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`Negligient' officials might face charges in Juarez murders

A Mexican federal prosecutor is calling for 81 state officials to be charged with negligence and abuse of their authority in carrying out investigations into a decade-long crime wave whose victims have been women in the northern city of Ciudad Juarez.

"That negligence, in some cases, will make it extremely difficult to find and punish those responsible for the murders," prosecutor Maria Lopez Urbina said, presenting her first report since her appointment in January to investigate the killings, which began in 1993.

The report is based on 50 of the cases, the first stage of a promised overhaul of all 307 files.

The 81 accused of misconduct were working on 29 of the unsolved cases in the first batch reviewed. The report says that the officials -- who included police officers, forensics specialists and detectives -- lost evidence, failed to interview witnesses, worked unreasonably slowly, made only cursory attempts to identify some victims and maintained chaotic files.

Mexican President Vicente Fox set up the special prosecutor's office in response to national and international pressure over the murders, which have attracted the attention of celebrities such as Jane Fonda and are at the center of an Amnesty International campaign.

About 100 of the cases conform to the same profile: young, slim and poor women are raped and strangled, then dumped in the desert surrounding Juarez.

Amnesty gave a cautious welcome to the report by Lopez Urbina.

"This is a step forward," a spokesman, Eric Olsen, said.

"The report confirms a lot of the things we have been saying," Olsen said.

He welcomed the prominence given to cases of domestic violence which, he said, had for too long remained in the shadows while the focus was on more sensational serial murders.

But, he added, there was a risk that the federal government was going to the other extreme and ignoring serial killings. Lopez Urbina said there was little evidence of serial murders in the cases reviewed so far, chosen at random from the total.

Most concern, however, has focused on the fact that the decision on whether to prosecute the 81 officials singled out by the report, but not named, is now in the hands of the state authorities that still employ some of them.

"It is a little worrisome that the federal prosecutor is handing this over to the state attorney-general who has been compliant here," Olsen said.

Vicky Caraveo, a women's rights activist from Juarez, said she believed the prosecutions would go ahead if there was sufficient pressure. But she was anxious about the timing of the next report.

"We cannot wait another year and a half for the rest," she said.
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