Another Woman Murdered in Juarez

ANOTHER WOMEN FOUND DEAD

Another woman has been found dead in the area of Ciudad Juarez, in the Mexican State of Chihuahua, along the border with the US. At least 300 women have been abducted and killed in the area since 1993. Hundreds are also missing.

Were they to occur in an American city, the serial murders of women in Juarez, Mexico, would be the crime of the century, assigned to teams of reporters coming at the murders from every angle. But because they happen in a Mexican border city, just across the sluggish Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, they are seen from the U.S. as a ghoulish curiosity.

The exception is the El Paso Times whose reporter Diana Washington Valdez has a new book on the killings. In it, she offers a widely circulated, though hushed, theory of why the authorities have failed to arrest the real suspects. She alleges that some of the murderers are young members of prominent Juarez families who have ties to the Juarez drug cartel and buy protection from the police. They are called Los Juniors.

“The best information we have is that these men are committing crimes simply for the sport of it. We know of girls who’ve told stories about escaping from certain parties — orgies — at which some of these people were present,” she says. “The Mexican federal investigators have enough information to put people in jail now. I know that.”

“Mexican federal investigations contain accounts of officials and other persons who facilitated orgies where they abused women whose bodies were found afterwards. The investigators say that some of the people also participated in the murders,” she wrote, in an excerpt of her book published last October in the Mexico City daily La Jornada. She named fourteen people, many from prominent families, who “could have known of the crimes or are involved.” She also wrote that “police corruption at all levels” and involvement by the cartel are critical to explaining the continuation of the murders. She asserted that certain Mexican state and federal investigators wanted to pursue promising leads but were blocked by supervisors because “rich and powerful people were involved.” Sources: Columbia Journalism Review, MISNA

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