Women of Juarez (2007)

In March 2004, the State Attorney of Chihuahua resigned in response to the V-Day March on Juarez, when a contingent including a number of women's organisations, American Congresswomen Hilda Solis and Jan Schakowsky, Jane Fonda, Sally Field and V-Day's Eve Ensler took to the streets of Juarez to reclaim them in honour of the women that were murdered or 'went missing' from Juarez in the preceding ten years. As of February 2005, Amnesty International reported that more than 400 women were still missing and over 370 bodies had been found. In 2005, Mexico's human rights ombudsmen reported that 28 women had been murdered.

The city of Juarez, Chihuahua, borders the American city of El Paso, Texas, across the Rio Grande. The people are poor and many global American corporations have built factories in the town in order to exploit the cheap labour supply; the workers, most of whom are women, work for less than US$5 per day. A 2003 report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) detailed that the victims were mainly between 15 and 25 years old. Although some were students, most had migrated from other parts of Mexico to work in the city's factories. The majority of bodies were found dumped in the dessert, mutilated, with signs of sexual assault. Women are bussed to and from the factories in the desert. A common report to the police - if the woman has family in the city - is that the woman left home for work, or was walked to the bus stop, and did not come home.

In 2002, Amnesty International requested information from the Mexican authorities on the progress made into solving these cases. Despite a recommendation from the National Commission on Human Rights in 1998 calling for thorough investigations into the circumstances in which these women were murdered, progress had been, and continues to be, slow and unsatisfactory.

Allegations of police corruption abound. One woman went to a morgue to identify her daughter. The corpse that they showed her had red hair but the police authorities had died it brown to trick her into believing it was her daughter. Esther Chavez, founder of Casa Amiga, an organisation that works to end violence against women in Juarez, says that it is easier for authorities to try and trick the surviving relatives of victims than it is to track down the killers.

No one knows for sure who is killing these women or why. America's NPR has linked the deaths to two prominent drug cartels active in the region whilst others have speculated the involvement of an organ harvesting gang. As with the rest of the world, domestic violence is prevalent in this community. The IACHR cited a study by the National Secretariat for Health where 15,000 death certificates were examined. Of these, 1,935 were the deaths of women, 48% of which resulted from domestic violence.

The family members that survive the victims want nothing more than to know what happened, to find out who murdered their loved ones and why. The lack of satisfactory progress from the authorities serves only to keep the perpetrators safe in the silence of their victims. Amnesty International has also called on the multinational companies that have investments in the area to play their part and exercise their social responsibility to increase the safety of their employees in the region.

ORGANISATIONS & WEBSITES

V-Day 2004: Missing and murdered women in Juarez, Mexico

http://www.vday.org/contents/vcampaigns/spotlight/juarez

Casa Amiga

http://www.casa-amiga.org/Presentation.html

Amigos De Las Mujeres De Juarez

http://www.amigosdemujeres.org/

Amnesty International

Demand Justice for the Women & Girls of Ciudad Juarez & Chihuahua, Mexica

POLICY & REPORTS

Statement: Justice and safety for the women of Ciudad Juarez
Amnesty International, 2002

The Situation of the Rights of Women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico: The Right to be Free from Violence and Discrimination
IACHR, 2003