Mexico Finally Sets Up Commission To Investigate Juarez Murders

by Diego Cevallos

(IPS) -MEXICO CITY - The brutal murders of 300 young women and the disappearances of 500 more during the past decade in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez have captured national and international attention. But little is said about the similar number of young men who have met the same tragic fate.

Under pressure from human rights defenders and relatives of the women victims, President Vicente Fox set up a commission last year to seek ways to prevent what are known locally in Spanish as 'femicidios' (femicides), and in late January he named a special prosecutor who has broad investigative authority.

Resolving the killings of women in Juarez "is a personal commitment," said Fox.

But the situation is a bit different for hundreds of cases in which men were the victims in this city of 1.5 million, with a reputation as Mexico's most violent city, located across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas.

"If the dead or disappeared are male, the authorities and the police label them as drug traffickers, and with that argument they don't investigate or offer support to the families," Francisco Arbello, of the Juarez Association for Disappeared Persons, told IPS.

The association has files for 198 unresolved cases of men who have disappeared in Ciudad Juarez since 1993. But the true number could reach 700, says Arbello. As for the male victims of murder, there are some 250 whose killers have yet to be caught.

The murder cases involving men are categorically different, because most of the women victims have been sexually abused, says Arbello, but the male victims should not be ignored by the authorities, because otherwise the crimes go unpunished.

Last week, buried in the garden of a house in Ciudad Juarez that apparently belonged to a drug trafficker, the police found the bodies of 11 men.

According to initial investigations, the victims were ages 20 to 35 and were reportedly tortured and then shot in the head. In November 1999, there was a similar case: the bodies of nine men were found buried on a property in the outskirts of the city.

Operating in this border city are several illegal organizations linked to the trafficking of drugs and of people to the United States. Also, there are many 'picaderos', local slang for the sites where intravenous drug users gather to inject themselves with heroin.

But the city is famed in Mexico and internationally for the "women of Juarez", the hundreds of young women, most between ages 15 and 30, who have been killed or disappeared.

Many of the women were stabbed to death and their bodies were found in abandoned lots or just outside of the city. In many cases, there was evidence that they had been raped and tortured.

Although the victims' families maintain that most of the 300 murders reported involved rape, a study sponsored by the state-run Chihuahua Women's Institute says that the total cases in which there was evidence of sexual attack was 90 -- while the rest involved crimes of passion, intra-family disputes, drug trafficking or robbery.

Most of the women victims worked at Ciudad Juarez's many maquiladoras, manufacturers that assemble for-export products with tax-free imported parts. Many women disappeared on the way to or from work, often at night.

At least 250,000 women work in the city's maquiladoras and most are young and single, earning just a few dollars a day.

The authorities of Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located, had been in charge of investigating the murders and disappearances of women in the border city. But in July 2003 the Fox administration decided to send in 400 federal agents to take over public safety and crime prevention responsibilities

To give his strategy a boost, the president named Mar’a L—pez Urbina as special prosecutor for Juarez in late January.

She pledged to investigate reports of inefficiency, negligence or leniency on the part of local investigators in charge of the Juarez women murder cases.

Unlike the murders and disappearances of men, the women's cases have been broadly covered in the media, spurred numerous lawsuits, and led to the creation of at least seven non-governmental organizations that follow the issue.

To date, at least nine books have been written about the murders of the women in Ciudad Juarez, and there are six video and film documentaries and six theatre plays.

"We do not at all deny the importance of the dead and disappeared women, but the question remains: why don't the cases involving men deserve attention?" said Arbello.