Murder Stalks The Women of Ciudad Juarez
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
The women of Ciudad Juarez live in fear.
In the last four years, 121 women have disappeared. Many of them have been found in the desert outside the city, raped, brutally murdered and sometimes disfigured.
Ten adolescent members of a gang were arrested this week and initially charged with scores of murders. But police now admit the boys confessed only to rapes and beatings, and say there is no evidence so far to support homicide charges.
The gang, which included members as young as 14, admitted to luring young women into cars and then raping them. In four of the cases, the women were severely beaten and abandoned.
Officials said they feared some of the women may have died as a result of their injuries, but no bodies have been found and no witnesses have come forward.
Ciudad Juarez's special prosecutor for crimes against women, Maria Esparza Cortez, said those responsible for about 20 killings in the past few years had been arrested, but most of the remaining murders were still unsolved.
"Violence against women here is an ongoing problem, and this year alone, we have had 14 cases of homicides against women," she said.
"The serial killer doesn't move in large groups," said women's rights advocate Esther Chavez. "He works alone and has one or two accomplices."
'Sometimes I don't want to remember'
The disappearence of young women is a chillingly frequent phenomenon, especially among those who are between 14 and 20 years of age. The victims are often thin and attractive and have long hair.
Eva Arce said her daughter, Sylvia, has been missing since March.
"Sometimes I don't want to remember or understand what's happening," she said.
Most of the women are workers in the maquiladoras, largely American-owned factories that have proliferated along the border opposite of El Paso, Texas.
Esparza said there is no logical reason for the killings, but thinks economic empowerment of the women may have stirred a pathological resentment among some unemployed men.
Of the one 150,000 maquiladora workers in Juarez, 70 percent of them are women.
Yet the average wage is equivalent to only $4.50 a day, and women's rights activist Judith Gallarza said prosperity is an illusion, because the female working poor are just chattel.
"The women here in Ciudad Juarez are expendable, disposable women," she said.
Congresswomen want investigation
Chavez blames the problem on a combination of factors.
"It's poverty. It's the low salaries paid by (factory owners)," she said. "It's a problem of government indifference, of impunity and of machismo."
Women's groups are on the offensive against Chihuahua State Gov. Francisco Barrio who, according to them, recently remarked that the murders were not unusual and that crime was not his responsibility.
A nonpartisan coalition of federal congresswomen charges that state authorities have failed to begin a systematic and scientific investigation of the killings.
Meanwhile, the victim's families build shrines in police stations as reminders of the missing. They say justice is deaf to their plea, and that the desert must no longer swallow the dead.