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MEXICO: Gov’t Finally Steps In to Investigate Juarez Murders

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Jul 23 2003 (IPS) - Mexico’s federal government has taken control of the police in Ciudad Juárez to investigate the approximately 300 cases of women brutally murdered over the past decade, an ongoing series of killings that has earned this northern border city the nickname “femicide capital”.

Mexico’s federal government has taken control of the police in Ciudad Juárez to investigate the approximately 300 cases of women brutally murdered over the past decade, an ongoing series of killings that has earned this northern border city the nickname “femicide capital”.

But the civil society groups – victims’ families and human rights activists – that had long been demanding federal intervention say they are disappointed in this latest move.

After being subject to pressure from human rights organisations, both national and international, the federal police finally took control of this city’s forces.

The murders in Ciudad Juárez, a city of 1.2 million people in the state of Chihuahua and situated on the border with the United States, are an internationally known phenomenon due to their persistence and cruelty.

The Vicente Fox government “has come with a plan that we did not approve, that was not consulted with the victims’ families and which will not resolve a thing,” Maricela Ortiz, spokeswoman for the non-governmental group Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (Bring Our Daughters Home), told IPS.


Some 400 federal police agents arrived in Ciudad Juárez on Tuesday to patrol, alongside local police, the most conflictive districts of the city. Meanwhile, experts from the national government’s security apparatus took control of the investigations of the deaths of the women, most of whom were raped before they were murdered.

Furthermore, the Fox administration announced that it had requested collaboration from U.S. police to ensure that the enquiry proceeds with the maximum possible efficiency and information.

But Ortiz says the Mexican government’s plan for Ciudad Juárez was implemented without input from civil society organisations involved in the matter, or from the victims’ relatives, who are the ones most anxious to clear up the murders.

The official programme is based on a “centralist” approach in defining strategies. “We do not approve nor do we trust the intervention decided by the Fox government,” stressed the activist.

Alejandro Gertz, Secretary of Federal Public Security, assures that the results coming out of the government’s intervention in Ciudad Juárez will be monitored by citizen groups, a mechanism that Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa had not heard of.

The initiative has begun now that the Fox administration and the Chihuahua state government have overcome their differences as to how to handle the investigations.

The broad-based effort focuses on achieving justice, but includes the promotion of social development and of human rights – women’s rights in particular.

New public telephones for emergencies will be installed and new public transport routes will be drawn up to maximise individual safety.

Many of the 300 victims have disappeared on the way to or from work at Ciudad Juárez’s many maquiladoras (tax-free manufacturers producing for-export goods), 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.

Under the new programme, state funding is to be increased for education and health and to combat intrafamily violence.

But human rights groups and associations of victims’ families maintain a deep distrust in this latest phase in the Ciudad Juárez murder investigations.

“We are dismayed at the level of the federal authorities lack of comprehension of the situation in Ciudad Juárez,” says Alfredo Limas, of the No Violence Network.

The official presentation of the federal government’s programme, which took place in a ceremony to which neither the Network nor Nuestras Hijas were invited, “was a bad joke,” said Limas.

The murders of women in this city, across the border from the U.S. city of El Paso, Texas, have been such a constant that human rights groups have dubbed it “the femicide capital” of Mexico.

The vast majority of the women murdered have been between ages 15 and 30.

The pattern that has emerged is that nearly all of the victims were stabbed with knives, tortured and raped, and their bodies left in the city outskirts or in abandoned lots. In some cases they have been burned, and many apparently have had their nipples bitten off.

The most recent victims in this long series of murders in Ciudad Juárez were three women and a girl, whose bodies were found in February.

The three women, ages 17 or 18, had evidently been raped, while the girl, a five-year-old, had been stabbed in the heart, according to the forensic experts involved in the investigation.

Several people have been arrested in relation to these cases, but the gruesome murders continue. Of those taken into custody, only one, the Egyptian-born Abdel Latif Sharif, has been sentenced to prison. He is serving 20 years for the murders of five young women.

Human rights groups say the lack of results in the investigations aimed at clearing up the hundreds of murders is due to the inertia and corruption of the local police.

Some of the theories about the motives behind the murders suggest that the women may be targeted for use in satanic rituals, pornography or even “snuff” films. And there are at least 14 cases that apparently involved the removal of internal organs, suggesting a possible motive of human organ trafficking for transplants.

The governmental but independent National Commission on Human Rights says federal intervention in Ciudad Juárez murder investigations has come too late.

And Miguel Granados, columnist for the influential newspaper Reforma wrote: “Even though it is a case of better late than never, one cannot help but lament the delay in coordinating action to confront the complicated phenomenon that has become known as the dead women of Juárez.”

Until recently, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office argued that the murders did not follow a pattern and that there was no evidence of a national-level crime ring being involved, therefore the investigations should remain in the hands of Chihuahua police.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has an open file on the Juárez murders, and has been preparing report on the matter.

The Commission’s special rapporteur Marta Altolaguirre visited Ciudad Juárez in 2001 to learn firsthand about the killings. She said she came away shocked by the brutality of the hundreds of murders that had taken place over the past decade.

“We don’t trust the government because it took so long to respond to our demands and because it designed its programme without consulting the people of Juárez. But if this approach works, if they arrest the murderers, we will applaud them. Because that is what we have wanted all along,” said Ortiz.

 
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MEXICO: Gov’t Finally Steps In to Investigate Juarez Murders

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Jul 23 2003 (IPS) - Mexico’s federal government has taken control of the police in Ciudad Juárez to investigate the approximately 300 cases of women brutally murdered over the past decade, an ongoing series of killings that has earned this northern border city the nickname "femicide capital".
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