The serial murders and disappearances of young women and girls in the bleak Mexican border town of Cuidad Juarez were transformed this weekend from a forgotten tragedy into an international symbol.
The grieving mothers and local activists who have been unsuccessfully trying to draw attention to the murders for years found themselves enveloped in a haze of pink banners and scarves, battling through a media circus shoulder to shoulder with Jane Fonda and Sally Field.
"One of the horrors is feeling that you don't matter, that what happens to you and your family has no impact, there are no ripples, you just don't count," Fonda said. "Part of our coming here is to show these mothers that we are hearing and we do care."
For a march through the city center on Saturday, busloads of American students and feminists, and a smattering of other nationalities, joined the locals and the film stars in the Spanish chant ni una mas -- "not one more."
The day of action culminated in a special performance of the cult play The Vagina Monologues, which forms the centre of the "V Day" traveling campaign, which highlights violence against women.
Its author, Eve Ensler, bounded center stage at the end of the show and before a cheering, crowd proclaimed Juarez to be the "pilot project" for "vagina warriors and vagina-friendly men."
"We are about making sure Juarez becomes the new capital of nonviolence towards women around the world," she said. "Lets think about Juarez as the victory place."
Ciudad Juarez is not used to inspiring such sentiments.
There have been about 100 of these murders of women here since 1993, when the often-mutilated bodies first began appearing in the wastelands of the sprawling city of assembly-for-export factories, narco mansions and shantytowns across the Rio Bravo from El Paso, Texas.
The victims have been young, pretty, slim, dark and above all poor, vulnerable and easily ignored by the state authorities responsible for murder investigations.
Many of them disappeared on their way to or from school or factory jobs, and were raped and tortured before they were killed and dumped.
Less systematic but often equally brutal killings of other women, frequently the result of extreme domestic violence, have increased the number of victims in the past 10 years to more than 300. The dozens of disappearances suggest that even more have died.
In the past couple of years the nightmare has spread south to the neighboring city of Chihuahua.
The lack of precise numbers is one factor that has left most in Juarez assuming that state police are at best totally inept and at worst directly involved in the killings.
The latter theory gathered momentum this month when the Mexican FBI arrested a gang of police officers for allegedly acting as hit men for the local drug cartel, killing 12 people who were found buried under a trafficker's suburban home.
The city buzzes with tales of women's bodies misidentified, their clothes switched, DNA tests hidden, physical evidence missing, case files used for bonfires for the homeless and confessions extracted from innocent people by torture.
Oscar Maynez, a former forensics chief in the state prosecution service, tells of one case in which the accused was set free when his forced confession could not be squared with the fact that he was in jail on the day of the murder. But the two accomplices named under pressure remain behind bars.
RSS