Femicide On the Rise in Latin America

[American Dream]

http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3142

Femicide On the Rise in Latin America

Kent Paterson | March 8, 2006



On the eve of International Women's Day 2006, a delegation of Latin American women made a historic journey to Washington, DC. Rather than celebrating the gains women have made through their many struggles, the group arrived at the headquarters of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States with an alarming message: femicide, the murder of women, is spreading.

“(Femicide) is not only present in Ciudad Juarez and most of Mexico, it's a regional problem,” warns Marimar Monroy, a representative of the non-governmental Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights and one of the delegates to the IACHR.

Joined by grassroots delegates from Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, and other nations, Monroy presented a report to the IACHR commissioners that sketched widespread violence against women from multiple causes, rampant failures in the procurement of justice for victims and relatives, the prevalence of impunity, and the absence of standard statistical gathering and record-keeping methods to document gender violence. Monroy and her Latin American colleagues delivered their femicide report as one piece of a campaign aimed at making “the problem more visible in the region.”

Incomplete murder rates cited in the NGO report mention 373 murders of women in Bolivia from 2003 to 2004, 143 in Peru during 2003, and more than 2,000 in Guatemala. In Colombia , a woman is reportedly killed every 6 days by her partner or ex-partner. Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City , Mexico , two cities where the femicide trend was first widely noticed, have suffered the murder of more than 500 women from multiple causes since 1993, according to press and other sources. Dozens more remain missing.

Latin American women's organizations contend that member nations of the Organization of American States are in widespread violation of international treaties and declarations that protect the rights of women , including the American Convention on Human Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Belem do Para Convention, and others. Appealing to the IACHR to follow-up on previous recommendations the human rights institution has made about eradicating femicide, delegation representatives considered the Washington hearing a positive step.

“Given the kinds of questions (from the commissioners) it opened a door to initiating a process with the participation of civil society,” said Adriana Beltran of the non-profit Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), which facilitated the delegation's U.S. visit. The IACHR conducted previous trips to Ciudad Juarez in 2002 and Guatemala in 2004 to investigate the femicides. Additionally, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women Yakin Ertuk traveled to Guatemala in 2004.
Femicide—a Form of Gender Violence

The Mexican Commission's Monroy says a broad debate exists about the definition of femicide, which in her analysis is “gender violence,”—violence specifically directed against a person because she is female. Femicide in Latin America first became a major issue in 1993 after women's activists in Ciudad Juarez raised protests about a growing number of unidentified women discovered raped, tortured, and murdered on the outskirts of this Mexican border city.

A sampling of recent cases reveals how the murder of women has become gruesomely routine in other parts of Mexico as well. In the month of February 2006 alone, Nora Rocio Ruiz, a 16-year-old Internet cafe employee, was found tortured and murdered close to a garbage dump near the drug-infested town of Uruapan , Michoacan. Eighteen-year-old Daniela Martinez, an indigenous Nahua high school student and domestic worker in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, was found shot to death and partially burned on the city's outskirts. Martinez had been holding down a second job at a stationery store and was described as a hard-working student who had dreams of emigrating to the United States . Meanwhile, hundreds of mile north of Guerrero, 17-year-old Fabiola Cuevas Coral was found raped and strangled near Cuauhtémoc , Chihuahua .
Guatemala: Ciudad Juarez South

Angelica Gonzalez, a member of Guatemala's Network to Oppose Violence against Women, says more than 2,400 women have been murdered in Guatemala since the year 2000. Killings have occurred throughout the Central American nation, with most concentrated in and around Guatemala City, Escuintla, and San Marcos, a department bordering Mexico. Despite the establishment of a special prosecutor's office for women's homicides, statistics compiled by WOLA indicate the slaughter is worsening. According to Adriana Beltran, more than 300 women were murdered in 2003, 527 in 2004, and 624 in 2005. Often portrayed in the press as faceless statistics, the victims had names and lives like Claudia Isabel Velazquez, a 19-year-old law student raped and shot to death, or 15-year-old Maria Isabel, a retail shop employee who was found raped with her hands and feet bound together with barbed wire.

A 2005 report by Amnesty International listed housewives, professionals, students, domestic employees, unskilled workers, sex workers, former and current street gang members, and migrants from other countries as among the victims. The human rights group cited class as another common denominator of the femicides. Most of the victims were very young and poor , and many were horribly tortured before their deaths. Like Ciudad Juarez , Gonzalez says sexual aggression, the mutilation of body parts like breasts, torture, and the dumping of victims in empty lots are trademarks of the killings. The cutting of women's skin is a common trait in many crimes throughout the hemisphere, according to Gonzalez. In Guatemala, firearms, knives, and strangulation are the most common methods of killing women, she adds.

Other similarities stand out between the situations in Ciudad Juarez and Guatemala. Amnesty International highlights foot-dragging, poorly-protected evidence scenes, ignoring concrete leads, and failing to gather forensic evidence as characterizing the police investigations. Many crimes have been pinned on the Mara street gangs, but Gonzalez says the real perpetrators aren't always readily identified. The women's advocate criticizes investigators for frequently focusing their probes on family members of victims rather than examining the bigger picture. “There's no clear information about the victimizers of women,” Gonzalez says. Similar to Mexico , police are suspected as being the authors of more than one killing in Guatemala . Only 15 sentences have been handed down for the more than 2,000 murders in Guatemala during the last six years, Gonzalez adds.
The Wars Against Women

The roots of the present gender crimes in Guatemala can be traced back to the civil war that ended in 1996 with a peace agreement between the Guatemalan government and opposition guerrilla groups. A report by the Roman Catholic Church's Project for the Recuperation of Historical Memory said one-fourth of the 200,000 people who disappeared during the conflict were women. As in the former Yugoslavia and the Darfur region of Sudan , government soldiers and pro-government paramilitary groups committed widespread human rights violations against women. “Rape and sexual violence were an integral part of the counterinsurgency strategy,” the church concluded. The present crimes reflect this pattern of hatred and domination of women .

Similar patterns have been observed in Colombia, Peru, and Chiapas, Mexico. In Colombia , suspected right-wing paramilitaries working with the Colombian military raped 16-year-old Omaira Fernandez and tore her unborn child from her womb before tossing the bodies of the teenager and baby into a river in 2003. In Peru , the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission identified rape as a form of torture during the 1980-2000 armed conflict.

In Guatemala violence against women continued in the years after the war ended, a period when international drug cartels and Mexican transnational corporations moved into the country. After a 2004 visit, the IACHR's Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women said there were indications that some women were being killed by organized criminal bands intent on carving up national territory into zones of influence. Young women who were in a gang's territory and rejected the passes of gang members were at risk, as well as those who resided in rival territory and were sometimes killed and exhibited in a lurid manner to send a “message.”

One former female gang member told Amnesty International: “Such murders can be used to show which gang has the most power. The one that does the most brutal things has the most power—all the more so if nothing happens to them as a result.”

Killing women as a means of projecting power is also evident in the neighboring nations of El Salvador and Honduras, where defiant messages and challenges to politicians have been found scrawled next to murdered (sometimes mutilated) women. South American anthropologist Rita Laura Segato, who has studied underworld sub-cultures, has pointed to the possibility of mafia blood pacts and territorial claims as features of some of the Ciudad Juarez killings.
A Transnational, Parallel State

In a globalized world, femicide is not just a local horror. The social, economic, and political forces transforming the globe and expelling populations across borders likewise put their stamp on the killing of women. Femicides flourish in areas experiencing social upheavals marked by previous or current armed conflicts, violent rivalries between internationally organized criminal groups, the displacement of old economies in favor of new—often illicit—ones, and the corruption and weakening of traditional forms of state power.

At the same time, killers now frequently jump borders. Jose Manuel Torres Yake, a Peruvian national, was arrested in Hiroshima , Japan , last year for raping and murdering a 6-year-old girl. The suspect had a previous criminal record in Peru for raping two other minors.

The assorted, possible transnational paths of femicide are mind-boggling. In recent comments, Alicia Perez Duarte, the newly-appointed federal special prosecutor for women's homicides in Mexico , departed from previous denials by the Chihuahua Office of the State Attorney General and her own agency, the Office of the Federal Attorney General, that organized crime and drug traffickers were not involved in the Ciudad Juarez rape murders. Perez links the murders to the rise of the Carrillo Fuentes drug cartel in 1993, even though evidence exists that the murders began somewhat earlier. The Mexican special prosecutor does not discount a possible link between the Ciudad Juarez murders and international money-laundering, prostitution, pornographic and pedophile rings that use modeling agencies, Internet cafes, and computer education schools as covers.

According to Perez, coincidences exist in the modus operandi of a ring exposed two years ago in Ciudad Juarez that recruited teenagers for sex with prominent businessmen and the international network of pedophiles involving Jean Succar Kuri, the Cancun businessman detained in Arizona. Perez recently said it's within these circles that murder victims “presumably met those who killed them.” Perez added, “There you have the leads. The forms are very similar in the state of Mexico , in Ciudad Juarez , in Cancun , in Tapachula.”

Spanning the globe from Asia to Europe to the Americas, the economic clout of human and sex trafficking networks is estimated by some observers to be only surpassed by illegal drug and arms trading. Latin America is a hot spot in the international sex economy. Recent pedophile investigations in Germany and Spain, for example, traced back to Guatemala where pornographic videos featuring children as young as three years old engaging in sexual acts were produced. Earlier this year, a scandal erupted in the Guatemalan town of Jutiapa bordering El Salvador when a pedophile ring was exposed. Suspects, including the son of an official of the Guatemalan Justice Ministry, were accused of using a high school to recruit 15 youth aged 11 to 16 to act in porn flicks. As in Ciudad Juarez , family members of the youths were threatened after pressing legal action.

In the view of Adriana Beltran, the power of organized criminal groups and the persistence of femicide serve to undermine the democratic transition Guatemala was supposed to experience after the peace accords. In former military dictatorships like Guatemala where civilian government institutions are still fragile, the security threats posed by organized criminal bands and their impunity are paradoxically reviving the former national security state apparatus as the military is being drawn into law enforcement. Beltran believes that this is a temptation that should be resisted at all costs. “We strongly believe that the lines between police and military should be kept separate, especially in countries that had armed conflicts,” she says.

The WOLA is supporting proposals to convene an international commission to investigate clandestine armed groups that grew out of the civil war years, and focus attention on the root causes of rapidly-proliferating organized crime.
Internationalizing the Anti-Femicide Movement

While the bad news is that femicide seems to be spreading throughout the hemisphere, the good news is that growing movements are emerging to counter the violent tide. In Chilpancingo, Guerrero, students of Daniela Martinez's high school demand justice in their slain friend's case. Another movement is being organized around the brutal December slaying of high school student Sara Benazir in Tijuana , linking activists in the Mexican border city with activists in San Francisco , California .

Meanwhile, the pro-Juarez women's movement has gone global. In Holland, activists outraged by the lack of progress in the 1998 Ciudad Juarez murder of Dutch citizen Hestor Van Nierop and other women are organizing to pressure the transnational electronics company Philips, which has maquiladora plants in the border city, to push for action, and has targeted the human rights clause of the free trade agreement signed between Mexico and the European Union as a pressure point for demanding an end to impunity. A growing roster of international celebrities including Jane Fonda, Salma Hayek, Joan Manuel Serrat, and the Mexican rock group Jaguares, among others, are giving mass exposure to the issue of femicide.

In the United States, the Mexico Solidarity Network and the Washington Office on Latin America are organizing tours and speaking engagements to educate the public about femicide in Mexico and Guatemala. Last year, U.S. Congressional briefings about the Guatemalan femicide attended by Democratic representatives Hilda Solis and Barbara Lee were held on Capitol Hill. “We're trying to raise the level of awareness, of concern,” says the WOLA's Beltran. “There is increasing concern from members of Congress about the situation,” she says. “Ciudad Juarez sparked interest … this is a situation that affects not only Ciudad Juarez.”

Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist based in Albuquerque, NM, and a frequent contributor to the IRC Americas Program (online at www.americaspolicy.org).


For More Information

Related IRC Americas Program Articles:

Pedophilia and Repression of the Press in Mexico: The Power of Corruption and the Corruption of Power
By Laura Carlsen
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3132

Women's Rights Eroding in Latin America
By Laura Carlsen
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/797

Organizations:

Mexican Commission for the Protection and Defense of Human Rights
Voice: 011-52-55-5564-2582 or 5564-2592
e-mail: denuncia@cmdpdh.org
website: www.cmdpdh.org

Center for Legal Action on Human Rights/Network to Oppose Violence against Women (Guatemala)
voice: 011-502-2251-0555
website: www.cald.org

Washington Office on Latin America (United States)
voice: 202-797-2171
e-mail: abeltran@wola.org or kmucino@wola.org
website: www.wola.org

Mexico Solidarity Network (United States)
voice: 773-583-7728
e-mail: msn@mexicosolidarity.org
website: www.mexicosolidarity.org

Amigos de las Mujeres (New Mexico)
website: www.amigosdelasmujeres.org

Nuestras Hijas a Regreso de Casa (Ciudad Juarez)
website: www.mujeresdejuarez.org
e-mails: nuestrashijas@yahoo.com.mx, marixxela@hotmail.com, malu9596@yahoo.com.mx

Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas (Chihuahua City)
voice: 011-52-614-419-3401
website: http://espanol.geocities.com/justhijas/
e-mail: almagomez@ch.cablemas.com

Amnesty International
voice: 44-20-741-35500
website: www.amnesty.org

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
website: www.iachr.org

Spanish-language media with regular coverage of femicides:

www.cimacnoticias.com (Includes special section on Ciudad Juarez and regular reports on Guatemala)

www.jornada.unam.mx

www.nortedeciudadjuarez.com (femicide section)

[jingofever]

New dark mystery hangs over Juárez

2 dozen teenage girls and young women have vanished without a trace in past 18 months.

By Ken Ellingwood
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Sunday, August 09, 2009

JUREZ, Chihuahua — Monica Alanis, an 18-year-old college freshman, never came home from her exams. That was four months ago.

Across town, 17-year-old Brenda Ponce didn't return from a job-hunting trip downtown. That was a year ago.

Hilda Rivas, 16, also last was spotted downtown. That was 17 months ago.

Two dozen teenage girls and young women have disappeared in this violent border city, across from El Paso, in the past year and a half, stirring dark memories of the killings of hundreds of women that made Juárez infamous a decade ago.

The disappearances, which include two university students and girls as young as 13, have some crime-novel touches: mysterious dropped calls, messages left by third parties and unsubstantiated reports of the women being kept at a house.

There is no clear evidence of wrongdoing or links among the cases, which have been overshadowed by a vicious drug war that has killed more than 2,500 people in Juárez since the start of 2008. But the young women's relatives say it is highly unlikely that they would have left on their own.

Alanis' parents say she was seldom late returning from school. That day in March, Olga Esparza says she called her daughter to find out why she was three hours late. Monica reassured her, "I'll be home later."

Desperate family members have hung missing person banners and taped fliers to telephone poles throughout the city in the hope of getting leads on the whereabouts of loved ones.

They've checked hospitals and combed dusty canyons on the fringes of the city. They've badgered state investigators but complain that authorities have no solid leads to explain why so many young women would drop from view at once.

"There is no theory. There is no hypothesis," said Ricardo Alanis, Alanis' father. "They don't have anything concrete after four months."

The vacuum has prompted parents to envision their own disturbing story lines. Several say they believe their daughters have been seized and forced into prostitution, perhaps in the United States, by the criminal bands that have turned Juárez into the bloodiest front in Mexico's drug war.

"She's in the hands of those people. I don't know who they are or where they are," said Aiben Rivas, a carpenter and father of Hilda.

Relatives and activists see common threads in the cases. Most of the young women were last seen downtown, a scruffy but bustling precinct of discount clothing stores, cheap eats and bars. Four of the missing teens are named Brenda.

Their general profile looks different from that of the more than 350 women killed during a 15-year stretch from 1993. Many of those victims worked in the city's assembly plants and came from other parts of Mexico. Their bodies turned up, often with signs of sexual abuse and torture, in bare lots and gullies.

Despite some arrests and the creation of a special prosecutor's office, those slayings remain largely unsolved.

By contrast the women and girls missing now are mostly local residents from stable, middle- and working-class homes.

"They are not only from the poorest families," said Marisela Ortiz, who directs a group representing families of the slain women that is now working with the families of those who have disappeared recently. "The characteristics have changed."

And this time there are no bodies.

Loved ones say they believe the young women are alive.

"God willing, someday I'll see her again," said Yolanda Saenz, Brenda Ponce's mother. The teen went downtown July 22, 2008, to look for a retail job to help pay for dental braces and school expenses, her mother said.

"I just want to know what happened to her so I can find peace," Saenz said.

Some families say they've gotten possible clues. Saenz said that even after a year, calls to Brenda's cell phone go to voice mail, implying that her account is still active.

Alanis' parents said someone hung up after calling their home last month from a number in the Tijuana area, where they don't know anyone. They said a friend of their daughter got a hang-up call from a number in Chihuahua, the state capital.

Sergio Sarmiento, whose cousin, Adriana Sarmiento, was 15 when she went missing last year, said the family got a phone call from a man saying she was fine and had left on her own.

"I don't believe it," said Sarmiento, a bus driver. He said that since the disappearance, the girl's mother has fled across the border to El Paso with another daughter, who is 18.

"I want to be an optimist," he said.

After Adriana disappeared in January 2008, loved ones went around tacking up posters. But competition with other missing-person fliers grew as the disappearances mounted.

"They got covered with other ones," Sarmiento said of the fliers. "Unfortunately, she wasn't the last one."

[American Dream]

Content May Be Triggering...

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2009/10/107897.html

Pandemic of Femicidal Sexism: Raped to Death

Wake up to Kaibil/US rape/disemboweling

By swaneagle harijan


Pandemic of brutal rape could be traced to US special forces training of Kaibiles who also have been hired as UN Peacekeepers in the Congo as well as training the Zetas in Mexico's cartel slaughter. Sexism in our communities emanates outward to reinforce the lack of effective action in stopping atrocites targeting women, pregnant mothers, girls and babies. This facet of so called "war" illustrates the femicidal and genocidal nature of corporate/US backed killers. We MUST stop it.
:

The following is a careful combination of many years of research documentation, first hand conversations and my lifelong struggle to find equality as a survivor of rape, battering, marginalization and harassment simply because i am a poverty level woman. I am devoting my life to righting this egregious wrong. The survival of all humanity depends on it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pandemic of Femicidal Sexism: Raped to Death

I woke up at 1:37 am a few weeks ago thinking it was after 7 am and my daughter was late for the bus to the Community College she now attends. She was annoyed to say the least when she checked her phone for the time. O well. Went back to bed, but was sleepless til dawn.

It is at times like this that i hear deeply disturbing reports on the radio that plays a spectrum of reports from European, Australian and Russian news services. Increasingly, i am disgusted with the senseless trivia, but i heard a report that has furthered my resolve to find ways of protecting women and girls by stopping the growing plague of rape, battering and murder.

Women who are fleeing Darfur into Chad's refugee camps are being systematically raped by soldiers as well as Aid Workers who are supposed to be protecting them. What kind of multi layered nightmare is this?!

http://www.canada.com/news/story.html?id=2048469

All the women, "100 percent", and girls fleeing have endured some level of sexual assault according to some reports in my searches. From babies to the elderly, no girl or woman is safe. The horror....

The so called UN Peacekeepers do nothing as it is "not their job", tho i have read (a report by Eve Ensler) that UN Peacekeepers have been facilitating the mass rapes in the Congo. Not only that, but former death squads from Guatemala, the "Kaibiles", US Special Forces trained commandos, have been hired as UN Peacekeepers in the Congo, site of some of the most massive and brutal rapes known. Recently reported are the ripping out of fetuses from the mother's womb. Such levels of horror have no archaeological precedent until the influence of US trained military forces in Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. I dare to venture that we can trace such behavior straight back to the US Marine Special Forces trained Kaibiles.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/un-offcial- ... -h15s.html

The Kaibiles were notorious for their disemboweling of pregnant Guatemalan Indigenous women and mutilating the fetuses as well as carrying out massacres.

http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/glo ... biles.html

When the massacre of 45 Mayans in Acteal, Chiapas occurred on December 22, 1997, reports from the Zapatista communiques, said the disembowelment of 5 pregnant Mayan women and their fetuses pulled out and hacked up indicated the presence of Kaibiles. Reports vary from 4 to 6 pregnant women being horrifically murdered in this way.

From the Acteal Massacre to the Merida Initiative
http://uppingtheanti.org/node/3077

http://books.google.com/books?id=TWO_77 ... as&f=false

Recently, the killers jailed for the Acteal massacre were released causing a renewed level of fear and anxiety among the people.

http://www.christiannewstoday.com/Chris ... t_309.html

http://www.counterpunch.org/ross08242009.html

So when i endure first hand sexism in my own life, it is no surprise that it is minimized, denied and swept under the rug of dominance. All too often the brutal massacres of women elsewhere are a result of US military training. As most who pay attention realize, thousands of US women in the military have been sexually harassed and raped by fellow male soldiers. Some return home only to be murdered by their soldier husbands. Then we have even more wives not in the service killed by their husbands returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.ph ... e&sid=5621

Since i first encountered oppression as a child, i resisted it with little success. As an American woman, a single mother who never married, i have known a life time of oppression, poverty and struggle. Tho i am educated and articulate, i lack the credentials essential for high paying work. I never felt drawn to the ways of the dominant society choosing instead to be part of the "back to the land" movement of the late 60's and early 70's. It was in this setting that i became a conscious feminist with the reading of Susan Brownmiller, Kate Millet, Phyllis Chesler and many more. I volunteered answering the emergency call-in line for battered women and my home became a safe place. Once some men in my neighborhood heard, i was called a "dyke" and a "witch". It was women neighbors and friends who came to my house with broken bones, clothes torn off or escaping verbal abuse. I was astounded as only 2 women i did not know sought sanctuary in my
home. My friends surpassed that number easily.

As i entered fully into the realm of nonviolent activism, i found even more danger lurking there. Once i began speaking out against rape of activist women by activist men, i received my first death threats. For some reason, to this day, women who have been raped, battered, stalked or harassed open up to me with their horror stories. Consequently, i have become a chronicler of these sad tales and an advocate for change. It is not a cherished calling to say the least. I have been vilified, called a "character assassin", suffered as much for my resistance and support to victims as i have in my own experiences with being raped and battered. This is such a perfect display of the insanity of the society that continues dominating the earth and her peoples with deadly consequences. So bleak.

Living in northwestern Washington places me in the Bermuda Triangle of femicide illustrated by the mass killings of women in Spokane by Robert Yates(as many as 18), along the Green River south of Seattle by Gary Ridgeway (as many as 50)and Robert Picton (as many as 49) who lived on his pig farm outside Vancouver, B.C. with women he killed buried around him. Then there are the murders of over 500 Indigenous women in western Canada from Alberta to the "Highway of Tears" north of Vancouver. But the little progress among citizens in addressing the daily groundwork laid by sexism is ignored on a scale i never would have imagined when i first entered the realm of women's advocate over 30 years ago. From the degrading American Apparel ads on the back cover of "The Stranger", which is also filled with ads portraying women as marketable booty and nothing more, to the fog filled outlook of young women tainted by the mass media normalization and glamorization of strippers, prostitutes and sluts as something to look up to, i see a backslide into the dark ages of women as chattel beyond anything i could have ever foreseen in the late 70's. How i naive i was.

In 2004, i drove Ramona Morales, the mother of a murdered 16 year old woman, Sylvia Elena Morales, on a 12 city west coast speaking tour as she spoke about the mass killings of young women in Ciudad Juarez that also took her daughter. Amnesty International puts the number of murdered women at over 800. This level of femicide is surpassed in Guatemala where the number is well over 3000. Similarly to Juarez, the women are often tortured and raped for days before being killed. Such crazed behavior is spreading throughout the world. I could go on and on. Everywhere i look, such killings are pandemic.

Earlier this year, a mass grave was found on a mesa outside Albuquerque of 13 women's bodies. The police have disregarded the rights of these women and their families by trivializing their deaths due to so-called criminal involvement with drugs and prostitution. Seems that a desperately poor woman has no recourse anywhere, not even when murdered. These killings have also been tied to those of Juarez, but will anyone ever know truly who is carrying out this holocaust? Not one true killer has ever been apprehended in Juarez or...New Mexico.

http://newmexicoindependent.com/tag/alb ... ial-killer

As i scrub floors, prune shrubs and cook to earn a living so my youngest can finish high school and continue with college, i think of how to address these atrocities effectively. When i have a moment free, i do all i can to educate those who might care about what i see and learn regularly. Many weeks and months go by these days before i am able to write. My life is one of constant drudgery. As i approach 60, i wonder if i will be able to do any good on this earth for the coming generations. It seems so overwhelming, isolating, lonely, frightening and dangerous to be simply a woman and even worse, a woman with a big mouth.

I will devote all my remaining life to addressing the horror faced by women globally in the context of demanding "NO MORE WAR ANYWHERE EVER AGAIN!!!"



By swaneagle harijan
frontlinemom@yahoo.com

[elfismiles]

Just last night I re-uploaded the archive of a radioshow I did with my good friend Robert Larson and playwright J.P. Smith (who did a 3 act play called AMONG THE SAND AND SMOG about the subject) talking about this horrific ongoing tragedy in Juarez and along the border.

Ciudad Juarez Murder Mystery on Out The Rabbit Hole
Monday, April 24, 2006



J. Jimenez-Smith, author of "Among the Sand and Smog" on
OUT THE RABBIT HOLE on KUCI Radio

J. Jimenez-Smith (pen-name of J.P. Smith) was interviewed concerning the creation and production of his latest work titled "Among the Sand and Smog" which examines the mysterious tragedy of over 400 missing and murdered young women in Ciudad Juarez and how it has affected that community. The play has garnered rave reviews and emotional responses from audiences in Texas.

Austin parapolitical researcher, informationalist, and gonzo alternative-media proprietor SMiles Lewis will also join in the discussion.

Listen to the Archived Show
http://www.elfis.net/media/OTRH060421.mp3

http://www.outtherabbithole.com/2006/04 ... bbit-hole/

And as I've mentioned before, at that time I collected various threads of this tragic mystery here in wiki form:

http://wiki.anomalytv.com/tavi/index.php?page=Ju%3Frez+Murder+Mystery+Research

[American Dream]

http://www.ww4report.com/node/7976

WOMEN IN BLACK MARCH ON CIUDAD JUAREZ

from Frontera NorteSur



A caravan aimed at upholding women's rights and stopping violence against women in Ciudad Juárez and Mexico is headed to the US border. Organized by Women in Black along with other women's and human rights organizations, the caravan set off from Mexico City on November 10.

Prominent Chihuahua City women's activist Irma Campos Madrigal spoke to about 100 people gathered in the Mexican capital as the "Exodus for the Life of Women" prepared to embark on its journey.

"The great distance between Mexico City and the old Paso del Norte is shorter than the breadth of impunity," Campos said, "but never greater than the demand for justice for women murdered in the city in which el Benemérito de las Américas [Mexican liberation hero Benito Juárez], present here today, and the secular Republic, found refuge in during the 19th century."

The Exodus for the Life of Women promotes a 10-point program which calls for finding missing women and clearing up murders, defending sexual and reproductive rights, advancing gender equality in the political system, demilitarizing the country, and ending military impunity in human rights violations against civilians. Women in Black and its allies are urging local legislatures in the states they pass through to codify femicide as a crime.

On the long road north, the caravan has stopped in several cities to hold public protests and document violence against women.

In the central Mexican city of Queretaro, caravan participants were present in a demonstration demanding justice for Maria Fernanda Loranca Aguilar, a 17-year-old local university student who was found murdered with signs of sexual violence in late October. At the Autonomous University of Queretaro, the caravaneers painted a mural that included the names of Ciudad Juárez femicide victims.

Reached briefly while marching near the border of San Luis Potosí and Aguascalientes, Chihuahua human rights lawyer Luz Castro told Frontera NorteSur the caravan would reach Ciudad Juárez on November 23, two days prior to the celebration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. In Ciudad Juárez, caravan organizers planned to deliver a big bell constructed from keys collected over the years in memory of femicide victims, Castro said.

In Aguascalientes, the marchers faced down local police reluctant to allow the bell onto a section of the city's main square, the Plaza Patria. Gathered in the city which was the scene of Mexico's historic 1917 Constitutional Convention, mothers of murdered and disappeared women recounted their suffering and struggles.

"There is a lot of pain on this road," said Norma Ledezma, mother of 16-year-old Paloma Angelica Escobar, murdered in Chihuahua City back in March 2003. "It is very tiresome, and our strength is extinguished," Ledezma said. "Nonetheless, the position of a mother is that I am going to struggle until the end of my life to find the murderers of my daughter."

Eva Arce, mother of Silvia Arce, who disappeared in Ciudad Juárez in 1998, also delivered a message of persistence and resistance. Arce pledged that the mothers on the caravan will aid all mothers of victims in the states visited by the caravan.

Surrounded by wooden pink crosses assembled on Plaza Patria, other speakers addressed violence against women in Aguascalientes. As if delivering a huge wake-up call to Mexico and the world, the bell lugged by the caravan rang out after each presentation. The event concluded with the singing of "Ni Una Mas," the anthem of the Mexican anti-femicide movement.

As it nears the borderlands, the caravan retraces the route of a similar event in 2002, when Women in Black and others traveled from Chihuahua City to Ciudad Juárez in protest of the femicide. Now, more than seven years and hundreds of murders later, most crimes remain unpunished and the killing of women in Ciudad Juárez is at an all-time high.

The Exodus for the Life of Women coincides with a flurry of activity around the Mexico femicides on the international front. At a meeting in Washington, D.C. earlier this month, representatives of Mexican human rights groups requested that the Organization of American States' Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) once again send an investigator to Ciudad Juárez.

In 2002, the IACHR visited Ciudad Juárez and issued a series of recommendations to the Mexican government.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the European Parliament is expected to review any progress that has been made since the elected body passed a resolution two years ago calling on governments in Mexico and Central America to protect women from violence and sanction the perpetrators of femicide.

Also in November, all eyes are on Costa Rica, where the Inter-American Court for Human Rights could render a historic decision holding the Mexican state accountable for the slayings of Esmeralda Herrera Monreal, Laura Berenice Ramos Monarrez and Claudia Ivette Gonzalez. The three young women were found murdered in a Ciudad Juárez cotton field in 2001.

A recent report from Mexico's National Human Rights Commission claimed that the three levels of the Mexican government [federal, state, municipal] spent tens of millions of dollars from 1993 to April 2009 in response to the women's homicides. According to the federal agency, the money went for special prosecutors, new institutions and related expenses.

Despite the alphabet soup of agencies brought into the field, women's homicides have broken all records in Ciudad Juarez this year. Through mid-November, more than 120 women were reported slain in the violence-battered city. Unlike previous years, when gender and domestic violence were clear motives in numerous killings, most of the crimes this year appear to be connected to the ongoing narco-war between rival cartels.

However, gender violence and gangland rivalries could be merging in an increasingly sadistic synergy. In mid-November, for example, two young women said to be in their late teens or early twenties were reportedly tortured and possibly sexually assaulted before being dragged outside of a house in the Senderos de San Isidro neighborhood where a party had been underway and then set on fire. The house in which the party was held was then torched in the fashionable style of warring gangs.

Because of indications of sex-related violence, the case was turned over to the women's homicide prosecutor. Earlier, in October, the body of a beheaded woman was found on a Ciudad Juárez street. Four execution-style slayings of young women also bloodied Chihuahua City in November.

Differing statistics from Mexico's National Defense Ministry and the Office of the Federal Attorney General report that somewhere between 3,726 and more than 4,000 women were slain in all of Mexico from December 2006 to October 2009. Domestic violence was blamed for the vast majority of the killings, but there was a clear trend of organized criminal activity as the culprit of crimes.

Some officials even attributed murders to human traffickers who killed victims resisting sexual exploitation. Mexican states registering the highest number of women's murders were Mexico, Baja California, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Tabasco, Veracruz, Chiapas, Jalisco, Tamaulipas, Michoacan, and Sinaloa, in that order.

Notably, because of smaller overall populations, violence against women was higher than average in the northern border states of Baja California, Chihuahua and Tamaulipas.

In a new book, Ciudad Juárez sociologist Julia Monarrez Fragoso explores the various causes and patterns of gender violence in her city. Among the roots of violence, Monarrez contends, are an industrialization based on existing gender and class discrimination, localized cultures of violence, drug trafficking and organized crime and, above all, the lack of rule of law.

According to Monarrez, "The demands for justice by relatives, by organized groups of women and feminists have not been heard by the State."

Commenting on the Exodus for the Life of Women, Chihuahua state legislator Victor Quintana wrote that Women in Black is attacking "apathetic attitudes, numbed consciences and normalized perceptions that the murders of women are something ordinary." The November 2009 caravan, Quintana added, proposes to shake up the nation and refocus its future on "a new reality built by all, women and men, of bountiful rights and of bountiful life."

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This article first appeared Nov. 16 on Frontera NorteSur.