Feminists Decry Police Handling of Murders in Border City
by Thaddeus Herrick
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
The girl's body turned up in a desert hamlet known as Loma Blanca, about 20 miles east of town. She was strangled and stabbed, three times in the chest and twice in the back. Police believe she was raped, too. By her side lay one side, a black pump, and a crimsom skirt, both of which she wore the day she disappeared.
She had been dead for two weeks. That made her body difficult to identify but for one thing. She was still dressed in the burgandy factory smock that bore her name, Maria Sagrario Gonzalez Flores, a 17 year old who only two years before had traveled north with her family from Durango in search of a living wage on Juarez's assembly lines. She had found one, welding electrical components for General Electric at about $3 a day.
Then, one afternoon, she vanished, much like the 100 or so young women who have been found dead in the past five years. Mexican police say Gonzalez is the 95th woman to be murdered in Juarez since 1993. Feminist groups put the number at 123. Many more are believed to have disappeared.
Like Gonzalez, the vast majority of the dead have been sexually assaulted. Many are slender and dark-skinned and work in the "maquiladoras", the free-trade factories that blanket this NAFTA boomtown. Some are strangled or stabbed or both. Such victims are often found with a breast mutilated or severed.
In what seemed to be a break in the case, police last week rounded up nine gang members who are suspected of kidnapping and raping young women.
But for many, the credibility of the police officers is shot.
In 1995, they jailed an Egyptian chemist named Sharif Abdel Latif Sharif, who came to Juarez by way of the United States. With a record of sexual assault in the US, Sharif seemed a reasonable suspect, even though he's claims he's innocent.
When the murders continued even after his arrest, the police jailed seven members of the gang "Los Rebeldes", the Rebels, and accused Sharif of paying them from prison to kill young women. Their leader, Sergio Armendariz, called "El Diablo", says he confessed to some of the murders only after he was beaten. Still, women kept turning up dead. Few think the latest arrests will alter the horrific course.
"The investigation continues to be poorly handled," said Esther Chavez Cano, an activist and accountant who has compiled what is believed to be the most detailed list of the dead. "This has been going on for five years."
Paula Flores, Gonzalez's mother, is blunter still. She calls the police "asesinos", killers. Stumbling in grief on this last day of April when the family's only son delivered the news that his sister was dead, she cried out amid the bustle of the state police headquarters. While the police may not have killed her daughter, she said, their shoddy work allowed her to die.
Activists say the police are indifferent to the plight of poor women, which indeed some might be. On the day Gonzalez's body was identified, police shared the discovery with Juarez news reporters before telling the family. Yet the Gonzalez family was just down the hall at police headquarters, holding a vigil with the mothers of other missing girls.
"Don't tell the family," said one local police reporter to a US correspondent, in a hushed voice. "They don't know yet."
The murders have created a political crisis of sorts for Chihuahua Gov. Francisco Barrio Terrazas, a prominent member of the conservative opposition party who insists the state is doing all it can. But the investigation has drawn flak from as far away as Mexico City, where several congresswomen who visited Juarez in February say the police works lacks professionalism.
In Juarez, the murders have unleashed a feminist movement, which has pressed for action in all crimes against women and made some gains. Leaders explain the murders as part of a widespread male backlash against increasingly independent Mexican women, especially those who earn a living in the "maquilas" sorting coupons or assembling auto parts.
Others see even larger social and economic forces at work. The murders have in the minds of some redefined this city of nearly 2 million as the nightmarish new frontier of the global economy, a place where low-wage, largely expendable workers have become expendable human beings.
"Juarez is not a backwater," writes Charles Bowden, in his recently published book on modern-day Juarez called "The Laboratory of Our Future", "but the new City on the Hill, beckoning us all to a grisly state of things."
The killings can perhaps most easily be explained by Mexico's internal migration, with hundreds of thousands of peasants fleeing the withering countryside for the industrial north. Some come with their families, others strike out with relatives or friends or even on their own.
In a dramatic break with the past, many are women, outfitted in high heels and short skirts but otherwise unprepared for urban life. Most say it's no wonder that at least some of the victims disappeared in Juarez's seamy nightclub district, where "maquila" workers go to drink and dance and sample the nightlife of their new home.
Gonzalez never knew this side of Juarez, or so says her family. She worked the day shift, returning home late in the afternoon. She was involved with a liberal Catholic group that organizes the city's poor. She was last seen changing buses downtown April 16.
"She was easygoing, reserved, responsible," said Jesus, her older brother. "She just enjoyed life."
Still, the parents of many "maquila workers" refuse to acknowledge that their daughters are growing up in an entirely different world than they did, denying that their children might from time to time steal off to a bar or disco after their typical 48-hour week on the assembly line.
While both feminists and police agree this is the case, they clash over the question of resposibility. The police suggest that the girls should know better than to venture downtown at night, and that those who are missing or dead in some cases have led a "doble vida", or double life.
"The parents will always tell you the relations between them and their daughter were perfect," said Jorge Lopez Molinar, a prosecutor for the state Attorney General's office. "But sometimes we find out that the girls are not the saints the parents would have us believe".
Such a take infuriates feminists, and in large part has galvanized the local feminist movement, which incoporates hundreds of local women and can mobilize a press conference or a full-fledged protest in a matter of hours. Leaders even dispatched a report on the killings to the United Nations.
"The moralists would have you believe women are bad if they dance," said Esther Chavez. "The problem of course goes much deeper than that."
To understand the problem, it may help to understand Juarez, which slams up against El Paso at the far end of Texas to form what is thought to be the world's largest border community. Juarez is growing annually by about 200,000 people. In most cases, they are migrants who make their homes in the far-flung sand hills and find work at the city's 400 "maquilas".
Such was the case with Gonzalez, whose family hastily built a four-room, wood and tar-paper home in a sort of post-apocalyptic "colonia" known as Lomas de Poleo and immediately dispatched four members of the family, father included, to work in the always-hiring "maquiladoras".
The factories prefer women, reasoning that they are more suited to the assembly line than men. Work is repetitive and turnover high. Those who study "maquilas" say female workers are sexually harassed, from having to show used sanitary napkins to prove they are not pregnant to competing in factory beauty contests.
"You find routine violations of integrity in all the plants," said Leslie Salzinger, a sociologist at the University of Chicago whose research included working on Juarez assembly lines herself.
"Maquila" boosters say the factories abide by Mexican law and provide decent jobs and even benefits which otherwise would not exist. Indeed, most do.
But activists say the way "maquilas" treat women creates a hostile climate. At the same time, the economic shift from rural to urban has put modern working women on a collision course with Mexico's macho culture. That job opportunities for men in Juarez are fewer than for women only intensifies this clash.
"Men feel powerless," said Chavez. "They can't find decent jobs and they can't cross into the United States. It's a huge social problem."
But questions remain.
Other border communities are magnets for bother "maquilas" and migrants. Why Juarez? Activists do not rule out Ripper-style murders in other cities along the border. In fact, many of the Juarez murders were virtually unknown until Chavez compiled her list.
Gonzalez's family still holds out hope that their daughter is not number 123. Jesus, her brother, told his mother the teeth on the body he viewed were large, not like the small ones he remembers his sister having. Forensic experts then explained that as the human body decays, teeth become more prominent.
Then there is the case of a young woman who was found dead in the desert wearing the clothes of another missing girl. Could this have happened in the case of the body thought to be Maria Sagrario? Police said no, but they will go forward with DNA testing in Mexico City anyway.
"Unfortunately," said Lopez Molina, the prosecutor, taking a deep drag on his cigarette from behind his desk at state police headquarters, "the ID is positive."