Murders in Mexico Continue

The brutal killings of 400 women began mysteriously in 1993 and continued until about 2005. Or so we thought.

In early 2007, National Public Radio’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro found still more recent unsolved cases in Ecatepec, Nezahualcóyotl, Naucalpan and Valle de Chalco, where women are reportedly killed at an even greater rate than in Juárez: with 223 deaths in the past two years alone. Then, earlier this summer, yet another naked body was found in the streets of Juárez, the Mexican border city just south of El Paso, Texas that is now famous for its murdered women: yet another raped woman. Hundreds more remain missing.

And yet President Felipe Calderón is now planning to dismantle a federal commission that was created three years ago under domestic and international pressure, for “the prevention and eradication of violence against women.” This news comes despite the fact that so many of the Juárez cases remain unsolved thanks to a bungled mess of disappeared evidence, coerced confessions, sloppy or nonexistent DNA testing, and corruption among law enforcement authorities.

Although a federal government report reveals that some 177 local officials in the U.S.-Mexican border city obstructed justice in the investigations, a local judge has ruled that the country’s statute of limitations (14 years for murder) has expired, and many cases are now being dismissed.

“Ciudad Juárez is the apocalypse. It’s the complete degeneration of society,” says Marion Lloyd, a journalist with The Houston Chronicle who has written extensively on the subject. No one knows exactly who is responsible for the killings, which appear to have occurred in a wide variety of contexts. However, it is clear that some involve vast and powerful international drug cartels, organized crime, and gang violence.

Inside the state of Chihuahua, Juárez is also home to the majority of the country’s maquiladores, the often U.S.-owned factory assembly plants where many young, economically vulnerable Mexican women live and work. In fact, many of the victims are factory workers who travel to and from their jobs in the wee hours of the morning on dark and dangerous streets. They often followed a pattern, and were slim, with long dark hair. But there were dissimilarities too. While some 25 percent of the victims were raped, others were not.

Over the past 15 years, there has been outrage from human rights groups and global political leaders to properly investigate and prosecute the cases. Amnesty International has long criticized the government’s inability to stop the killings or to bring their perpetrators to justice. And in May of 2006 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill officially urging more pressure on Mexican authorities to solve and prevent these crimes.

Anti-violence advocates in Hollywood have also weighed in: Jane Fonda, Salma Hayek, Eve Ensler and Sally Field have made highly publicized visits to Mexico, as has Jennifer Lopez, who produced and starred in “Bordertown,” a feature film on the subject of the Juárez murders that premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year.

And yet the rapes and the killings continue.

Adriana Carmona Lopez of the Center for Women’s Human Rights in Chihuahua says that she and Chihuahua Attorney General Patricia González Rodriguez have petitioned the federal government to look into 22 cases, including those of the eight women found in a cotton field in 2001. Lopez says that Perez Duarte’s office returned the files earlier this year citing a lack of evidence of organized crime, which would have made the cases federal crimes.

Margarita Guille, founder of Mujer Contemporanea, Mexico’s first women’s shelter, has a similar story saying that the government failed to act on cases involving 81 female murders in Oaxaca, reportedly because the Oaxaca attorney general was unable to provide proof of organized crime.

“Thanks to international and domestic pressure the Juárez cases became visible,” says Guille. “But we need more. We’re working to save women’s lives. Something the government is not yet doing.”

With reporting by Rebecca K. Rosenberg, this article will appear in the Autumn 2007 issue of "Expectations," a publication of The Family Violence Prevention Fund.