Mothers of Ciudad Juarez Search for Missing Daughters EFE
go to original March 16, 2012

Covering their faces with white in a display of mourning, dozens of women protest the hundreds of unsolved murders and disappearances of females in the border city of Ciudad Juarez. (Borderland Beat)

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - Nearly two decades after the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez first gained notoriety for the slayings of young female factory workers, scenes of mothers searching the desert or the municipal morgue for their slain or kidnapped daughters remain commonplace.

The Juarez Valley, an arid area that is home to a stretch of rural towns on the city's outskirts, has become a clandestine cemetery for murdered women, with at least a dozen bodies found thus far this year.

On Feb. 7, agents with the Chihuahua state Attorney General's Office combed the area after an anonymous caller said human remains were found in the southwestern part of the town of San Ignacio, a small town in the Juarez Valley.

Authorities found the remains of four young women, some missing since 2010. Days later, the remains of another five females were found in different areas of the same town.

"Nine bodies have been found thus far in 2012, that is skeletal remains belonging to nine bodies; and there are three more probable bodies, but we're not sure if these are of young women also," AG's office spokesman Carlos Gonzalez said.

"Of these nine confirmed bodies, family members already have identified four. The rest remain unidentified," he added. In addition to those finds, another body also was found in recent hours.

Spanish journalist Javier Juarez - who for several years has covered the phenomenon of female homicides in Ciudad Juarez, located across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas - says kidnapping gangs targeting young women have chosen this region due the secretiveness of local residents.

"It's an area that's been controlled by drug traffickers. It's a very secretive and inaccessible place. In our investigations, we even found a safe house where kidnapped women were presumably held captive," Juarez told Efe.

According to Imelda Marrufo, coordinator of the Red Mesa de Mujeres, a network dedicated to supporting mothers whose daughters have been slain or gone missing in Ciudad Juarez, her organization "regrettably" could see this situation coming.

In the 1990s, Ciudad Juarez became notorious for the brutal murders of hundreds of teenage girls and young women, many of whose bodies have never been found.

Most of the victims were young women from poor families who worked in the assembly plants, known as "maquiladoras," that sprung up around the city to take advantage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Many were sexually assaulted before they died.

But some observers, including Juarez, say the current situation is even more dire in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's murder capital and a coveted drug-smuggling corridor being fought over by violent cartels.

Over the past four years, we've seen the disappearance of nearly 200 adolescents, according to our figures. Authorities give a much lower number, but between the parallel count by the families and ours, we're talking about between 160 and 200," the journalist said.

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