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In 2001, eight women’s bodies were found in a cotton field in the middle of the city. Today, a large cross made of broken glass and garbage stretches out as a memorial. An emaciated yellow dog sniffs the half-melted candles. Behind the shrine, an ornate plastic spoon and a cream sweater rest on the banks of a sewage ditch where five women were found.
“Even though the FBI has dealt with (Mexican police) for years on how to maintain a crime scene, we did a search in that field two months after the bodies were found,” says Victor Muñoz, the co-director of the Coalition Against Violence for Women and Families on the Border. “Two men found the overalls one of the girls had been wearing. Searches are very popular. We just walk across the desert, looking for bodies.”
Muñoz has spent much of his life organizing unions in northern Mexico. He retired in El Paso and spends a warm Friday night in his kitchen painting Mexican designs on a miniature rocking chair and two vases his sister bought him. His tiled kitchen table is covered in newspaper and paint.
Muñoz says the police are corrupt because they are simply ignorant.
“Soon there’s this pile of stuff they’ve missed. (The police) come and just start stuffing everything in a scene bag,” Muñoz says. “Months later they burned this clothing because it smelled too bad. They find three bodies, but 1,000 yards away is a big ditch (where five more bodies were found). They just investigate this really small area.”
Special Prosecutor Maria Lopez Urbina has published two reports since she took her position in January. In them she says 130 justice officials—including investigators, forensic experts and police officers—lost evidence, contaminated crime scenes and were slow to act to protect threatened women.
Chavez sees this as blatant discrimination against women.
“Some of the (murder) records were water-damaged,” Chavez says. “This demonstrates that the life of women isn’t important to them.”
Funding the police force is a major issue throughout Mexico. Although police in Juarez walk around in bulletproof vests with 9mms, police have to provide their own bullets. Through a compensation fund created in July, the Mexican government pays $2.2 million to victims’ families. Muñoz says it would cost tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to update the area’s police force.
The lack of funding has led to an underpaid police force, making it more likely that the police will take bribes, Muñoz says.
In addition to these problems, police use torture to elicit confessions in Juarez, according to Amnesty International.
The FBI in El Paso has been involved in training Mexican police on proper investigation techniques.
“We really can’t set foot on their ground. We aren’t going to push ourselves into their environment and tell them how to do things—that never works well,” says Art Wedge, the media coordinator for the FBI office in El Paso. “We always make ourselves available.”
This shrine was built in an old cotton field where
the bodies of eight women were found in
November, 2001.
Cartel Dominance
Drug cartels flourish in Juarez, which has became one of the primary places to get drugs into the United States. About 200 murders have been attributed to domestic and drug-related violence, according to the El Paso Times.
Colombian cocaine used to run through Florida and Cuba. After those routes were shut down by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in the early ’90s, the cartels began to channel drugs through Juarez and other border towns. The Dallas Morning News has reported that a group of state and local police in Juarez double as agents for the Fuentes cartel, Juarez’s richest and most powerful drug cartel. About 60 percent of the drugs that come into the United States come through Juarez, says Laurie Freeman, the Mexican associate for the Washington Office on Latin America, a policy group.
“The drug trade has managed to infiltrate and corrupt the police. There is complete impunity,” Freeman says.
The corrupting power of the drug cartels makes police afraid to do anything, says Tom Hanson, the director of the Mexican Solidarity Network, a national network of policy organizations.
“Frankly, there is no political will to change. The best way to end (the killings) is to legalize the drugs, and you get rid of the cartels,” Hanson says. “There is such a market for (drugs) here in the United States. They are worth tens of billions of dollars—we aren’t going to be able to find a police force able to deal with that.”
Murders have occurred throughout the city—women are abducted in broad daylight on Juarez Avenue, a busy street lined with stores. In 2002, a woman was stabbed and killed by her husband just outside Casa Amiga in front of several witnesses.
Chavez says the city has 500 gangs. By taking drugs over the border, a person can make in one day the same amount it would take weeks to earn in a maquiladora, or a foreign-owned factory in Mexico. This temptation overwhelms the system.
“A lot of police officers and government officials protect the drug dealers,” Chavez says. “These same people who commit these crimes can do anything. They have a level of impunity because they have a lot of drugs.”
Fear at Home
Casa Peregrina is a temporary shelter in juarez for women who have survived physical violence or who have been recently deported from the United States. Its director, Kathy Revtyak, was born in Indiana. Her office is dilapidated but tidy, crowded with children’s toys and smelling of mildew. She runs the home, which is run by the Annunciation House, a Christian shelter network, in the United States. The house is in the middle of downtown Juarez, guarded by a white-barred door. American college-age women work in the shelter with Revtyak. With hopeful smiles, they play with the children and do laundry.
In the past, the number of women who came to the shelter to escape domestic violence was not as large, Revtyak says. Now domestic violence is the primary reason they seek shelter.
“Look at the social and political interface,” Revtyak says. “Look at the drugs, the prevalence of women on the border. Look at the signs that say (they are looking for) sexy young women to work. There is a very negative and damaging sexualization of women here.”
She says the economic repercussions of Sept. 11 in the United States were also felt in Mexico.
“Look at the U.S. and Mexico relationship,” Revtyak says. “After 9/11, there was a huge amount of economic stress on families, a tremendous lack of jobs. People have to give voice to the reality of the situation.”
Marisela Hernandez Hernandez, 29, lives at Casa Peregrina with her five children. She says her husband drinks and has a drug habit, but he didn’t begin to abuse her until they had their third child and it became difficult for them to survive economically. Hernandez now works at the Ediasa Plant 1 maquiladora to support her family. She sews garments for 450 pesos a week, the equivalent of about $41.
“Police don’t do anything unless there is a cut or a broken bone,” Hernandez says, fingering her Catholic scapular. Worn around her neck, the two bits of cloth attached by a string represent Hernandez’s religious devotion. “I went to the police and denounced the abuse. They jailed (my husband) for just one day, and then they let him out.
“For a long time my husband wouldn’t let me leave the house. He tried to strangle me two times. He told me he wanted to kill me, but (the police) won’t do anything. (If he killed me) he would be jailed for some time, but then he would be let out. I wouldn’t be able to come back to life again.”
Forcing woman to stay at home is one aspect of machismo, the cultural practice of acting manly. There is a great emphasis placed on men to protect their images. Recently this image has been threatened by women going out of the home to get jobs in maquiladoras. Laura Freeman, of the Washington Office on Latin America, says women getting jobs outside the home has made many women the breadwinners of the family.
“These women have a lot more freedom. Women are killed (going) to and from work, so the message could be, ‘The only place you are safe is in your home,’” Freeman says. “Maybe some of (the men) are angry so they punish (the women) to put them in their place. (The women working) has caused a disruption and altered the traditional family role.”
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