Please watch video on Juarez Mothers Fight Femicide:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK0f_7XeYJA
Over the last twenty years, bodies of girls and women began appearing in the desert on the outskirts of Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, a city of 1.4 million just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Many of these women were raped, beaten, mutilated, and tortured. This was the beginning of an epidemic of brutal rapes and murders aimed at Juarez’s, young, poor, women. To date, more than 400 women have been murdered in the cities of Juarez and Chihuahua. More frightening, there have been over 4,000 registered complaints of women who have disappeared. In Spanish, this phenomenon is called “Feminicide.” These victims of feminicide, predominately young women between the ages of 12 through 22 would after a day of going to school or work disappear. They would later be found murdered and buried in shallow graves in the desert or at construction sites around the city. Many of these young women were maquiladora workers.
Ciudad Juarez is a city known for its pollution, drug cartels, and violence. Maquillador Factories began opening and operating in Juarez over the years and have lured thousands of women throughout Mexico in the hopes of financial and social independence. The maquiladora workers usually come from small villages and rural areas, and move to Juarez in search of work. Many of these women have worked in family economies, including working on a farm, taking in laundry, or making and selling tortillas. Others have worked for wages in agriculture or as domestics, and some have taken up maquila piecework before migrating to Juarez. They all share the same desire to escape poverty and this helps motivate their decision to move to Juarez. Many of the workers of the maquiladors live in the outskirts of the city in makeshift houses constructed from cement, cardboard boxes and live without electricity and running water. Each day women have to walk through the rural dark dirt roads and take company buses that transport them to work. Despite the harshness of life in Juarez, the young women keep coming at the rate of forty to sixty thousand a year. They seek jobs in these factories, which pay higher wages than anywhere else in Mexico. The chance to have an independent life also attracts these women to the city to work in the maquilladors.
These murders flourish in a city where everyone knows that you can kill a woman without consequence. Many cases have not been adequately investigated and are unsolved. Few have been punished for these horrendous crimes, denying justice to the victim’s family members. The combination of poor investigation techniques, flaws in the judicial system, and the use of torture to extract a confession, has contributed to the murders in these areas. The families of the victims are denied justice that they deserve.
Mexico has ratified International Instruments and domestic legislation on torture, but sadly this practice plays a key role in the criminal justice system. It is systematically used as an investigative tool and is the basis of numerous unfair convictions. As a result, the guilty remain unpunished. Hundreds of families will only see justice when Mexico seriously investigates and punishes those who are responsible for the murders of these women and fully investigates the disappearances of many more women.
