Combating Impunity and Femicide in Ciudad Juárez

...Until then, the Chihuahua attorney general’s office had been delivering the corpses of murdered women to the wrong families, or buried them in common graves, as it still does...

...As the killings and disappearances continue in Juárez and throughout the state of Chihuahua, the police and various attorneys general have been the great missing force in the investigation and resolution of the long wave of violence...

...These crimes, together with official in­difference, have given rise to a new term in Mex­ico: femicide, the systematic murder of women...

...During the long absence of official interest, they took on the job themselves, beginning their activism by simply documenting the femicides: For the period 1993–2005, Our Daughters Coming Home, by clip­ping the articles that appeared almost daily in the local press, documented 430 murders and 600 disappearances...

...The commission, chaired by the former commissioner for human rights of the state of Jalisco, Guadelupe Morfín, addressed femicide not only in the state of Chihuahua, but throughout the country...

...Composed of various groups—Catholics for the Right to Decide, the Mexican Commission to Defend and Promote Human Rights, the Morelos Academy of the Woman, and eight other activist and academic organiza­tions—it monitors femicide on a national level, producing statistics and policy proposals, while formulating national standards to enforce the 2007 General Law of Access of Women to a Life Free of Violence...

...The victims, most of them teenagers, have typically been abducted, raped, strangled, and left in empty city lots, often on their way home from work...

...We depended to a great extent on the memory of the grave diggers,” Doretti says...

...The city attracts impoverished campesinos and unem­ployed workers from throughout north-central Mexico, as well as transnational factory owners, who appreciate the city’s modern industrial parks, low-wage workforce, and proxim­ity to the United States...

...The team began its search in the cemeteries, whose registers proved unreliable because the majority of the women were buried in the area reserved for unidenti­fied indigents...

...According to Mercedes Doretti, one of the forensic an­thropologists, the team has identified 27 remains, which have been delivered to the proper families.5 Nevertheless, this leaves a large number yet to be identified...

...Hun­dreds of women in Juárez have been killed in the last 15 years, many of them raped and their bodies dumped in the surrounding desert...

...Femi­cide, Lagarde continues, furthermore constitutes “the rupture of the state of law, since the state is incapable of guaranteeing the life of women, of acting with legality and enforcing respect, of achieving justice and preventing and eradicating the violence to which it gives rise...

...A re­port produced by the commission defines femicide as the combination of “violent misogynist acts against women” and the institutional violence against women exerted by the authorities who block their access to justice...

...The best information we have,” she told NPR in 2003, is that “men are committing crimes simply for the sport of it...

...And Casa Amiga, an um­brella group, has identified 265 of the dead.3 In November 2003, the first official investigation into the femicides began, headed by a specially convened federal body known as the Commission to Prevent and Eradicate Vio­ jAime PueblA / ArChivo lAtino MAY/JUNE 2008 report: mexico i lence Against the Women of Ciudad Juárez...

...She adds that although accord­ing to official documentation, bodies were sent to common graves until 1997, her team is still finding remains buried as recently as 2005 in the common graves, requiring continued exhumations...

...It also eliminates a requirement that plaintiffs in rape cases were “chaste and honest” when the crime took place...

...MAY/JUNE 2008 report: mexico i Combating Impunity and Femicide in Ciudad Juárez Mothers of murdered women in Ciudad Juárez lead a march in 2003, demanding that the government of then president vicente Fox take action...

...The mothers’ organizations have largely supported the commission, because it is the only body that gives them a line of communication to the federal government...

...In December, after the Chihuahua attorney general’s office recommended that the common graves filled between 1993 and 2005 be exhumed, the NGOs of Ciu­dad Juárez and Chihuahua asked the governor, José Reyes Baeza, to extend the forensic team’s contract to conduct the research...

...The federal government’s lack of interest is so great that since November 2006, when Morfín left her posi­tion, the group has yet to name her successor...

...Doretti, suggesting that her team had already done all that was humanly possible to find and exhume the re­mains of missing women, warns that while much work re­mains to be done at the level of identification, “there is little hope of finding more women’s remains...

...In 1996, in the midst of the ongoing serial killings, then gover­nor Francisco Barrio remarked that the killings were within the range of what was to be expected in a city like Juárez...

...But it never had sufficient personnel or resources to carry out its work...

...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: mexico i Students in Ciudad Juárez walk past a cross painted in tribute to the city’s many murdered women...

...It generated low-paying and insecure jobs, while its urban services, from road maintenance to primary education, remained nowhere close to adequate for its bur­geoning population...

...Transnational drug traffickers come to Juárez for the same reasons...

...heriberto rodriguez / lAtinPhoto By lourdes Godínez leal O ver the past 15 years, some 400 women have been murdered, and hundreds more have disappeared in Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican city that borders El Paso...

...Indeed, the commission demonstrated that the problem was nationwide, despite the lack of statistics and reliable informa­tion...

...The authorities know who the killers are, and nothing’s being done about it...

...Another theory was proposed a few years ago by Diana Washington Valdez, a reporter for the El Paso Times...

...they are also attracted by, and make profitable use of, the city’s social disorganization...

...More than 225,000 Juárez resi­dents, nearly half the city’s labor force, work in the maquila­doras, most of them women under the age of 30...

...Even European law­makers have discussed the question: In October, the Euro­pean Parliament issued a report in which it concluded that the government of Mexico (along with those of Central America) had not taken sufficient steps “to attack the roots of the femi­cides...

...It expanded explosively over that decade, with no warning and no planning...

...6 F emicide is a crime of the state,” says marcela Lagarde, a feminist federal legislator who presided over a special commission of the Chamber of Dep­uties established to look into the Juárez killings...

...Even though the state attorney general’s office recently acknowledged that at least 364 women were murdered in the city between 1993 and 2005—and research has shown that this kind of anti-woman violence oc­curs elsewhere in the country—the problem of femicide has never taken its rightful place as a national electoral issue...

...Thus most of the investigation continues to be undertaken by civil society, reflecting the continuing pattern of official neglect...

...Throughout the 1990s, Juárez was Mexico’s fastest-growing center of industrial production...

...International organizations, mainly women’s groups and human rights defenders, have been watching the situation closely, frequently criticizing various branches and levels of the Mexican government for its neglect...

...Since 1995, they have demanded federal inquiries, suc­ceeding only in the last four years in pressing the state and federal governments to investigate...

...Lourdes Godínez Leal is a reporter for the press agency CIMAC (Communication and Information About Women), where she has worked since 2002...

...CIMAC is a news agency formed to promote and enhance the daily coverage of women’s human rights in the Mexican news media...

...The impunity for violence against women that has prevailed for so long in Chihuahua has been maintained by of­ficials of various parties...

...Nonetheless, official indifference still rules the day in Ciudad Juárez and the state of Chihuahua...

...After 400 un­explained, apparently senseless murders in 15 years, this indifference itself is femicide...

...Two of those organizations, perhaps the most significant in terms of their continuous work and determination to shed light on the murders, are Justice for Our Daughters and Our Daughters Return Home...

...Set opposite El Paso on the Texas-Chi­huahua border, the city is now home to an estimated 1.5 million people and nearly 300 export-oriented assembly plants, or maquiladoras...

...The report emphasized that fighting violence against women requires good law enforcement as well as preventive measures, such as the creation of a legitimate social order as well as education on human rights and gender equality.4 Recognizing the prevailing climate of impunity surround­ing these cases, the report also recommended a larger bud­get for investigative organizations, better witness-protection programs, and more support for judicial organisms and gen­eral investigators to pursue these cases...

...Other state and local officials have justified their lack of in­vestigative fervor by stressing that many of the victims have been prostitutes and involved in the drug trade...

...Doretti con­firms the Mexican government’s lack of interest, noting that official files on the victims typically include no information on where the recovered bodies, frequently unidentified, are buried...

...Justice for Our Daughters, using local reports as well as the findings of a team of Argentine forensic anthropologists working in Juárez, documented 433 murders...

...2 In the face of Mexican authorities’ neglect and their disre­gard for the many recommendations offered by national and international human rights organizations, mothers of the victims have formed organizations, embarking on two long missions: recovering the bodies of their daughters and seek­ing just punishment for those responsible for the murders...

...International support has also come in the form of an expert team of forensic anthropologists from Argentina that arrived in Ciudad Juárez in 2004, to help identify human re­mains...

...7 There have been some advances in recent years against gender-based violence in Chihuahua at the legislative level—an increase in penalties for sexual abuse, including sexual harassment, and the classification of rape within marriage as a crime...

...T he citizen observatory on femicide, formed in August, is the latest civic organization to addresses the crisis...

...Neither the end of the PAN’s political domi­nance in the state of Chihuahua in 1998 nor the end of the PRI’s decades of autocratic rule at the federal level in 2000 have had any effect on the official indifference to the killings...

...Although the authorities have arrest­ed and convicted a number of perpetrators—by the end of 2006 at least 160 were serving prison sentences—the killings have continued at the same pace.1 To date, law enforcement has not seriously investigated the serial nature of the killings, and the motivation for them remains a mystery...