Mexico Border Killings a Mystery to Police
by Anahi Rama
Ciudad Juarez - Josefina Gonzalez did not get to say goodbye to her 20-year-old daughter Claudia before she left for work at a factory in northern Mexico one day in October 2001.
Claudia never returned home. Her body was found weeks later, half buried next to that of seven other young women in the desert near the border city of Ciudad Juarez.
She became one of the hundreds of women killed in the area since 1993 in a chilling spate of murders that police have failed to solve.
Exact figures are hard to come by, but investigators say that 258 women have been murdered in and around Ciudad Juarez in the last decade. Non-governmental groups put the number at around 300.
Many of the victims were, like Claudia Gonzalez, poor young women who worked at "maquiladora" factories that make goods for export to the nearby United States.
"When she didn't come back we thought she had stayed on to do extra hours," her mother said at her home in a poor neighbourhood of Ciudad Juarez, close the US border.
"The police told us we had to wait 72 hours before they'd look for her, but a mother always knows," she said in tears, sitting beside a photograph of her smiling black-haired daughter.
Ciudad Juarez has grown to a population of two million in the past two decades as trade has increased between the US and Mexico.
Until 1993, the city was like any other along the Mexican side of the border with its drug trade, under-age US drinkers visiting for a night on the town and would-be immigrants looking for a way into the US.
Manufacturing is the main source of employment in the region and draws a steady stream of poor Mexicans, mostly women, to the city in Chihuahua state.
In 1993, young women began to disappear. Almost 100 have become victims of what police call serial murders in which the victims' bodies were found with signs of sexual assault and torture. Some were mutilated and others found in common graves.
Theories for the motives range from Satanic rituals, organ trafficking and snuff movies where women are kidnapped, sexually assaulted and then murdered on camera.
Another 200 women have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez in the same period either in domestic violence, feuds between drug traffickers or other killings. The attorney general's office says there have been around 60 successful prosecutions for those murders.
Non-governmental organisations have coined the term "feminicide" to describe the Ciudad Juarez killings.
"The murders have a class bias because the women are poor and a gender bias because they're happening in a masculine-dominant state where the victims have even been blamed for their own deaths," said Julia Monarrez of the Northern Border College, a non-governmental Mexican organisation that studies border-related issues.
Added to families' pain and the terror among local women are accusations that the authorities have taken the crimes lightly and failed to react sufficiently.
Government officials including a governor said several years ago that the victims were prostitutes and "tramps," giving the impression that they were not blameless in their own murders.
Despite an abundance of prostitution along the border, many of the dead were students or factory employees.
At the state attorney general's office, where a task force has been working since 1998 to solve sexual crimes against women, officials say half of the 97 cases of serial murder have been solved.
But only one person, Egyptian Abdel Latif Sharif, has been found guilty of a serial killing. He was sentenced to 20 years in jail in March for the murder of one woman, although he had originally been accused of six killings.
Two bus drivers have been accused of several murders but one died in prison before being prosecuted and the other is still in jail awaiting trial.
Few in Ciudad Juarez, including the victims' families, believe the authorities have caught the real culprits.
"This has all been plagued by irregularities," said Oscar Maynes, former head of criminal investigation at the attorney general's office.
"If you analyse the case of Sharif presented by the attorney general, if you investigate the drivers, there's nothing," Maynes said.
Fear among women is evident, above all among factory workers, because many live alone, far from their families in other states in Mexico.
"We walk around terrified. I don't go out at night," said 22-year-old Maricruz Perez.
Maynes in large part blames police and judicial inefficiency and the general corruption of authorities throughout Mexico, where the majority of crimes go unreported and even fewer are solved.
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