Epidemic In Juarez: Slain Women
by Dave Harmon
Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua
Esther Chavez Cano pulled the photographs from a thin manilla folder and spread them out on her desk one at a time. She never met them, but she knows these young women now - their names, how they lived, how they died.
Silvia. Alicia. Olga. Marta. Sagrario. "Pobrecitas," Chavez whispers. Poor things.
They represent a handful of the dozens of young women who have been sexually assaulted and killed since 1993 in this growing Mexico border city of more than 1 million people. Many here believe a serial killer, perhaps more than one, is prowling their streets in search of victims and dumping their bodies in the desert scrub at the edges of the city.
To Chavez, a former accountant who now leads one of the city's organizations for women; the photos represent the anguish of families she has consoled, the incompetence of the authorities she has denounced and the friction she sees between Mexico's male-dominated society and a new class of women who come to the border seeking factory jobs and a measure of independence.
"The government isn't interested in what happens to these women," Chavez, 65, said from her office near Juarez's bustling downtown. "This is not a just society."
As women continue to die violent deaths in Juarez, law enforcement officers and women's groups continue to clash over how many have died, who might have killed them and whether the victims could have prevented their deaths. Six years after the first killings aroused suspicions that young women were being hunted, the men who hold the power in Juarez and the women who say they speak for the dead seem farther apart than ever.
Chavez has another manila folder, containing a list of 145 women slain in Juarez since 1993. Gleaned from newspaper articles, the list includes domestic killings and drug-related executions, as well as roughly 30 cases in which women were raped and strangled or stabbed. Another 15 bodies were mutilated or burned, and more than 20 victims remain unidentified, according to Chavez.
She doesn't know how many of the cases are connected, but she said: "The police can't tell you either, because they are disorganized. It's a disaster."
Suly Ponce Prieto, the special prosecutor in charge of investigating the killings, said more than 180 women have been murdered in Juarez since 1993 - not an unusually high number in a city of 1.2 million, she added - but only seven appeared to be the work of the same killer or killers. Prosecutors say they have arrested those responsible for about half of the killings, and the number of slain women has actually dropped in recent years.
But the arrests haven't stopped the killings, and as public pressure mounts with every body found, the Chihuahuan government is looking for all the help it can get. Investigators have received training from the El Paso Police Department, they have invited a respected former FBI agent to sift through the files, and early next week, three FBI psychological profilers are scheduled to arrive from the agency's Quantico, Va., headquarters to help with the cases.
While Juarez officials try to downplay talk of a serial killer, Robert Ressler, the former FBI profiler who flew from Virginia to Juarez twice last year to offer his assistance, said he found 76 cases with enough similarities to make him suspicious.
"My impression was there was a pattern in some of the cases which would indicate that there are one or more serial murderers at work," said Ressler, who now owns a consulting company.
Blaming the victims
Wednesday, another body surfaced; this one was burned beyond recognition and found protruding from a brick kiln next to a highway leading out of the city. After learning that two wires found on the body might be from a bra, Chavez leaped into action, sending emails and faxes to her network of supporters.
Chavez - whose group is called 8 de Marzo, for March 8, International Women's Day - began noticing a pattern in the murders in 1993 joined forces with a dozen other women's groups to pressure authorities into action. They have written letters, held demonstrations, occupied the governor's offices in Juarez and given tours to reporters from across Mexico and the United States.
Chavez and her friends say they speak for the young women of Juarez, many of them from villages in the interior who find work in a downtown office or in one of the 300 maquiladoras, or manufacturing plants, that employ almost 250,000 people - more than half of them women.
These women are changing the border, Chavez said. They come to the cities wide-eyed and naive, and many adopt the lifestyles and fashion of the American women they see in movies and across the Rio Grande: They live with female roommates instead of looking for husbands, they challenge propriety by wearing shorts, they dance in women's discos at night. Those in relationships often end up providing for their men, she said.
In her eyes, the murders, and their brutality, are "a symptom of the frustration of men who feel themselves losing their power".
As proof, she pointed to recent comments by the city's new police chief, who was quoted saying women have no reason to be out in the wee hours drinking and using drugs, and by Chihuahua Attorney General Arturo Gonzalez Rascon, who said that the victims put themselves at risk bybeing out on the streets late at night and associating with shady people.
"The attorney general's comments tell us that he doesn't care," said Chavez, who fired back with a sharp rebuke in the next day's paper.
The prosecutors, who work for the attorney general, were clearly uncomfortable with their boss' statement.
"We're familiar with the comment," said Manuel Esparza, operations coordinator for the special prosecutor's office. "We think it was misunderstood." The attorney general, he said, was simply trying to alert women to the city's potential dangers.
A daylight abduction
The dangers are real. Thousands of young women live in shantytowns at the edge of Juarez, which requires them to walk alone on deserted dirt roads to catch buses to their jobs or downtown. Many maquiladoras work two shifts, sending hundreds of workers home long after dark. The women follow predictable patterns, Chavez said, making them easy to stalk. The factories, she added, need to provide more secuity, even door-to-door bus service to ensure their workers' safety.
"We're not police. We cannot provide security to (everyone) in Juarez," said Servando Sarabia, director of the Juarez Maquiladora Association, which represents 210 factories. "Security comes form the government. But what we can do, we are going to do it."
Any action comes too late for Maria Sagrario Gonzalez Flores, who was found raped, stabbed, and strangled last April after leaving the maquiladora where she worked.
Her parents, Jesus and Paula, had heard about the murders when they moved their six daughters and one son from Durango three years ago. But daughter Guillermina, 22, said they believed the authorities' statements that the victims were prostitutes or women who frequented bars. "We didn't think anything would happen to us," she said.
They built a three-bedroom shanty where the city meets the desert, and Jesus, Guillermina, and Maria Sagrario all got jobs at the same maquiladora, making refrigerator parts.
Maria Sagrario, 17, didn't go to bars, her family said. She was active in the local church, sang in the choir, and had a boyfriend who took her to the park or the movies. On April 16, when she left the plant after her shift ended at 3:30pm, she disappeared.
For two weeks, the family taked up photos Maria Sagrario, questioned bus drivers and searched the city. The police reacted with indifference, saying she probably ran off with her boyfriend, said her brother, 21 year old Jesus Jr. A group of boys found the body in a desert area called Loma Blanca. The family found out when reporters started calling.
Guillermina and her father quit the maquila. She now works as a stylist at a brightly lit Super Cortes, or Supercuts, in a new strip mall. Her father or brother always picks her up after work, and they drive back to the house that now contains a shrine with photos of Maria Sagrario, lit by flickering candles and surrounded by artificial flowers.
Prosecutors say they have promising leads in the case.
Prosecutors pressured
In the bare offices that house the Special Prosecutor for the Investigations of Murders of Women, investigators at government-issue desks questioned worried-looking women whose daughters are missing, while men with guns on their belts clustered nearby, smoking and talking.
The unit is the first of its kind in Mexico. It was created a year ago by an opposition party government that since has been swept from office.
"It was kind of like public opinion; people wanted a special prosecutor for these crimes," said Esparza, the operations coordinator. But since its inception, the uniet has been showered with criticisms.
Last week, for example, two criminologists who had come from the capital a month earlier to help in the investigation suddenly returned to Mexico City, claiming the special prosecutor's staff had obstructed their work at every turn.
Ponce, the special prosecutor, and her staff said the criminologists arrived uninvited and were nevertheless shown every courtesy. "They came here hoping to get fame for helping us," prosecutor Julio Yanez said.
For all their critics, the prosecutors have a supporter in Ressler, the former FBI agent, who said he came back from Juarez with a new respect for the local authorities.
"I spent one day with a table full of case files that I went through one by one," he said. "I think the police are making pretty good progress. I was impressed, since I went in with the impression that nothing was being done, and in fact, a lot was being done. I didn't see anything less than I would normally see in a US case of the same magnitude."
Ressler believes one or more Americans is crossing the river to kill. But because the cases are still active, he won't say why he believes that.
Meanwhile prosecutors wonder if they will ever earn the support of the people they are paid to protect.
"It is difficult because you don't get a lot of support from the community," Esparza said. "We have to prove ourselves time and time again."
The prosecutors thought they had proved themselves with a series of highly publicized arrests in late 1995 and early 1996. Police arrested an Egyptian chemist, Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif, and 11 members of a street gang called the Rebels. Authorities announced that Sharif, who immigrated to the United States and has a criminal record for rape in Florida, had paid gang members to abduct women for him and that they could be responsible for more than a dozen murders.
Last Wednesday, a judge sentenced Sharif to 30 years in prison for the rape and strangulation of Elizabeth Castro Garcia, a 17 year old student whose body was found Aug. 19, 1995. Sharif has maintained his innocence, insisting that he was used as a scapegoat to take pressure off the police. Cases are pending against two of the gang members who are charged with seven murders.
Nameless victims
While prosecutors work to find the killers, Dr. Irma Rodriguez Galarza tries to identify the victims.
Rodriguez, a no-nonsense forensic dentist who works in a cramped office smelling of coffee and cigarettes, pulled out the three-ring binder and flipped through the photographs, one by one. She may never know who some of these girls were, but she knows their faces: every chipped tooth, every curve of their jaw line, every frozen grimace.
Behind her on a scarred wooden table, three faces stared at her - unidentified victims from three and four years ago. Their skulls, wrapped in plastic, formed the base for faces reconstructed in clay and painted in too-pink flesh tones.
Rodriguez is still trying to identify 25 victims, most of them decomposed beyond recognition after months or perhaps years in the desert.
"The hardest cases are like this one," she said, holding up a jawbone encased in plastic wrap. "This is all we have of one victim. We can't reconstruct a face with this."
Rodriguez doesn't believe the serial killer theory.
"Who's guilty?" she asked. "Everyone. Society, the police, families who aren't watching their children, companies that have their workers leaving work early in the morning."
Desert dumping ground
Vicky Caraveo steered her sport utility vehicle through Juarez's busy streets, heading to the edge of town, where the pavement turns to sand and concrete homes give way to homemade shacks built from cardboard and discarded wooden pallets.
Caraveo, a lawyer and housewife who heads an advocacy group called Women For Juarez, drove past the sprawling, dust-choked settlement - where the poorest residents dig their own latrines and steal electricity by connecting wires to power lines - and into the dirt tracks that crisscross the desert.
Lomas de Poleo, as the area is called, looks as if a city landfill has dropped from the sky. Piles of garbage, discarded clothes, even a dead pig litter the scraggly vegetation. This is where 11 bodies have been found, Caraveo said. Last year, the charred bones of three women were discovered in one day.
She motioned to miles of trash-strewn nothingness around her.
"I think we've got more bodies hidden in the desert," she said. "They rape them, they kill them, and they thrown them again, like this bucket, like this paper.
"We try to imagine the horror. They can scream at the top of their lungs, and no one - no one - is going to hear them."
Copyright 1999 Austin