Day of the dead

More than 325 women have been murdered in the free-trade boomtown of Ciudad Juarez in the past decade. Faced with government incompetence and corruption, people are rebelling.

By Max Blumenthal

Dec 4, 2002 | The body of another murdered woman was found late last month in the Mexican industrial hub of Ciudad Juarez, dumped behind some shrubs in the squalor of the Anapra neighborhood, a ramshackle hodgepodge of corrugated tin and cardboard shacks on the sludge-washed banks of the Rio Grande. Her hands had been tied, and the evidence suggested she had been raped. The body was so badly decomposed that investigators calculated that she'd been dead for seven months.

However horrific the details, they were numbing in their familiarity. The body of a woman who had died in similar circumstances was found in the same dusty lot a couple of months earlier. The bodies of eight women were found in a lot not far away a little more than a year ago. So many women have been murdered here in the past 10 years that there is no reliable count. Most experts place it close to 325, an average of 32 a year, nearly three every month. At least 90 of the deaths are believed to be the work of one or more serial killers. Hundreds more women have simply vanished.

Like so many of the others, the woman whose body was found in late October had probably come to Juarez from the poverty of southern Mexico to work for about $10 a day in one of the many foreign-owned assembly plants known as maquiladoras that sprouted up in Juarez after the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994. And like them, too, her body was unclaimed in death and buried alone and anonymous.

Such death has become a way of life here. So, too, with the fear and paranoia that rise in such a climate. Nobody knows who is doing the killings, and the mystery only seems to deepen. Arrests made by local authorities have produced allegations of torture, witness tampering and frame-ups -- but no convictions. Most here believe that the killer or killers must have enormous clout. Perhaps, some say, the killers are narcotrafficantes disposing of witnesses. Perhaps they are the sons of the wealthy and powerful indulging in sick sex. Perhaps they are cultists whose members come from the highest levels of government and finance. The theories differ, but a common assumption is that arrests made thus far are only a smokescreen for an historically opaque and corrupt government that will protect its dark secrets at any cost.

One thing seems clear: The murders arise from a social landscape that has been transformed by global economic forces. Where Ciudad Juarez was once a small, sleepy desert outpost just across the border from El Paso, Texas, the population in the past decade has exploded to 1.2 million people, many of them drawn by the lure of the maquiladoras. The tides of people have overwhelmed the ability of the city to absorb them, overwhelmed health services, social services and law enforcement. Free-trade advocates once promised that NAFTA would transform Juarez into the City of the Future -- and they have been proven right in a way they never could have imagined. Today, Juarez still has the feel of the lawless Old West, but with a grim 21st century edge.

Despite promises of swift justice from Mexican President Vicente Fox and Chihuahua Gov. Patricio Martinez, they have yet to take up offers of assistance from the FBI; bureau agents in Texas have suggested that official corruption is hindering efforts to stop the murders. Chihuahua state investigators have seemingly adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" policy towards Juarez's homicides, fostering an atmosphere of impunity and pervasive fear. Foreign corporations operating in Juarez that have employed many of the murdered women largely deny that such an atmosphere exists.

But in this postmodern urban culture, where the very concept of community has broken down, many bereaved family members and local activists have begun to take matters into their own hands, investigating the murders and speaking out even if it means threats and other reprisals.

Evangeline Arce's daughter, Silvia, a street vendor, disappeared on Nov. 3, 1998. Since that day, she said, the authorities have done little to investigate. "Two days after my daughter disappeared, I went to the police and filed a report," the mother says in Spanish, her face flaring with anger. "They promised me prompt action but when I checked back a week later, the missing persons report was never filed and the investigation had not even begun. When they finally got witnesses together, none of them would talk because they were too afraid."

Even as Mexico continues to make strides toward becoming an open and democratic society, the epidemic of rape and murder here has exposed the heavy residue of its corrupt and authoritarian political legacy as well as the contradictions of its efforts at economic expansion.

To understand the magnitude of the breakdown, think of the sniper rampage in the Washington area this fall that left 10 people dead and three wounded. Imagine that Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose held a press conference and asked local citizens to catch the sniper themselves because local police were not up to the task and the federal government was not being helpful; imagine that the federal government charged that local officials in Montgomery County were complicit in the killings and impeding the investigation. Chaos would ensue, certainly. But then, multiply the number of victims by 30, by 40, by 50, or more.

That's Juarez today.

Next Page: "Really," says a local security guard, "it's the girls' fault"

• View blog reactions