Danger of Death.

· More than 300 women have been tortured, murdered and mutilated in the Mexican City Juárez
· The authorities don’t seem to be making any effort to solve these crimes

TONI CANO
MÉXICO

Between screams of: " justice! ", the mournful members of the organization Mujeres de Negro (Women in Black) fix, one after other, 20 nails in the cross of Plaza Hidalgo; because 20 more bodies in one year, have increased to even more than 300, the number of women who in the last ten years who have been raped, tortured, mutilated, and dumped on the common lands or the desert surrounding Juárez City. Before the guttural crying turns into a howl and fills the square, an actress shouts: "¡Sacos de huesos, sin órganos, como no nacidas! ¡Cuerpo de mujer, peligro de muerte!" (" Sacks of bones, without organs, as not been born! Woman's body, danger of death! ").

The dispersed ‘crucecitas’ cry out to the world, throwing roses, the nails in the heart of this urban state of Chihuahua (in the north of Mexico), at the border of El Paso, Texas. In Juárez there’s no drinkable water for its two million inhabitants, but drug trafficking abounds, trafficking of undocumented emigrants, and of women. Only impunity reaches the same levels of the racism and machismo.

Life Without Value

The life of the 220,000 young women who work in the 500 factories is not worth anything: the proof is 300 bodies and a thousand disappeared. "Those women have a nocturnal life; it is difficult to go out and not get drunk ", maintained public prosecutor Arturo González.
“This case must be monitored more closely so that it does not continue”, says the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who, as ‘defender of human rights’, is offering to take to the European Parliament what is already being called ‘the feminicide of City Juárez’. The president of Mexicos’ National Commission of Human Rights, José Luis Soberanes, affirms that “the situation has gone from disgrace to national emergency” and that these murders “are already an issue for the State”. But the Mexican president, Vicente Fox, demands that it is “the local government, since it corresponds to its constitutional responsibility and sovereignty, which deals with the investigations and punishes the culprits”.
The matter probably even crosses the international border. For another district attorney, Carlos Vega, some “American military men might be involved in the women's murders”. This is one of the dozens of hypothesis that the General Lawyer's office of the Republic (PGR), or district attorney's office, handles, and whose “new lines of investigation” also include “the participation gangs of police, treats it as half notes, trafficking in human organs, satanic rites, and snuff videos, or of atrocious realism”. For the investigation to pass to the hands of the Federal authorities there has to be a “presence of organized groups”, until now “not verified”.
Almost nobody believes in the guilt of the Egyptian - American Sharif Sharif, sentenced in 1999 to 30 years in prison as “intellectual author of the serial murders”, nor his 11 supposed accomplices, of the bands The Rebels and The Ruteros, who are in jail awaiting sentence. The murders continue and, as is highlighted in an editorial in a Mexican daily newspaper; " the legislation and the ethical essential values succumb to the incompetence, the corruption, and the lack of political will on the part of the authorities ".

Letter to Fox

The actress Cristina Michaus, who has become famous with her monologue ‘The women of City Juárez’, prepares to deliver to Fox a letter asking him to visit this city. Michaus picks on the governor of Chihuahua, Patricio Martínez, like anyone who makes comments of the type: “they deserved it for leading a double life”. She takes up what the people think: “They Say that the police officers use them for their bacchanals”. She denounces the “barbarities committed against them by the judicial system”. And she concludes: “It Is as if they’veturned to killing”.
“They treat them loke rubbish”, says writer Elena Poniatowska. The filmmaker Lourdes Portillo, who won awards with Señorita extraviada (Lost Young Woman), an impressive documentary on the great suffering through which the mothers of the murdered ones live, says: “The authorities talk alot, but the violence continues”.
Writer Sergio González, author of ‘Bones in the Desert’, highlights that “the victims are modest labourers and workers” and that these crimes are “examples of the new violence that is happening in the world”. The backpage of his book carries the motto: “The recipe for the perfect crime”.
Much smells rotten in City Juárez; and not just these remains that a mother, Benita Monárrez, contemplates half a year later, to sob: “I don’t feel that this is my daughter”.


Noticia publicada en la página 11 de la edición de Martes, 12 de agosto de 2003 de El Periódico - edición impresa.
(News published on page 11 of the Tuesday edition, August 12th, 2003 of El Periodico - printed edition)