Juarez

[Beulah5]

What are ur thoughts?

[And Such Were Some Of You]

Forgive my ignorance. Because I didn't know exactly what "Juarez" was, I am not ashamed to say that I had to do a "google" search and I am simply shocked by what I am reading. Where have I been for I have never heard of this until now.

Still reading......will be back to share my thoughts.

[Beulah5]

Thanks for your response sis. The situation in Juarez has been one that has been very close to my heart for the last 3-4 years and i just assumed that everyone had heard about it.

I am going to pull up an article on it so at least we all have background reading.

Looking forward to ur response....

[lanl ns]

B5, this is awesome, I went to the Border of Juarez on last year (my husband and I) and said a prayer for that land............

I will see what you post and start my thoughts from there

[Beulah5]

Since August, 1993, Mexican Federales have been baffled by the number of young women found brutally raped and murdered in the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, an industrial border town next to El Paso with a population of 2 million. The numbers of the dead vary according to the sources. Local women's rights groups believe that since 1993 at least 187 women have met violent deaths in Juarez. Of these, many were killed by pimps, drug dealers, husbands and boyfriends. However, at least a third of the deaths remain unexplained and police have no suspects. Authorities believe that about 30 cases have the common thread of torture and rape suggesting they are the work of one or several serial killers. Independent criminologist from the U.S. believe that between 50 and 70 cases fit a similar rape-torture-murder profile. But FBI agents who visited Juarez found no evidence suggesting there was a serial killer at work. Local authorities all but dismiss the killings as a side effect to the city's mushrooming industrial sector, which brings tides of hungry migrant workers to the area desperate for work and money.

Most victims are slender, dark-haired girls between 14 and 18 years old who work in one of the numerous U.S.-owned "maquiladora" factories. Many are killed on their way to and from work. Their bodies have been found - sometimes with their blue factory-issued aprons on -- dumped in the desert or next to the roads leading to the unlit squatter camps ringing the city. In some cases, the victims are mutilated and horribly disfigured. Objects have been stuffed into their vaginas or anuses, and/or their left breasts have been hacked off. Many are strangled, then stabbed repeatedly. Others were found with their hands tied behind their backs. Some have their panties removed, even if they are still fully dressed. Several men have been arrested in connection with the killings, but the carnage continued unabated.

The "maquiladora" murders first attracted attention in 1993, when a government psychologist, Oscar Maynes, noticed an unexplainable rise in the murder rate of poor, young, slender women with dark skin and long black hair. "The authorities were just indifferent," said Irma Perez Franco, the mother of a 20-year-old shoe store clerk who was murdered in 1995. During the same week in which her daughter was killed, eight other bodies were discovered in a stretch of the surrounding Chihuahua desert. "Juarez is the ideal place to kill a woman, because you're certain to get away with it," said Astrid Gonzalez Davila, a founder of the Citizens Committee Against Violence, a group that works with the relatives of murder victims. "The failure to solve these killings is turning the city into a Mecca for homicidal maniacs." Adding to the homicidal maniacs the local heroin and cocaine distribution networks have made Juarez and its sprawling shantytowns one of the most dangerous places on earth.

While similarities between many of the murders have fueled the theory that one or more serial killers may be at work, local authorities attributed most of the deaths to the growing drug trade and the shifting of traditional values in the region. By and large, Juarez has always been a city ripe with violence, but the growing list of dead girls became too large to be ignored. "We don't believe that we do have a serial killer," said Manuel Esparza, operations coordinator for the state's Special Prosecution Unit of Female Homicides. "There are different (method of operations), different dump sites and different kinds of victims."

Some see the heart of the problem stemming from a macho backlash caused by the growing local female labor force in this sprawling industrial mecca. In the rapidly transforming social hierarchy of Ciudad Juarez women are being victimized for taking the traditional place of men in the work force. Dr. Irma Rodriguez Galarza, a forensic specialist, told The Dallas Morning News that the cluster killings haunting Juarez and its surroundings may be the result of the psychological crisis affecting Mexican men as they are being phased out of the local labor force.

"There exists a rivalry, professionally and economically, between men and women," Dr. Rodriguez said. "Women don't stay at home anymore. They have more liberty now, liberty that puts them at risk. I'm sure that the FBI, as experts, will come to the conclusion that this is not the work of a serial killer but of a social criminological phenomena - a product of a loss of values and influence of drugs and alcohol." Women's rights advocate Esther Chavez Cano, who has spearheaded the effort to resolve the killings, agrees that the violence against women in Ciudad Juarez is partially caused by the growing number of "maquiladora" factories that only hire female workers. "Women are occupying the place of men in a culture of absolute dominance of men over women," said the 65-year-old retired businesswoman. "This has to provoke misogyny."

Plant owners of the 330 "maquiladora" factories say they prefer hiring women because they are "more nimble and orderly." However, the standard $3-a-day minimum wage they pay might be the true reason why 70 percent of their labor force is young, female and uneducated. Many of these young women are drawn from the southern Mexican states to Juarez by the promise of work and a better life. Sadly, their hopes for prosperity are quickly dashed by a grim reality of meager salaries, shantytowns, violence and squalid living conditions. "The women here in Ciudad Juarez are expendable, disposable women," said Judith Gallarza, a women's rights activist. "It's a problem of government indifference, of impunity and of machismo."

Complicating an already complex situation, two federal investigators, Oscar Defassiux Trechuelo and Eduardo Muriel Melero, protested that their investigation was being hampered by state authorities because evidence in some of the killings implicated local police officers. Other reports paint the foreign-owned "maquiladora" factories and the rich who are untouched by the slaughter as the true culprits of this evolving tragedy. "Even the devil is scared of living here," a Juarez fruit vendor told a Harper's reporter who was in town dredging up stories about the unfolding carnage.

The living conditions for most of these women are less than desirable. Most of the 150,000 factory and assembly plant workers live in wood-and-tarpaper shacks in squalid slums surrounding the city. Many of these shantytowns have no running water or electricity. Factory owners, wishing to maximize their profits, keep their plants in operation 24 hours a day, forcing many women to return to their homes late at night on isolated unpaved roads. Some, unfortunately, never make it.

According to Alma Vucovich, president of the Mexican Congress Committee on Sexual Equality, authorities have not shown much interest in solving the cases, "because the victims are women and poor, and many times they have no family in Juarez." A federal human rights commission criticized state authorities for consistently dismissing the murders, even suggesting many of the victims invited their fate by using too much makeup or wearing miniskirts. "Girls of 11 and 12 disappear, and the first thing the police say is that they probably ran off with their boyfriends," said Esther Chavez, "That's ridiculous."

Several mishandling of events have worsened the rift between city's poor and disenfranchised, and the police. For instance, when the body of 17-year-old Sagrario Gonzalez was found 20 miles from Rio Grande, police informed the media before notifying her next of kin. And when they did finally contact her family they suggested Sagrario had been trying to earn extra money turning tricks, even though she was last seen getting on the bus after her shift in a maquiladora factory. Enraged by the apathy of city officials, Sagrario's sister, Geeyamina, started painting black crosses on the municipal lampposts to symbolize the senseless loss of her sister's life. Now, most posts in the Juarez sprawl are covered with the crosses. And many makeshift altars have been made in street corners and in police stations.

[Beulah5]

That is an old article i believe the total number at now is 325.

[lanl ns]

Also, this article does not mention the fact that there is NONE to very little police protection because the influence of the Cocaine trade in that city.

Also, B5 and others there were several American women killed and tortured in Juarez, tourists were being robbed in broad daylight in front of the police without any protection.
there are accounts of entire tour buses being diverted and the people being tortured, raped and robbed.....

That city wreaks of evil and corruption......