. On May 8, 1995, her 15 year old daughter, Adriana, disappeared while shopping for shoes downtown. The girl's body was found six months later, in the same garbage-strewn expanse of desert where Olga Franco's tennis shoes turned up.
"Like everybody else, I try to believe what I've been told," Bertha says, speaking of her dealings with police, who have not made an arrest in the case. Her smile is gone, at least for the moment. "But it's very difficult to accept when you leave your daughter alive somewhere, and they give you back just bones."
The army of workers moves three times a day, with every shift change at the maquiladoras, a Spanish word that means twin plants. The factories are the centerpiece of a 30-year-old agreement between the US and Mexico: American companies can avail themselves of inexpensive Mexican labor without paying Mexican tariffs on their goods.
More than 300 maquiladoras operate in Juarez now, employing 230,000 people, a large percentage of them teenage girls and boys. Every eight hour, tens of thousands of workers stream from the blocky, sprawling plants owned by such American business titans as Johnson & Johnson, Ford Motor Co., United Technologies and General Electric, onto hundreds of white buses provided by the factories. The buses then clog the thoroughfares, raise clouds of dust in the colonias, rumble past the plaza downtown.
A primary dus stop downtown is a few blocks from the mission. Some men and older women step down onto the street from the white buses. But hundreds of those who descend are waiflike teenage girls, wearing bright red lipstick and maquiladora smocks. They have come in the past few months from farms and villages in every state in Mexico, some from as far away as Oaxaca or Chiapas in the far south.
Now they are on the street in Mexico's seventh-largest city, often alone and sometimes late at night. To catch the next bus to their colonias, they routinely must walk past the cantinas and discos and howling young men. Some of the girls stop in the nightclubs to drink and dance. Most of the sexual homicide victims, Juarez journalists say, are maquiladora girls.
But for many of the victims, the tragedy of their lives began long before their horrid deaths. Instead, from the moment of birth, they were victims of the dire alchemy that is the life of Mexico's poor.
That alchemy begins, most observes agree, with a century of national government that has been both corrupt and indifferent to the plight of its masses. The oil crash of the 1980s shattered Mexico's already fragile economy, forcing the country heavily into debt. Money that might have been used for education and social services at home was paid out by the milloins to lending nations, the US prominent among them. The peso was devalued in 1994, making Mexico's basic currency almost worthless. Then, more than ever before, desperate Mexicans turned their attention north.
Between 600 and 1000 people arrive in Juarez every day, refugees drawn to the US-Mexico border that looms before the stricken nation like a mirage. Poor Mexicans are tantalized by stories of relatives in the US, of running water, and flush toilets, and electricity, and birthday parties at McDonald's for their children. But the realities that greet them at the border are chain-link fences 10 feet high, barbed wire, and the light green sports utility vehicles of the US Border Patrol, waiting on the American side every few hundred yards.
The maquiladoras are part of the mirage, too, but less obviously so. The plants, which manufacture everything from bluejeans to cruise controls to television sets, seem insatiable in their demand for workers. Driving through the industrial parks, placards at one factor after another practically beg for help.
The factories are clean, well-lit places. Workers can shower there. There is air-conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter. There's green grass outside, a rarity in Juarez, and picnic areas, and soccer fields for games after work. In addition to their salaries, maquiladora workers receive two good meals every day and some health benefits.
But for housing, the newcomers must turn to the slums and throw up carboard shacks that spill down the hills on the outskirts of town, or spread through the valleys like a rash. Running water is an unthinkable luxury. Diets consist mostly of beans and tortillas. Human excrement washes into the streets with every hard rain. In most slums, the schools have room for a fraction of the children who play together each day in the dusty streets.
Yet the masses continue to pour in from the south, drawn by the mirage, like drips of gasoline into an already combustible mix. The army of waiflike newcomers in red lipstick and maquiladora smocks wanders unknowingly into places where hardened police officers say they would never go. Scores of them have paid with their lives. For thousands of others in Juarez, the tragedy unfolds more slowly, day by day.
The week after the slaying of the latest young victim, Irma Lovano, was a succession of 15-hour days, and the faces of Suly Ponce and Manuel Esparza were puffy from lack of sleep. Ponce heads a special state unit investigatin the slayings of Juarez women. Esparza is her chief lieutenant. With every new body that turns up, public pressure to solve the crimes ratchets up several more notches, pressure that comes from as far away as the national government in Mexico City. The small, windowless cluster of offices where the investigators work feels like a bunker.
But that recent morning, the weariness of the two lead investigators seemed to belie the most common criticism leveled by Juarez feminists and victims' families: that the police don't care.
"When we have a new case," Ponce says, "a lot of us feel like crying."
Former FBI agent Robert K. Ressler has made two consulting trips to Juarez in the past two years at the request of the Mexican investigators. Ressler says he was surprised at the commitment he found there.
"So in other words, it wasn't just these guys in big hats, taking siestas," says Ressler, who left the FBI's behavioral sciences unit in 1990. "They had a pretty good operation and pretty good people in the top spots. What the women's groups are saying is that these macho guys didn't give a damn about the victims. I disagree with that."
What investigators undoubtedly lack, if not commitment, is experience. Ponce, a prosecutor with the state attorney general's office, is only 35. She has been in her job with homicide for five months. Esparza is an articulate lawyer who moves freely between Spanish and barely-accented English. But he is only 28.
For them, the investigation has amounted to on-the-job training, a crash course in methods of confronting the sort of psychopaths who routinely baffle the most seasoned American detectives. Only last year, Ressler helped Mexican investigators computerize their evidence and taught intensive, weeklong investigative seminars. The recent arrival of the FBI profilers warranted huge headlines in the Juarez press.
For many here it seems too little, too late. Yet Ponce and her staff plow on, remaining surprisingly accessible to the media, ushering a procession of American reporters into their bunker. They plead for patience, insist they are not in over their heads, that they are pursuing strong leads in several of the cases. With the FBI's help, Ponce says, investigators expect to soon know better whether another serial killer is at work, or whether Juarez women are being brutalized by a series of copycats.
"We don't know what it will take or how long it will take," Ponce says gesturing, her face flushing with emotion as she talks. "But if we have to work seven days a week, 24 hours a day, we will do it. We must make Juarez a safe place. That's our goal, to make Juarez a safe place."
Whatever her good intentions, in the social cauldron that is Juarez, it seems a task well beyond her.
It is a tradition among the workers to have their photographs taken in front of their maquiladoras. Thus the largest of Sagrario's portraits shows her standing in front of her American-owned factory, a trace of a smile across her long face. The picture, framed and hung on a wall in the tiny parlor of her home, loomed over her family as they gathered to speak of her one night last month.
Sagrario was a devout girl who worked with a Catholic agency to organize the poor. She and Guillermina wore each other's clothes. Sagrario dreamed of studying computers and learning to speak English like her boyfriend. Then the tempting riches of places like El Paso might be more accessible. She and her family were reminded of the prosperous world every night - the lights of the American city spread out below them like a blanket of white Christmas lights.
But Sagrario would never see the promised land. Almost a year after her death, her mother, Paula, can speak of her daughter only haltingly. Every few weeks comes another terrible reminder of Sagrario's death, another body, another young woman raped and killed and dumped in the desert.
"Last night was a very bad night because I learned of the last one," Paula says, crowded onto a sofa with three of her surviving children beneath Sagrario's maquiladora portrait. "The family tries to hide that fact from their mother, but a lady told me. And it comes alive again."
Votive candles flickered by the Virgin in the dimly lit room that had grown cold from the lack of heat. Sounds of dogs barking came from outside, where a nearly full moon hung over the mountains on a crisp winter night. It was late, but white buses still rumbled past cardboard shacks, carrying armies of workers, raising thick clouds of dust.
Copyright 1999 Fort Worth Star-Telegram