Besides China's attractive economic climate, an intangible cause of maquiladora flight is Juarez's chronic violence. The effect is difficult to measure. Two companies in the city's industrial sector -- including TDK, the audio tape maker -- have posted banners on their factories reading: "STOP THE VIOLENCE. To Better Our City, Let's Unite." But most foreign companies are purely economic organisms governed entirely, it seems, by the dictates of efficiency. They have maintained a stunning silence even as their female workers are slaughtered.

Consider the case of 17-year-old Claudia Ivette Gonzalez. Her body was found in November 2001 along with seven others in an overgrown cotton field on Avenida Technologico, just blocks from Sitio Colosio Valle mall and across the street from the offices of the Association of Maquiladoras. She had worked on the assembly line for the Lear Corp., a Detroit-based auto-interior supplier. Lear has declined to publicly address Gonzalez's murder.

Greg Bloom, editor of the Frontera Norte Sur -- an Internet news service that focuses on the U.S.-Mexico border -- recalled a conversation with Gonzalez's mother, Josefina, in which she recounted her daughter's last day. In the darkness of the early morning, Gonzalez told him, Claudia set out for her job at Lear. When she arrived at work a few minutes late after missing her bus, Claudia Ivette was promptly sent away under a policy barring tardy assembly-line workers from their shifts. A half-hour past when she usually would have returned home, her mother knew something was gravely wrong. Her worst fear -- the same nagging fear shared by so many Juarez mothers -- would soon be realized.

Andrea Puchalsky, Lear's director of communications, acknowledged that the company has not made any public statements regarding Gonzalez's murder, nor has it enacted any proactive measures to protect employees from another wave of violence. "Adding security is not a question that relates to Lear," she said. "[Gonzalez's murder] did not happen on Lear property."

When questioned about the murder and Lear policies, Puchalsky mentioned that a company memo was prepared for her with responses to possible questions. As to Lear's worker-lockout policy, which apparently put Gonzalez in a precarious situation the day of her abduction, Puchalsky declined to comment on whether Gonzalez was locked out or sent home from Lear's plant on her last day.

"We have a policy for tardiness and she was tardy many times," Puchalsky said. "When she had arrived late to work her shift, she was not there in time to work her shift."

When asked whether Lear's offices in the U.S. have a similar policy in which late employees are barred from working their shifts, Puchalsky reversed her earlier statement, vehemently denying that such a policy existed anywhere within Lear's operations. "There is not a policy to send a worker home after X number of tardy arrivals," she said. "Typically what we do is if there is someone arriving late on kind of a warning system, there might be a notification that 'the next time you arrive late, you have to take a day off ...' It's not a policy, though. There is no written policy like that throughout Lear Corp."

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