Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The jumbled, exhaust-choked commercial core of this city has grown wildly in the wake of NAFTA, adding modern shopping malls, condominiums and expansive boulevards. The population is growing at twice the rate of the national average; it is expected to nearly double by 2010, to 2 million people. Many of them directly or indirectly rely on the 300 or so maquiladoras for their livelihoods.
To accommodate the new army of workers, the city has given birth to entirely new sectors. The Campestre Juarez is a luxurious conglomerate of gated communities, with a main gate that's a life-size replica of Paris' Arc de Triomphe. Nearby, many of the maquiladoras are situated along the Avenida de la Industria. Though the assembly-line workers sometimes can be glimpsed behind a plate glass window in aqua-blue uniforms, there usually is little sign of any activity behind the maquiladoras' featureless walls.
Most of the new residents are poor, or on the brink of poverty, and they live in Anapra or another of the grim, violent colonias populares on the outskirts of town. In those colonias, residents usually live without sanitation, running water, electricity or paved roads.
Avenida Manuel Gomez Morin is the pothole-riddled six-lane avenue that ties these varied worlds together. Sitio Colosio Valle, a medium-sized strip mall, stands on a corner of the avenue at the gateway to the industrial sector. It is fronted by a vast parking lot and inside are various clothing outlets and boutiques. By day, the lot bustles as customers scurry back and forth, hauling their purchases to their cars -- a sight similar to any mall in the suburban United States. By night, however, traffic tapers off, stores lock up and the mall's lot becomes dark and desolate. Sitio Colosio Valle was where many of the slain and missing women were last seen.
In the mall's parking lot, Braulio Rosas, a 40-year-old security guard, leans against the door of a giant Nike outlet. Inside the store, under bright fluorescent lights, employees frantically check inventory and scramble to close up.
"A lot of girls were picked up here," Rosas says in a voice of calm resignation. "But really, it's the girls' fault. It's because even though they weren't putas, [prostitutes] you know, they were more like faciles [easy women]. They didn't have to get into those cars if they didn't want to."
Rosas sounds cynical, but blaming the victims is by no means an aberration in Juarez. Similar notions have been offered by officials like Suly Ponce, the former Chihuahua special prosecutor in charge of the murdered women's cases. "Sometimes there are cases that a girl meets some person, he strikes up a relationship with her, they drink ... and it ends violently," she told the Washington Post in 2000, before she was promoted to a job in the governor's office. "It's difficult to know."
A handful of the women found murdered since 1993 were indeed confirmed as prostitutes. But the truth is that a large majority of the missing or murdered women were hardworking, young, poor and for the most part socially conservative. Most had migrated to Juarez from Mexico's depressed south to work in the maquiladoras , sometimes arriving alone and with little means of contacting their families back home.
The maquiladoras , run by companies like Delphi and RCA Thomson, prefer to hire young women for assembly-line jobs. An entry-level assembly-line worker makes minimum wage, about $2 an hour. With experience, pay can rise to as much as $2.50 an hour -- and compared to wages in Guerrero or Chiapas, that's good money. But in Juarez, the women are caught in an economic trap: Since the cost of living here is only slighter lower than in El Paso, the wages that seem so high to new maquiladora workers actually ensure poverty. The workers can be hired and fired on the spot, with little pretext and no legal protection. And union activities are prohibited.
Even for those who accept the conditions, security is elusive. More often now, the global companies that own maquiladoras are closing up shop and transferring operations to China to take advantage of lower taxes, investment subsidies and outrageously cheap labor. On June 29, Royal Philips Electronics announced it was moving its P.C. monitor manufacturing operations, at a cost of 900 jobs. On July 1, Scientific Atlanta fired 1,300 workers after shutting its plant down. According to the Nov. 5 New York Times, this trend has cost Juarez 287,000 jobs in the maquiladoras since their peak in October 2000.
Not only does this slash and burn the economic base. There are brutal social reverberations, too. The city's health system, Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, has reported 200,000 people falling from its list of insured after losing their company policies, according to a July article in La Prensa. Esther Chavez Cano, director of Juarez's only battered-women's shelter, Casa Amiga, said in a speech this summer that domestic violence cases had risen by 50 percent in July alone.
The combination of poverty and a lack of social connections renders women on the assembly line powerless and virtually invisible. And that has made them easy prey. According to the El Paso Times, about a third of the approximately 325 slain women were employed by maquiladoras at the time of their murder.
Given that few of the maquiladoras provide shuttle service to and from the colonias, the female workers often are preyed upon while walking through perilous places like Sitio Colosio Valle in the darkness of the early morning. At such an hour, the only nearby activity is that of bars and nightclubs closing up as male patrons filter into the street after a long night of drinking.
