Lupita is in her 30s and works as a laundry maid in several houses in Mexico City. She can still remember the first time she saw a girl taken from her home village.
“She was very pretty,” said Lupita. “She had freckles. She was 11 years old.”
Lupita was 20 when five men drove into the small community near Dos Bocas, outside the port of Veracruz, Mexico.
“When they got out of the van, all we could see were the machine guns in their hands. They wanted to know where the pretty one was, the girl with freckles. We all knew who that was. They took her and she was still holding her doll under her arm when they lifted her into the van like a bag of apples. This was more than 12 years ago. We never heard from her again,” she said.
The girl’s name was Ruth, Lupita said.
“She was the first one they stole. Then we heard it had happened in other villages,” she said.
The men who visited the villages worked for the local drug cartels, snatching girls to be trafficked for sex.
“There was nowhere in our village to hide,” Lupita said. “Where do you hide? So we dug holes in the ground and if we heard there were narcos around, we’d tell the girls to go to their holes and be very quiet for an hour or so until the men left.”
She remembers how one mother would leave paper and a crayon in the hole for her daughter.
“This worked for a while until even the narcos began to know about the holes,” she said.
Two years later, Lupita left the village and came to Mexico City looking for work.
The lists compiled by Mexican government agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for missing girls in Mexico read like this:
Karen Juarez Fuentes, 10. Female. Disappeared going to school in Acapulco. Brown skin. Brown hair. Brown eyes.
Ixel Rivas Morena, 13. Female. Lost in Xalapa. 1.5m tall. 50kg. Light brown hair. Light brown skin. Oval face. Thin. Left earlobe torn.
Rosa Mendoza Jimenez, 14. Female. Disappeared. Thin. Brown skin. Dark brown hair. Long. No more data.
They go on and on. According to Mexican government figures, kidnapping in the country increased by 31 percent last year. Those statistics tend to refer to victims who have been kidnapped for ransom, as people are more likely to report the crime when money is demanded. However, there is another kind of kidnapping that goes unreported. When a girl is robada — which literally means stolen — she is taken off the street on her way to school, leaving the movies, or even stolen out of her own house. No ransom is sought. Her body is all the criminals want. The drug cartels know they can sell a bag of drugs only once, but they can prostitute a young woman many times in a single day.
To avoid the traffickers, families are now taking extreme measures. Some women hide in secret shelters and homes, buildings disguised from the outside to look like shopfronts. Many poor farming families have secret places in their shacks where they can hide their sisters and daughters from the constant raids from drug traffickers.
A woman who sells beaded necklaces on a beach in Acapulco tells me how her parents created a small crawl space between the wall and the refrigerator where she would be sent to hide if they heard that there were drug traffickers roaming around in SUVs or on motorcycles.
“There were shootings and kidnappings all the time,” she said.
“We don’t live there any more. Nobody lives in that village any more,” she added.
Another way to avoid the narcos’ attention is by being unattractive. Over and over again, mothers explained that they do not let their daughters dress up or wear makeup and perfume. Some mothers from rural areas, met at marches and protests in Mexico City, even make their daughters “ugly” by cutting their hair and making them dress like boys.
“I told my daughter to keep in the shade,” said Sarita from Chilpancingo, a large town in the state of Guerrero. “She never listened to me.”
Sarita’s tears rolled down her cheeks and she wiped upward, as if to put them back in her eyes.
“We would fight all the time because I did not want her to wear lipstick. And I don’t know if she willingly ran away with a man, she was wanting to be loved, or was stolen, robada. I don’t know. She went to school in the morning and never came home,” Sarita said.
In one town in the south of the country, a 17th-century convent is used by one of the few groups in the country that secretly works to help women leave dangerous situations. Here, the nuns, all over the age of 75, have 20 women and their children hiding in a basement to escape their husbands and boyfriends. Asked what would happen if one of the women’s husbands or boyfriends should appear on their doorstep with a gang, carrying AK-47s under their arms, the nuns said without hesitation that they would stand together and create a wall with their bodies and die for the women and children they protect.
At the convent there is a slim, brown-haired woman who is 18 years old. Maria has been living with the nuns for more than a year. Her husband first saw her at a party.
“He looked at me and I knew I was trapped,” Maria said. “I hid in the bathroom for the rest of the night and he stood outside the door for hours. If you turn these men down, then they steal you. There is no saying ‘No.’ A woman cannot say no. I finally left the bathroom and there he was. He raped me for days.”
Maria explains how, after a few days, she managed to crawl through a window while the man was asleep and make it back to her family home.
“When my mother saw me walk in the door I thought she was going to hug me, but instead she picked up the telephone to call that man to tell him where I was,” she said.
“My mother said that she was not going to die for me. He beat me badly after he came to pick me up. One night, months later, he took me into the woods so that I would help him dispose of a barrel of hydrochloric acid in which a body was decomposing. He wanted to make sure I was an accomplice,” she said.
There are no precise figures as to how many women and girls are being stolen and trafficked in Mexico. In rural areas, few trust the police forces, who are often involved in local mafias, so many cases of missing girls are not registered. One fact all government and nongovernmental agencies agree on is that instances of forced labor, debt bondage and sex trafficking are growing at an alarming rate. Mexico’s government has vowed to find a more effective means to fight the country’s violence — the head-on fight with the drug cartels has killed up to 70,000 people in the past six years — but has yet to produce any kind of plan.
In November last year, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto stood beside Mexican Minister of Social Development Rosario Robles as she opened a women’s center in the remote, impoverished community of Tlapa de Comonfort in Guerrero State.
“In Mexico in the 21st century, the worst expression of discrimination against women is violence,” Robles said. “In this modern Mexico there are still states where the punishment is greater for stealing a cow than stealing a woman.”
At the cathedral in Xalapa, Veracruz, families of missing, stolen or killed women staged protests last year on International Women’s Day. As part of the protest, the shoes of missing girls and women were left on the cathedral steps with the names of their owners written next to them. A sign beside one pair of size 2 sandals read: “You took her alive, bring her back alive.”
“We stopped taking our daughters to the market,” one mother there said.
“It was too dangerous. You’d let go of your daughter’s hand to pick up a papaya and in a second she was gone. This happened to my cousin. They took her daughter at the market. She felt a movement, a push, and she fell on the ground. They pushed her away and picked up the girl. She was only 7. When my cousin went to talk to the policeman that is supposed to guard the market, he said only an idiot would take her daughter to the market. You can have another child, he said to her. You’re still young,” she said.
In Mexico City’s Santa Martha Acatitla women’s jail, prisoners wear one of two colors: Those who are sentenced wear navy blue and those awaiting sentencing are dressed in beige. The women’s jail faces the men’s jail and the prisoners can see each other through the cracks in the concrete walls. A man and a woman can look at each other for 35 years. They see a flash of skin, the shadow of a face, a blown kiss across a courtyard of cement and barbed wire. They wave handkerchiefs at each other.
Artist Luis Manuel Serrano has given collage workshops at the jail for more than 10 years, helping women tell their stories by cutting images out of magazines and gluing them to large pieces of cardboard. Serrano said that the collage technique allows the women to express themselves and tell their stories without needing technical skills. The collages tell an overwhelming number of stories about women who were kidnapped, used or sold as prostitutes, and then jailed for working as prostitutes.
Serrano said the most frightening collage he ever saw was made by a young woman called Marcela. She was from Tijuana and had been walking away from school to take the public bus home when she was snatched off the street and thrown into a car. She was 14 years old. She became a paradita — literally “one who stands” — in Tijuana’s well-known prostitution district called Callejon Coahuila, where the women stand out on the street and lean against walls.
“We were all little girls, really,” she told Serrano. “How did I know we were all little girls? We only had to look at each other’s small, small breasts to know.”
Serrano said her collage was black and white and covered in skulls.
“It’s the only time a collage has frightened me,” he said. “It shook me up.”
Almost every woman met in the prison testified that her life there was better than it had been outside. Proof of this is that the jail authorities never tell the inmates when they are going to leave. Instead, very late at night, a prisoner is taken from her cell and quietly released. The prisoner or her friends might otherwise do something, such as place drugs or a weapon in the cell or attack a guard, in order to remain in jail.
Luis Manuel Serrano said that, once released, women often commit crimes so they can return.
“Here, for the first time in their lives, many are safe and cared for,” he said.
The main activity at the jail is beautifying; sometimes it almost seems like the largest beauty parlor in Mexico. The jail smells of hairspray, nail polish remover and perfumes, and the prisoners spend most of the day painting their nails, dyeing their hair and applying false eyelashes. A couple of years ago, several staffmembers were fired for hosting a Botox party in the infirmary. Perhaps here, inside the prison, it feels safer for the women to be pretty.
Jennifer Clement is the author of Prayers for the Stolen.
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