Murders Reignite Fear In One of Mexico's Tough Border Towns
by Julie Watson
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico
Police discovered the bodies of eight more young women this week in this tough town along the U.S.-Mexican border, renewing fears that a 1990s string of rape-murders had resumed.
In March 1999, five bus drivers were charged in 20 of the 57 previous murders, and police thought they had solved brutal killings.
But this week's shocking discoveries showed they were wrong, said women's rights activists who have insisted the killings never stopped.
Authorities in Ciudad Juarez found the skeletal remains of five women Wednesday near a field where they had uncovered the decayed bodies of three other young women the previous day.
"My God, I'm so angry," said Victoria Caraveo of Mujeres por Juarez, one of a dozen women's groups that has pressured police to do more. The activists marched to the prosecutor's office Thursday to demand action.
"Tell me, in what part of the world do you find a cemetery with bodies of girls who didn't do anything wrong - they just worked - and for that they have been raped, tortured and murdered, their bodies thrown in the desert like dogs," she said.
Between 1993 and 1999, police found at least 57 bodies in the desert around Ciudad Juarez, a sprawling city of 1.3 million people across the border from El Paso, Texas. Most were young teenage women who had come from small, poor towns in the Mexican countryside to work in the city and support their families. Some aspired to earn enough money to eventually go to school and begin new careers.
Women's groups have insisted that the number of women who disappeared had risen to more than 200, and they accused police of failing to investigate. More than a dozen Juarez women disappeared this year alone, they say.
"We want straight answers," Caraveo said. "The police don't do anything and they don't care to do anything. Yet they always have a perfect excuse for their incompetence."
On Thursday, Chihuahua state authorities announced that a special police task force will investigate the killings, and they set a $21,500 reward for the capture of the killer or killers.
At the time, police identified as the main suspect Abdel Latif Sharif, an Egyptian citizen formerly employed as an engineer at a Ciudad Juarez factory. Sharif allegedly paid as many as 10 other men, including the bus drivers, to commit copycat murders to draw suspicion away from him. Sharif denied any involvement in the killings, and his 30-year sentence was overturned on appeal last April. He remains in custody pending appeal by the prosecution.
Following the arrests, the killings appeared to have ended for a while, and police said the disappearances of other women were unrelated to the serial killings. But at least one of the victims found this week had her hands tied behind her back and was stripped down to her socks in a murder chillingly similar to the dozens of killings that occurred here in the 1990s. She had been killed about 10 days ago, and was between 15 and 17 years old.
The bodies were found about 300 yards from the offices of the Association of Maquiladoras, the group representing the mostly U.S.-owned export assembly plants that dominate the city. Most of the victims in the 1990s killings were young, slender maquila employees.
It was not immediately known whether the victims found Tuesday had been raped, and a source close to the investigation said it may be difficult to make that determination from the remains.
"The authorities lack investigative skill, and they lack interest," said Esther Chavez, a women's rights activist who led the battle to investigate the killings, which began in 1993. "Imagine: after all these deaths, they are only now deciding whether to bring DNA identification equipment here."
Juarez's problems go beyond the rape-murders. A disproportionate number of women are killed here in more "common" crimes.
The city recorded the murders of 192 women between 1987 and 1997, compared to 138 in Tijuana, another violent border city of almost the same size.
Copyright The Associated Press 2001