Juárez is one of those places on the planet where the third world coexists with what the first worst product produces.
In Ciudad Juarez since 1993, more than 500 corpses have been found in landfills and in deserted areas, most of them young women, even teenagers, students, night workers in factories, chambermaids, and small employees.
Many live in very precarious conditions, sometimes with children to raise. They were abducted, held captive, and subjected to torture and severe sexual violence before being stabbed or strangled to death. Their lifeless bodies were abandoned in wastelands on the outskirts of the city or in the desert, since then, the sand has continued to bring corpses to the surface, spitting out with them poor vestiges of women's clothing: shoes, handbags, skirts...
In a few cases, they are found within days, but sometimes they take years to reappear, months to be identified. Hundreds of families are still waiting for the disappearance of their daughter to be solved, but many cases will remain forever unanswered.
However, after the discovery of the body of the first victim, and despite the arrest of nearly twenty suspects, the authorities have still not identified those responsible for these murders. The thing should have caused a stir, but who is interested in the fate of unfortunate workers living in the middle of the desert in a dustbin ignored by tourists?
Worse still, the crimes continue at a hellish pace, and Ciudad Juárez is today considered the world capital of "feminicide", over the years, and according to official figures, nearly 5,000 women have been declared missing, missing in the empty. In less than one in ten cases, they were found, covered by the sand of the desert.
In January 2004, the government of Vincente Fox appointed a Special Federal Prosecutor to coordinate local and federal investigations. This ordered a complete review of the investigations carried out by the regional jurisdiction (State of Chihuahua) seizing the file of 24 homicides. In its report, published in February 2006, it implicated 177 civil servants suspected of negligence and omission during the investigations, yet none had been brought to justice.
At the border with the United States
“On the
border between Mexico and the United States,” writes Elena Poniatowska, “there
are few wounds that heal; on the contrary, most become infected and contaminate
the body. There, in these zones of contagion, we see boiling at the highest
temperature political power, drug trafficking, violence, and greed. It's a
gangrenous area."
The
triangle formed by the cities of Juárez (Chihuahua), El Paso (Texas), and Sun
Land Park (New Mexico) today forms the largest border metropolitan area in the
world. It is also the main trading region of the economic bloc united by the
NAFTA agreement (North American Free Trade Agreement). The latter, adopted in
1994, encouraged the massive exodus of American factories on Mexican territory,
among others: Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, and Chrysler.
In the
1960s, the “maquiladoras” (assembly factories of electrical household
equipment) began to flourish in Juárez.
In 2000
this industry reached its peak. Today, the city prides itself on its position
as a world leader in this field. In Juárez, a television is manufactured every
three seconds, a computer every seven, at the end of the assembly line work, is carried
out by the workers of a few hundred export factories, the majority of whom are
women, young people from preferably, underpaid and non-unionized.
Someone pointed out that if maquiladoras in recent years had taken on the task of escorting female workers home after work, homicides would have halved. But the maquiladoras do not even collaborate with the surveys and in principle do not provide any data on their workers.
Why do factories have more women than men?
Some argue that women are more conscientious at work, but one can imagine that it is, in reality, because it is easier to discipline them by the pressure of all kinds: sexual harassment, compulsory pregnancy tests, blackmail dismissal, ban on joining a union. The "maquiladoras" are high places of exploitation, the workers earn 4 dollars a day there, but since they bring to the city currencies and jobs, any criticism is nipped in the bud.
To the economic, moral, and sexual pressure exerted on the workers, it is necessary to add to understand the context in which the assassinations are perpetuated, a general climate of violence, in large part due to the real mafia of drug traffickers who have settled on the edge of the border. At the time the murders began, 60% of the cocaine consumed in the United States passed through Juarez.
Many analyzes agree in pointing to the pernicious operation of the “maquiladoras” and the violence induced by the drug trade as having predisposed to hundreds of assassinations. It is, moreover, no coincidence that many of the murdered women had in common to work in these factories. The shifts lead their workers to return home late at night or to go to the factory in the early morning. Some women died for swapping turns with a colleague and going home alone, others for wanting to save the price of a bus ticket and walking the streets unaccompanied.
Meanwhile, in the state of Chihuahua, key chains are sold with plastic charms imitating a woman's nipple. Angry husbands threaten their wives by telling them now: "If you piss me off, I'll throw you in the desert!" ".
In Ciudad Juarez, where brothels for gringos flourish and where new narcofosses are periodically discovered, the clandestine cemeteries of drug traffickers, the police limit themselves to watching.
And the killers walk free, protected by impunity and corruption.
Señorita extraviada, a film by Lourdes Portillo
Lourdes Portillo through her documentary Señorita extraviada shot in 2000, signs an honest and courageous indictment against the institutional indifference which has reduced to news items a real scandal, a failure of justice, and, with it, of the Mexican democracy.
She analyzes the progression of murders, linking it to the system of “maquiladoras” and drug trafficking. Señorita extraviada paints portraits of young girls barely in their teens, forced to work in chain factories, exposed to the risk of poorly lit streets, living in fear, risking their lives for a few dozen pesos a day.
What were these young girls doing in the street?
"They didn't exactly go to mass," replied a governor of the right-wing political party PAN. This also appears to be the view of the Northern Zone Deputy State Attorney who, in his Report on the Murders of Women in Ciudad Juárez Chihuahua 1993–2001, writes: "it is important to note that some of the victims have attitudes and behaviors which are not in conformity with the moral order, when they go, with abnormal frequency and very late at night, to places of entertainment which often do not suit their age”.
It is not only "a few" of the victims but a large number of them who have been accused of prostitution or dissolute living. For these reasons, their children were deprived of any state aid.
The systematic defamation of victims by authorities led to downplaying the significance of their deaths, neglecting investigations, and ultimately legitimizing their killings.
"All are whores", or women of dubious morality, who do not understand that decent people walk around during the day and that the indecent, who do so at night, expose themselves to all misfortunes.
These crimes, similar to each other, accompanied by acts of torture and barbarity, carried out with premeditation and relentlessness, are the product of a real hatred of women that extends to the highest spheres of power. Institutionalized misogyny, therefore, seizes spiritual and moral values to justify itself.
Bordertown, a film by Gregory Nava, the activist filmmaker
"I ask you to watch this film with your eyes wide open because everything you see really happened", implores Marisela Ortiz Rivera, co-founder of an association of victims, a mainstream film that plunges us into the heart of this drama, shot with a small budget, tells the investigation of two journalists.
Lauren (Jennifer Lopez), the American journalist from the Chicago Sentinel, goes to Juarez, determined to bring out the truth and to investigate the violence of which the workers of the famous "maquiladoras" are victims and a Mexican journalist (Antonio Banderas) determined to clarify serial murders and disappearances.
While the mothers of the victims dig the desert in search of the corpses of their daughters and the authorities strive to bury this affair, a miraculous woman (Maya Zapata) comes out alive from the hands of the criminals and decides to testify at the risk of her life. , as it is so obvious that everything is taking place against a backdrop of corrupt police and judiciary.
The two journalists and the "miraculous" will only have support from a human rights activist (Sonia Braga) and the director of the local newspaper (Martin Sheen).
Director: Gregory Nava
Screenplay: Gregory Nava
Production: Mobius Entertainment
Cie: MGM Studios — SND Groupe M6
Music: Graeme Revell Costumes: Fran Allgood & Dorothy Baca
Duration: 01:55
With: Jennifer Lopez, Antonio Banderas, Martin Sheen, Kate del Castillo, Teresa Ruiz, Maya Zapata & John Norman.
The City Who Kills Women: Investigation in Ciudad Juarez
This book is the result of 2 years of investigation and 3 on-site trips. From the start, the idea of a web-documentary type complement was integrated into the project. This book is published by Hachette Littératures, under the direction of Denis Pingaud. Marc Fernandez and Jean-Christophe Rampal carried out the investigation in the heart of this city that kills, meeting the main protagonists of the affair — dubious cops, reckless lawyers, scapegoats tortured to confess to crimes they do have not committed, families of victims and women of honor.…
They come back to the various tracks, from the craziest to the most scientific, of a file that is unfortunately far from closed. Because if today the criminals remain untraceable, one thing is certain: the assassinations of Ciudad Juárez reflect the perversity of this border city, a kingdom of drugs and corruption, a veritable laboratory of unbridled globalization.
Juárez is one of those places on the planet where the third world coexists with what the first worst product produces.
Unbridled globalization, carrying its dreams of economic expansion, its illusions of a better life, in reality only brings social and human regression. These border areas are hybrid and transitory spaces that one can enter for the time to indulge, without consequence, in all that one does not dare to do in the domesticated space of one's own city and then leave without worrying about knowing what we leave behind. The story of Juárez shows how the acculturation of space can feed barbarism. It also highlights a legal system that despises those who cannot afford it, that disregards simple people, especially if they are female.
On the telegraph poles of Juárez, a black cross on a pink background is painted each time a new woman is found dead, the only way for the families to imprint on the city the mark of this massacre and to arouse a duty of memory. Until the authorities in Juárez stop neglecting these hundreds of murders, the pink crosses continue to appear on the telegraph poles.
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