Few in Juarez believe in the guilt of the motley collection of bus drivers, gangsters and an Egyptian-born chemist currently in jail for the murders.
"We are in a Kafkaesque situation, the absurdity of the system at work," Maynez said.
He saw how the investigation worked from the inside between 1999 and 2001. He resigned after being asked to help frame two bus drivers for the murders of eight women found in a mass grave in November 2001.
It is clear, he says, that an organized and rich mafia is behind the murders, and in Juarez that points to drug traffickers, politicians and businessmen.
He discounts widespread theories of organ trafficking and serial killer tourism, but refuses to give more details of his own hypotheses in the hope that a serious investigation will one day be carried out.
In the past year a highly publicized Amnesty International report and visits by a UN human rights commission and a delegation of US congresswomen has changed latent international concern about the "Juarez feminicide" into direct pressure on President Vicente Fox to do something about it.
A new federal prosecutor took office last week promising to review all the cases and to prosecute any abuses of power she may find.
Juarez activists are skeptical that she has the power to cut through the self-protection of the corroded state investigation, but they recognize her presence as the best hope of justice they have had.
To some of the relatives, hope after so much despair seems too much to bear. In a press conference before the march, one of the mothers broke down and screamed at the prosecutor that Juarez needed "actions and not words."
Brenda Esther Alfaro, 15, disappeared one September morning in 1997 on her way to her first day of work as a domestic servant. She walked from her home in a poor suburb down a busy street to take a bus and nobody, it seems, saw anything happen to her.
Her family says the police made few efforts to search for the girl, and suggested that she had run away with a secret boyfriend.
Outraged, they still show off her glowing grades and say she was going to work temporarily to help out after her mother Esther Luna and her drug-addicted father separated.
Three weeks later workers stumbled over a young woman's body in an abandoned football field on the other side of town. Esther Luna says she knew the raped, stabbed and strangled corpse by a dog bite on her calf. Lorena Alfaro says she knew by the knee-length school socks and a t-shirt she had lent her younger sister.
But it took the family five years to persuade the authorities to hand over the body. DNA tests were lost, there was endless red tape and a total disregard for the family's pain.
Brenda was finally buried in 2003, the investigation into her death in effect shelved.
Esther Luna, who suffers periodic blackouts, says she will never give up campaigning for justice for the victims of the violence: her only hope of making Juarez safe for her other daughters.
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