Murder In Juarez And Beyond
by Dannah Baynton
Empathy and incredulity grow for the women of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. This transient border town has been wracked by a decade-long string of serial murders in which every single victim is female, and most are sweatshop workers. An estimated 300–400 women have been reported murdered, with another 400-1000 missing.
At least 90 of the murders have been labeled serial killings, although no one really believes one perpetrator or even one group is responsible. And the death count shows no sign of relenting. On February 17, three more bodies were found in the remote outskirts of Juárez, and a few days later, the body of a six-year-old girl was discovered.
Here’s the part that’s hardest to read: When they’re not skeletal remains, most of the women’s bodies are found in the nearby desert with evidence of torture and gang rape. Forensic evidence shows many are kept alive during this for days or longer. The bodies are usually mutilated, laid out in cross formation, and branded with signature carvings on various parts of their bodies. All the victims have been young and poor.
Official and police response have varied over the years from denial to incompetence to misogyny to corruption. In ten years, not one of the murders has been solved, though police regularly claim otherwise. Guesses at who is responsible for the crimes range from narco-traffickers to police to bus drivers to foreign nationals. An Egyptian national was jailed in 1995—despite slim to bizarre evidence, and despite the murders continuing while he's in prison. A U.S. profiler has said he believes one of the killers is a border-crossing American. Speculation runs rampant, as do uninvestigated leads.
Juárez groups focused on the issue include Nuestras Hijas de las Casas (May Our Daughters Return Home), a grassroots group dedicated to advocacy for the victims and their families, and Casa Amiga, a crisis center for women. Among U.S. groups increasingly focused on the crimes is the Chicago-based Mexico Solidarity Network. MSN leads educational delegations to Juárez and recently sponsored a speaking tour in the United States with Rosario Acosta, cofounder of Nuestras Hijas de las Casas and aunt to one of the victims. Acosta’s speeches were accompanied by presentations of Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman), a moving 2002 documentary about the murders produced by Lourdes Portillo.
Bad Policing
According to the Mexico Solidarity Network’s Jason Wallach, advocacy groups in Juárez and elsewhere have no faith that police or state authorities will solve the crimes.
Whether speculation about police involvement is true or not, they have bungled murder investigations, harassed locals, and destroyed evidence. In the late 1990s, for example, they burned a thousand pounds of clothing, much of it collected from victims’ bodies.
Juárez has one of the highest crime rates in the Americas and is a well-known center for drug trafficking and its related violence. Drug murders occur daily in this city of two million, as local government is unable to defeat narco culture and control. Many familiar with the town accuse authorities and local business of colluding with the drug cartels. They believe those connections are at the heart of the serial murders.
Local authorities often add insult to injury by playing "blame the victim" games: saying the women were killed because they were involved in prostitution or drug trafficking. Some blame the crimes on women’s clothing or on their staying out late. The assistant attorney general for the state of Chihuahua, where Juárez is located, once proposed a curfew as a solution: "All the good people should stay at home with their families," he said with a shrug in one Señorita Extraviada interview, "And let the bad people be out on the street."
Activists say such misogynistic statements and actions only worsen the climate of fear for women and the sense of impunity for the perpetrators. Officials who blame the victims also ignore an important point: many of the abductions have occurred in broad daylight, some of them in maquilas, and many of them as the women were on their way to or from work.
The Sweatshop Link
Some of those murdered in Juárez were students or children, but most worked at local maquilas or maquiladoras, better known in English as assembly plants or sweatshops. Many of these women migrated from other parts of Mexico in desperate search of work, with no resources or connections in the region. About 70 percent of this factory workforce is female, and when one of them disappears—or for that matter, when hundreds do—there are always more to replace them.
Hundreds of thousands of women and girls work at the 500 maquilas located in Juárez. "Eighty percent of these border factories are U.S.–owned, and they generate about $16 billion per year," says MSN's Wallach. "Despite that impressive number, their workers earn an average of $4–6 a day, in a nation where 40 percent of the population live in extreme poverty."
Free-trade supporters once claimed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would turn Ciudad Juárez into the city of the future. It was a model of economic globalization as guided by the U.S. neoliberal model. Under free trade terms, U.S. companies are able to avoid import taxes on goods their maquilas produce for the U.S. market. Historically, most maquilas pay no taxes at all, though in the last year or so Mexico has pushed for a property tax. As expected, the maquilas have fought this idea fiercely.
More maquila workers live in Juárez than in any other city along the U.S.–Mexico border, where about two-thirds of Mexico’s maquilas are located. Most live in shanty-town type neighborhoods lacking real addresses, phones, electricity or roads. And certainly they lack resources to investigate the murders of their daughters or neighbors. Some of them don't earn enough for bus rides to the police station. The maquilas cement a system of poverty and vulnerability.
The maquilas’ responses to a decade of murdered workers has been dismal. "Local advocates tell us their efforts to get the factories to provide more security for women workers have gone nowhere," says Wallach. Many of the victims have disappeared while waiting for or traveling on the buses that take them to and from work. Making matters worse, the factories sometimes change workers’ shifts at the last minute, so the women find themselves unexpectedly traveling late at night or early in the morning, in the dark and alone. One girl who had always gone to and from work with the protection of her family was left to make the trip alone after an unexpected shift change. She was killed on the journey. A number of workers have been killed in these circumstances.
In another case of corporate cluelessness, according to Wallach, one maquila refused to let a missing worker’s family make photocopies of the "Missing" flyers they had made about their daughter. The maquila learned the girl was underage—she had told them she was 16 though she was actually 14. They fired her in absentia and told the family she wouldn’t be welcome back if she were found.
"The maquiladoras are untouchable," says Mexican activist Judith Galarza in Señorita Extraviada. "Nothing is investigated at the maquilas because they are the biggest investment of the Mexican government."
According to Wallach, NAFTA exempts the maquilas from being forced to provide better protection or transportation for their workers. NAFTA’s Chapter 11 (the investors’ rights chapter) gives corporations the right to sue and stop any government regulation that infringes on their ability to make profit. This would include any Mexican legislation that required extra security expenditures. Under NAFTA's free trade rules, a company’s right to profit trumps the rights of government and the protection of citizens. But no one said the Mexican government is pushing for such measures. Meanwhile, the workers who help create the profits are easily replaceable.
Amid Cultural Encouragement, Does Murder Spread?
Similar murders have begun to occur in Chihuahua City, about 230 miles south of Juárez, and in Matamoros and Nuevo Laredo, border cities located in the state of Tamaulipas. Some 34 women have been murdered in Nuevo Laredo in recent years. Last fall, a murder in the pattern of Juárez took place in Matamoros.
Torture and murder mark the worst of violence against women, whether in Juárez or elsewhere. Other forms of violence, from domestic beatings to discrimination to rape, remain part of the daily experience of many women in Mexico, as elsewhere.
By now, violence against women is practically advertised as an unpunishable crime in Ciudad Juárez, where such impunity can only encourage more of the same. The violence plays out in dysfunctional laws as well: In Mexico, it is not illegal for a man to rape his wife. In the state of Chihuahua, home to Juárez, wife beating was legal until 2002. And Chihuahua's missing person laws are woefully outdated in light of a 10-year killing spree. The region still requires a 72-hour waiting period before anyone can file or get help for a missing person case—despite physical evidence that many of the Juárez women were tortured for days or weeks before they were murdered. Earlier searches might have saved them.
Mexican media coverage can further victimize women. Women in some local advocacy groups report they suffer character assassination as soon as they stand up for themselves. Members of the Juárez victims’ group Voces Sin Eco (Voices Without Echo) decided to end their advocacy campaign for victims and families because of repeated attacks by local media. Their reputations were questioned and the victims they were defending were accused of being women of "ill-repute." This culture combined with the transience of Juárez leads some activist groups to disband quickly. The media also pits some groups against each other, leaving them focused on internal squabbling rather than real issues.
Organizing Against Murder
Awareness of the murders is spreading. On March 8, International Women’s Day, 600 people marched from El Paso, Texas to Ciudad Juárez, where they met with local groups to demonstate against the violence and impunity there. Last November, another thousand marchers in Mexico City decried violence against women and the tragedy of Juárez.
Last October, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, part of the Organization of American States (OAS), held a hearing on violence against women in Juárez. It’s a step forward, though any recommendations that come out of the hearing would be non-binding, according to Wallach. This is why many human rights activists want to focus their attention on Mexico’s President Vicente Fox. They believe he can prioritize the Juarez murders on the national stage, a move he has yet to make overtly. He has also refused to ask the United States FBI for direct help. The FBI has provided training, but for them to participate in the investigation, Fox has to request it.
A Web posting about Juárez illustrates the growing concern of Mexicans about the crimes, but also sheds light on a profound sense of resignation there about the government’s willingness to help. Beneath an article detailing the murders and their spread, a reader posted this thought: "This is nothing new. Mexico has been shrouded in secrecy institutionally, and cases like these, where important names might be revealed, are usually buried as deep as the yet-undiscovered bodies of the victims. Such is the reality we live in."
But pressure is growing: Human rights groups have begun to tackle Fox. Amnesty International launched a global campaign last fall demanding that he take action. International media increasingly report on the story. And with a broad anti-sweatshop coalition already in place in the United States and Canada, the ground seems ripe for those groups to turn more of their attention to the negligence and indifference of the maquilas in Juárez. How many women’s lives would be saved with even minimal security improvements?
Copyright 2003 Resource Center of the Americas