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.
PHOTO: EPA
"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.
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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS