Female homicides in Ciudad Juárez
Encyclopedia
Femicide
Femicide was first used in England in 1801 to signify "the killing of a woman." In 1848, this term was published in Wharton's Law Lexicon, suggesting that it had become a prosecutable offense. Another term used is feminicide.-First feminist definition:...
s") and las muertas de Juárez ("The dead women of Juárez"), involves the violent deaths of hundreds of women since 1993 in the northern Mexican
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
city of Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juárez , officially known today as Heroica Ciudad Juárez, but abbreviated Juárez and formerly known as El Paso del Norte, is a city and seat of the municipality of Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Juárez's estimated population is 1.5 million people. The city lies on the Rio Grande...
, Chihuahua, a border city across the Rio Grande
Rio Grande
The Rio Grande is a river that flows from southwestern Colorado in the United States to the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way it forms part of the Mexico – United States border. Its length varies as its course changes...
from the U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
city of El Paso, Texas
El Paso, Texas
El Paso, is a city in and the county seat of El Paso County, Texas, United States, and lies in far West Texas. In the 2010 census, the city had a population of 649,121. It is the sixth largest city in Texas and the 19th largest city in the United States...
. The estimated homicide toll is speculated to be around 400, but many local residents believe that the true count of los feminicidios stands at an estimated 5,000 victims. Most of the cases remained unsolved as of 2003, and are still mainly unsolved today.
Femicides
According to the Organization of American StatesOrganization of American States
The Organization of American States is a regional international organization, headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States...
's Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is an autonomous organ of the Organization of American States .Along with the...
:
The victims of these crimes have preponderantly been young women, between 12 and 22 years of age. Many were students, and most were maquiladoraMaquiladoraA maquiladora or maquila is a concept often referred to as an operation that involves manufacturing in a country that is not the client's and as such has an interesting duty or tariff treatment...
[manufacturing] workers. A number were relative newcomers to Ciudad Juárez who had migrated from other areas of Mexico. The victims were generally reported missing by their families, with their bodies found days or months later abandoned in vacant lots, outlying areas or in the desert. In most of these cases there were signs of sexual violence, torment, torture or in some cases disfigurement.
According to Amnesty International
Amnesty International
Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...
as of February 2005 more than 370 young women and girls had been murdered in the cities of Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua.
In November 2005 BBC News
BBC News
BBC News is the department of the British Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online...
reported Mexico's human rights ombudsman
National Human Rights Commission (Mexico)
Mexico's National Human Rights Commission is the national human rights institution accredited at the United Nations with 'A' status by the International Co-ordinating Committee of NHRIs . It is a member of the Network of National Institutions in the Americas, one of four regional groups within...
José Luis Soberanes
José Luis Soberanes
José Luis Soberanes Fernández is a prominent Mexican lawyer. He was president of the National Human Rights Commission of Mexico from November 16, 1999 to November 15, 2009....
as saying that 28 women had been murdered so far in 2005. Despite past and current unsolved murders in August 2006 the federal government dropped its investigation, concluding that no federal laws had been violated.
Suspects
The most prominent suspects in the Juárez serial case were arrested, following the discovery of body clusters in the areas noted in parentheses.1995 - Abdul Latif Sharif
Abdul Latif Sharif
Abdul Latif Sharif , was an Egyptian chemist and chief suspect in the Juárez killings, a decade-long murder spree that began in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez in the early 1990s....
was arrested, charged, and convicted of the 1995 murder of Elizabeth Castro Garcia (Lote Bravo).
1996 - Several members of Los Rebeldes, a Juárez street gang, were arrested (Lote Bravo).
1999 - Los Choferes, bus drivers on routes between the maquiladoras and residential districts, were arrested (Lomas de Poleo).
2001 - García Uribe and González Meza were arrested for the murder of eight victims found in a cotton field near the Association of Maquila Workers in East Juárez (Cotton Field).
Reactions
Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa A.C.
Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa A.C. is a non profit organization composed of mothers, family members, and friends of victims of the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez. The mothers claim that their cases have gone unsolved in some cases for over 12 years...
("Civil Association for the Return Home of Our Daughters") was formed to raise awareness about the situation and put pressure on the Mexican government to pay attention to these cases, some of which have gone unsolved for 13 years. Members of the group, including co-founder Norma Andrade
Norma Andrade
Norma Andrade is one of the founding members of Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa A.C., a Mexican non-profit association of mothers whose daughters have been victims of female homicides in Ciudad Juárez. Her daughter, Lilia Alejandra García Andrade, disappeared on February 14, 2001. On February 21,...
, demand that proper investigations be carried out.
Another family organization, Voces sin Eco ("voices without echo") was founded in 1998. They painted pink crosses on black telephone poles to draw attention to the problem and align themselves with family values.
There are several feminists and feminist organizations working in Ciudad Juárez to improve the situation of women. Documentación y Estudios de Mujeres (DEMAC), a Women's Studies and Research Center in Juárez, is one such organization. DEMAC works to improve the lives of women in crisis by teaching narrative writing skills to women ages 7 to 70. Seeking to restore the rights of one woman at a time and rescue another side of Mexican history, the center is launching a project called "Reading My City" to wake up to what is happening in the city. Casa Amiga, Ciudad Juárez's first Rape Crisis Center founded in 1999, is another organization seeking to help women in Ciudad Juárez. The organization initially focused on sexual violence and now helps women and families who have experience any form of violence in their lives by providing psychological help for parents, women and children and by intervening in cases of domestic violence. Both organizations acknowledge that a culture of impunity is a crucial factor in causing the violence and that unemployment and low wages compound the problem.
Many people have fled Ciudad Juárez in the face of the violence. 700,000 people out of a population of 2 million have left, with about 100,000 moving to El Paso.
Tori Amos
Tori Amos is an American pianist, singer-songwriter and composer. She was at the forefront of a number of female singer-songwriters in the early 1990s and was noteworthy early in her career as one of the few alternative rock performers to use a piano as her primary instrument...
reacted to the accounts of the murders with her song "Juárez" on the album To Venus And Back
To Venus and Back
To Venus and Back, the fifth album released by singer and songwriter Tori Amos, is a two-disc album set including a studio album and a live album. The first disc, titled Venus: Orbiting, features eleven original songs that finds Amos experimenting heavily in electronica...
.
In 2000, El Paso
El Paso, Texas
El Paso, is a city in and the county seat of El Paso County, Texas, United States, and lies in far West Texas. In the 2010 census, the city had a population of 649,121. It is the sixth largest city in Texas and the 19th largest city in the United States...
post-hardcore
Post-hardcore
Post-hardcore is a genre of music that developed from hardcore punk, itself an offshoot of the broader punk rock movement. Like post-punk, post-hardcore is a term for a broad constellation of groups...
band At the Drive-In
At the Drive-In
At the Drive-In was an American rock band from El Paso, Texas, considered part of the post-hardcore genre and active from 1993 to 2001. They were known for their extremely energetic stage shows which hearkened back to the 1980s hardcore scene...
released a music video for their song "Invalid Litter Dept.
Invalid Litter Dept.
"Invalid Litter Dept." was the third single released from At the Drive-In's album Relationship of Command. The CD release in March 2001 came in a variety of international formats, including the standard two CDs in the United Kingdom...
" that details the deaths. The video features several photos of newspaper clippings and articles about the murders.
In 2001, filmmaker Lourdes Portillo
Lourdes Portillo
Lourdes Portillo is an American screenwriter and filmmaker. While the majority of her work is in the documentary film genre, she has also created video installations and written for the stage...
released one of the first documentaries dedicated to the victims of the murders, Señorita Extraviada.
An informal group, which the press named Las Mujeres de Negro ("the women in black"), originated in November 2001 in the city of Chihuahua, following the discovery of eight corpses together. They attended the protest, which interrupted the celebration of the Mexican Revolution
Mexican Revolution
The Mexican Revolution was a major armed struggle that started in 1910, with an uprising led by Francisco I. Madero against longtime autocrat Porfirio Díaz. The Revolution was characterized by several socialist, liberal, anarchist, populist, and agrarianist movements. Over time the Revolution...
, wearing black tunics (as a sign of mourning) and pink hats. Since then, they have marched across the desert from Chihuahua to Juárez and planted crosses (sometimes with plastic limbs attached) in prominent places.
In 2001 Gabriella “Azul Luna” Parra founded Las ViejasKandalosas, a collective of artists with a mission to denounce the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico through art. She organized various multimedia shows, the first being EsesKandalo in 2001 at Self-Help Graphics & Art in East Los Angeles. In February 2002 she and Lorena Mendez-Quiroga led a caravan (from Los Angeles to Ciudad Juárez) to the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) Museum in Ciudad Juárez for a ViejasKandalosas three-day protest event that included a bi-national exhibit, a press conference with Diana Washington Valdez, and a candlelight procession through the streets with community and visiting artists.
In 2002, Mexican journalist, novelist and essayist Sergio González Rodríguez published Huesos en el Desierto, ("Bones in the Desert") one of the most comprehensive researchs on these murders and its social and political causes on book form. Sergio González Rodríguez claims that, during the course of his research for the book, which discovered links between organized crime, local entrepreneurs and local and federal authorities, he suffered death threats, and was kidnapped and tortured.
In 2002, U.S. border journalist Diana Washington Valdez published an investigative newspaper series in the El Paso Times
El Paso Times
The El Paso Times is the English-language newspaper for the U.S. city of El Paso, Texas. The paper was founded in 1881 by Marcellus Washington Carrico. It originally started out as a weekly but within a year's time, it became the daily newspaper for the frontier town.The newspaper has a daily...
about the murders titled "Death Stalks the Border."
In 2002, as part of the art activists from Los Angeles that caravanned to Ciudad Juárez for the INBA protest exhibit, Rigo Maldonado and Victoria Delgadillo, co-curated the first internationally acknowledged exhibit on these femicides at the Social & Public Arts Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California. The exhibit was called Hijas de Juárez, and included 45 major artists from the Los Angeles area. In 2002, details and images of victims were not readily available via the internet or libraries prompting both curators, the SPARC gallery coordinator Jennifer Araujo, artist/filmmaker Patricia Valencia and her friend/writer Max Blumenthal to regroup in Ciudad Juárez to collect data and interview victim families. In 2003, Victoria Delgadillo & Rigo Maldonado’s written account on the curatory process for this exhibit was published in Aztlán an Academic Chicano Journal, through the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) press. The article was entitled “Journey to the Land of the Dead: A Conversation with the Curators of the Hijas de Juárez Exhibit” [Volume 28, Number 2 / Fall 2003]. For their work on the Hijas de Juárez exhibit and for creating public awareness through art, Rigo Maldonado and Victoria Delgadillo received awards from the Instituto Cultural de León, Guanajuato (Mexico) in 2003, La Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa (Mexico) in 2003, and the Los Angeles City Council (United States) in 2002.
In the same year Polish journalists Eliza Kowalewska and Grzegorz Madej released a TV series about crimes in Juárez. Journalists cooperated with crime experts Robert Ressler
Robert Ressler
Robert K. Ressler is a former FBI agent and author. He played a significant role in the psychological profiling of violent offenders in the 1970s and is often credited with coining the English term "serial killer"....
and Candice Skrapec. This series was shown on Polish television TVN in 2003.
In 2003, journalist Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal is an American author, journalist, and blogger. A senior writer for The Daily Beast, he is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party....
won the Online News Association independent feature award for his investigative article in Salon.com, "Day of the Dead", which examined the murders and the connection between them and the policies of the corporations with factories in the border city.
In November 2003, UCLA Chicano Studies Professors Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Chon Noriega organize a conference called “The Maquiladora Murders, or who is Killing the Women of Juárez?” at the University of California, Los Angeles, bringing victim families, and other notable guest speakers to present to students and community members.
In 2003, Eve Ensler demanded justice from the Special Prosector and vowed to return with support from around the world, and established a V-Day march in February 2004 with over 7,000 participants including actresses Sally Field
Sally Field
Sally Margaret Field is an American actress, singer, producer, director, and screenwriter. In each decade of her career, she has been known for major roles in American TV/film culture, including: in the 1960s, for Gidget or Sister Bertrille on The Flying Nun ; in the 1970s, for Sybil , Smokey and...
and Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model, and fitness guru. She rose to fame in the 1960s with films such as Barbarella and Cat Ballou. She has won two Academy Awards and received several other movie awards and nominations during more than 50 years as an...
.
In 2004, Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist and poet. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes , and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes...
's novel 2666 centered around the murders in a fictitious town called Santa Teresa, widely acknowledged as an alias for Ciudad Juárez.
In 2004, Mexican norteño
Norteño (music)
Norteño , also norteña or conjunto, is a genre of Mexican music. The accordion and the bajo sexto are norteño's most characteristic instruments. The norteño genre is popular in both Mexico and the United States, especially among the Mexican community...
group Los Tigres del Norte
Los Tigres del Norte
Los Tigres del Norte is a norteño-band ensemble based out of San Jose, California, hailing from Rosa Morada, Sinaloa, Mexico.- History :...
released a song called "Las Mujeres de Juárez" (The Women of Juárez) on their Pacto de Sangre album. Juárez mayor Héctor Murguía denounced the song, saying that it painted a false picture about the "real face of Juárez."
In 2004, Greek documentary team Exandas, released a production titled "Juárez, City of the Dead, women" featuring interviews with several relatives, maquiladora workers and owners and showcasing police corruption, evidence tampering practices and collaboration with one of the Mexican drug cartels, whose members emerge as the most likely culprits.
In 2004, USA musician Bugs Salcido released a concept album titled "The Juárez Murders" featuring David Lowery
David Lowery
David Lowery is an American guitarist, vocalist and songwriter; he is the founder of alternative rock band, Camper Van Beethoven, and co-founder of the more traditional rock band, Cracker...
, David Immerglück
David Immerglück
David Immerglück is an American multi-instrumentalist who is best known as a guitarist in the alternative rock bands Counting Crows, Camper Van Beethoven and the Monks of Doom...
, Martin Pradler, Jeff Trott, & Alan Weatherhead. Proceeds from sales of the album and from his live concerts have gone to aid the families of the victims and the rape crisis center in Juárez. “. . .I do hope that ultimately, people are left with a feeling of hope after hearing this music,” says Salcido.
In 2005, native of the El Paso/Juárez border, Alicia Gaspar de Alba author of various works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and artist in Las Hijas de Juárez exhibit publishes her novel "Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders", which she had been researching since 1998.
In 2005, Diana Washington Valdez published "Cosecha de Mujeres: Safari en el desierto Mexicano" [Oceano/Mexico/Spain], an investigative book in Spanish exposing the murders. It was a finalist for the Ulysses Lettre Award for international reportage.
To protest the lack of progress in the cases, a huge free concert was held by famous Latin artists such as Alejandro Sanz
Alejandro Sanz
Alejandro Sanz , is a Spanish singer-songwriter and musician. For his work, Sanz has won a total of fifteen Latin Grammy Awards and three Grammy Awards. He has won the Latin Grammy for Album of the Year three times, more than any other artist...
, Alex Ubago
Álex Ubago
Álex Ubago is a Spanish singer-songwriter. He is especially known for his heartfelt voice and his ballads. He rose to stardom in 2001, when he appeared as a guest on a hit TV show in Spain. Alex started to tour national radios with his guitar to sing his songs live and be interviewed...
, Manu Chao
Manu Chao
Manu Chao , is a French singer of Spanish roots . He sings in French, Spanish, English, Italian, Galician, Arabic and Portuguese and occasionally in other languages...
, Lila Downs
Lila Downs
Lila Downs is a Mexican singer-songwriter. She performs her own compositions as well as tapping into Mexican traditional and popular music...
and others on September 18, 2005 in Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
's central Zócalo
Zócalo
The Zócalo is the main plaza or square in the heart of the historic center of Mexico City. The plaza used to be known simply as the "Main Square" or "Arms Square," and today its formal name is Plaza de la Constitución...
square.
On May 30, 2005, President
President of Mexico
The President of the United Mexican States is the head of state and government of Mexico. Under the Constitution, the president is also the Supreme Commander of the Mexican armed forces...
Vicente Fox
Vicente Fox
Vicente Fox Quesada is a Mexican former politician who served as President of Mexico from 1 December 2000 to 30 November 2006 and currently serves as co-President of the Centrist Democrat International, an international organization of Christian democratic political parties.Fox was elected...
told reporters that the majority of the Juárez killings had been resolved and the perpetrators placed behind bars.
He went on to criticize the media for "rehashing" the same 300 or 400 murders, and said matters needed to be seen in their "proper dimension".
In 2006, Diana Washington Valdez published The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women [Peace at the Border/California/First Ed.], an investigative book in English about the Juárez women's murders, drug cartels and government corruption in Mexico. The ebook version was titled Harvest of Women: Safari in Mexico.
In 2006, Los Angeles filmmaker Lorena Mendez produced Border Echoes, a documentary about the Juárez women's murders based on nearly 10 years of investigation. She collaborated with Diana Washington Valdez for the film. Azul Luna co-produced.
In 2006, Gregory Nava
Gregory Nava
Gregory Nava is a film director, producer and screenplay writer, of Mexican and Basque heritage.-Education:...
directed a movie called Bordertown with Jennifer Lopez
Jennifer Lopez
Jennifer Lynn Lopez is an American actress, singer, record producer, dancer, television personality, and fashion designer. Lopez began her career as a dancer on the television comedy program In Living Color. Subsequently venturing into acting, she gained recognition in the 1995 action-thriller...
and Antonio Banderas
Antonio Banderas
José Antonio Domínguez Banderas , better known as Antonio Banderas, is a Spanish film actor, film director, film producer and singer...
.
In 2006, a book of poems on the Juárez women's murders was published by White Pine Press
White Pine Press
White Pine Press is an American, nonprofit, literary press located in Buffalo, New York, publishing poetry, fiction, essays, and world literature in translation...
: Secrets in the Sand: The Young Women of Juárez by Marjorie Agosín
Marjorie Agosín
Marjorie Agosín is an award-winning poet, essayist, fiction writer, activist, and professor. She is a prolific author: her published books, including those she has written as well as those she has edited, number over eighty...
.
In 2007 The Daughters of Juárez by 11-time Emmy award-winning journalist Teresa Rodriguez was published, the most recent book on the murders. Teresa Rodriguez is a reporter for Univisión
Univision
Univision is a Spanish-language television network in the United States. It has the largest audience of Spanish language television viewers according to Nielsen ratings. Randy Falco, COO, has been in charge of the company since the departure of Univision Communications president and CEO Joe Uva...
, the largest Spanish-language television network in the United States. There, she co-anchors the critically acclaimed and award winning news magazine Aqui y Ahora. She has been investigating and reporting on the Juárez murders for over 13 years.
In 2007, Toronto filmmakers Alex Flores and Lorena Vassolo released Juárez, a documentary film about the murders.
In 2008, the artist Swoon
Swoon (artist)
Swoon is a street artist born in New London, Connecticut, and raised in Daytona Beach, Florida. She moved to New York City at age nineteen, and specializes in life-size wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts of figures...
displayed a paper-cutout memorial of victim Silvia Elena in the Chelsea art gallery Honeyspace. She displayed another version of the piece on a wall in San Francisco's Mission District.
In 2009, Backyard (El traspatio) was released in Mexico. Directed by Carlos Carrera
Carlos Carrera
Carlos Carrera is a Mexican film director and screenwriter. He directed El crimen del Padre Amaro , which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film....
(The Crime of Father Amaro) and screenwritten by Sabina Berman. This film was part of the 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival
Vancouver International Film Festival
The Vancouver International Film Festival is an annual film festival held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada for two weeks in late September and early October...
, where an extra screening had to be scheduled because of the interest it generated.
In 2010, a book of poems on the Juárez women's murders was published by University of Arizona Press
University of Arizona Press
The University of Arizona Press, a publishing house founded in 1959 as a department of the University of Arizona, is a nonprofit publisher of scholarly and regional books...
: Each and Her by Valerie Martínez
Valerie Martínez
Valerie Martínez is an American poet, teacher, playwright, and translator. She is author of three poetry collections, most recently Each and Her , a poetic exploration of the femicides in Ciudad Juárez and the surrounding areas...
.
In 2011, Judithe Hernández
Judithe Hernández
Judithe Hernández is a Chicana artist and a founding member of the Chicano Art/Los Angeles Mural movements. She first received acclaim in the 1970s as a muralist...
produced a solo exhibition, La Vida Sobre Papel, concerned with the Juárez femicides. According to the Chicago Weekly
Chicago Weekly
The Chicago Weekly is a student-written alternative weekly at the University of Chicago that promotes arts and culture on the South Side of Chicago through coverage and criticism. The paper also follows South Side news stories that are ignored by mainstream media...
, "The only thing as conspicuous as the artist’s skill is her message: being human is hard, a woman harder, and life as a Latina occasionally downright grisly."
External links
- Mexico's Macho Blood Sport, New Statesman article on the killings
- No Angel Came, contains an extensive amount of articles about the homicides, all with sources, covering from 1995 to the current time
- ReDressing Injustice, a collaborative public art project led by visual artist Irene Simmons City of Missing Women, Stern Magazine (Germany) written by Jan Wiechmann, photographs by Timothy Fadek
- Press release: The Truth Behind the Juárez Murders - documentary film, by Lorena Mendez-Quiroga
- Lourdes Portillo, Señorita Extraviada ("Missing young lady", 2001 video) ISBN 0807861731
- Juárez police drop 72-hour requirement for missing persons reports May 2005 Cosecha de mujeres. El safari mexicano,("Harvesting women, the Mexican safari", article by Diana Washington, at La JornadaLa JornadaLa Jornada is one of Mexico City's leading daily newspapers. It was established in 1984 by Carlos Payán Velver. The current editor is Carmen Lira Saade...
Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa A.C. ("May our daughters be returned to our homes, civil association"). - A 2004 online booklet on the femicides published by the Mexico Solidarity Network.
- 420 women killed in Ciudad Juárez, a short film by Rocco Trigueros
- http://www.amazon.com/dp/140006533Xby Ted Botha Forensic artist Frank BenderFrank BenderFrancis Augustus "Frank" Bender was a world-renowned autodidact forensic artist and fine artist. His job was to make facial reconstructions of the dead and of fugitives, many of whom had, or still have, been on the run for a long time...
's life story intertwined with his most challenging case The Juárez Murders, published by Random House, May 2008]