Ciudad Juárez: More than 2,000 women murdered in three decades (2024)

«My hope is to find you,» is written above photos of Ivonne and Iriana; a phone number for clues to their whereabouts is included below. The note is stuck to a lamp post next to the Paso del Norte border crossing into the United States. Between two barriers, a black wooden cross on a pink base has been erected: «Not one more! Justice for all victims of femicide,» it says. In front of it, vehicles with Texan license plates jam the central Avenida Benito Juárez.

Every day, Americans from the sister city of El Paso come over to receive affordable treatment in the city’s modern hospitals and to shop in its stores. El Paso, hidden behind high metal fences, is also the destination of hundreds of migrants seeking shade in the center of Juárez. The Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans and Hondurans have crossed the sweltering desert of northern Mexico on foot. They plan to attempt to cross the border illegally soon, maybe even tonight.

Only bone fragments were found of Esmeralda

Amid the hubbub, José Luis Castillo hangs up pink banners: «Don’t forget me,» accompanied by a photo of a chubby-cheeked girl with long black hair. On May 19, 2009, Esmeralda, then 14 years old, disappeared amid the crowded alleys of the city center. Since then, the small man with the sad eyes has been looking for his daughter.

In February, a letter from the authorities arrived, he tells us, informing him that Esmeralda would be officially declared dead and that the search would be stopped. He will not accept this, says the 62-year-old. For the authorities, a 10-centimeter bone fragment found in early 2013 is sufficient. The result of the DNA analysis came two years later, confirming that it was a fragment of Esmeralda’s right tibia. But that is not enough for her father. «A human body consists of more than 200 bones. Where’s the rest?»

Starting in 2008, bones that have so far been attributed to 25 women were found in Arroyo El Navajo, a dry riverbed in the desert southeast of Juárez. Esmeralda is the only victim from whom only a single bone fragment was found. Castillo and his helpers turned over every stone in a 10-kilometer radius. He says they found 66 human bones. But none from Esmeralda. Her body had been carried away by wild animals or washed away by rain, the authorities told him. Castillo is suspicious of it all.

It all started with two murdered girls

On Jan. 23, 1993, 13-year-old Alma Chavira Farel was found in Juárez. She had been abused and then strangled. Two days later, Angélica Luna Villalobos was found with an electric cable tied around her neck. The 16-year-old had been six months pregnant. The two murders are considered the beginning of the phenomenon of the «muertas de Juárez,» the dead women of Juárez. The cases started to pile up – but the authorities downplayed them, saying the victims were involved in drugs and prostitution. But when the bodies of eight women were found in a former cotton field in November 2001, the story went around the world.

In 2004, Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño published his novel «2666», in which he describes in detail a series of femicides in the fictional northern Mexican town of Santa Teresa. He prefaced the hard-to-digest work with a Baudelaire quote from the poem «Le Voyage» from «Les Fleurs du Mal»: «An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.»

With the arrival of migrant workers, poor neighborhoods are growing

It was clear to everyone here that Santa Teresa in «2666» was really Juárez, since that is the name of the border crossing to New Mexico, says journalist Marco Antonio López Romero. The violence in Juárez is part of his job: the deadly drug war between the Sinaloa cartel and the Juárez cartel, the migrants kidnapped, robbed and buried in the desert, the migrant workers without rights. The latter arrive here from all over Mexico to manufacture goods for the American market at low wages in the maquiladoras, the local assembly plants.

With the boom of the maquiladoras, new poverty belts had been pushed out into the desert from the 1990s onward. The girls and women living in these huts were easy prey, and many disappeared on their way home from work. «Juárez has grown very quickly and without an ordering hand,» Romero explains. What are the police and military doing? They «make people disappear, murder, torture and abuse,» he says.

He turned his investigations into a book in 2018. The cases described there started occurring in 2008, he stresses. Back then, the U.S. financial crisis destroyed tens of thousands of jobs in Juárez. At the same time, President Felipe Calderón declared a war on drugs, setting off an endless spiral of violence in Mexico. With 2,650 murders, Juárez was the most deadly city in the country in 2009, and in 2010, with 3,111 murders, it was the most dangerous in the world.

Inactive politicians

Romero does not think much of the politicians. He says they are against the wooden crosses erected as symbols of the femicides. They would rather feign normalcy, he adds. They named the baseball stadium «Juárez vive» (Juárez lives). «While the residents are dying,» Romero says.

Romero, too, has titled the prologue of his book in the style of Baudelaire: «On the banks of this river of tragedies exists an oasis of impunity.» The last chapter tells the story of murdered journalists. It is more relevant than ever. Nationwide, 14 journalists have already been murdered in 2022. Is he afraid? Yes, there was his research in the town of La Caseta, where gangs transport drugs and migrants across the border. Suddenly he realized that he was being followed, he tells us.

La Caseta has a border crossing through which American men come to visit the brothels filled with Mexican girls. Norma Andrade of the women’s aid organization Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May Our Daughters Return Home) says that a girl who had been abducted in Juárez was once discovered there. But the girl did not dare to escape. Days later her body was found.

«We’re disposable products here at the border»

The 62-year-old Andrade remembers walking to school alone as a child. In the beginning of the 1990s, however, the idyll was over. Girls disappeared, «all of them the slim Morena type, 13 to 18 years old, long black hair.» Like her daughter Alejandra. On Feb. 14, 2001, the 17-year-old did not come home from her work in the maquiladora, where she was earning money for her journalism studies.

Seven days later, Alejandra’s body was found. She had been strangled and her skull crushed. DNA from three individuals was recovered in blood and sem*n samples. But the investigation was slow. Alejandra’s position at the maquiladora, on the other hand, was filled a day later, Andrade says. «We’re disposable products here at the border.»

Along with other mothers, Andrade founded the organization Nuestras Hijas. Together, they went to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights against the inactive Mexican judiciary. The judges there agreed with them that the Mexican state was not fulfilling its obligation to investigate these cases. In 2008, Andrade learned that the DNA of the three individuals who murdered her daughter was compared to evidence from other cases. The DNA of one person matched samples that were discovered on four other bodies.

When the body of a murdered employee of the prosecutor’s office was investigated in early 2010, the authorities found something: The DNA of Alejandra’s tormentor would have to belong to a male relative of this murdered man. But then the investigation stopped. And the threats and murders began: Five activists died, others fled. But Norma Andrade stayed.

In December 2011, five bullets were fired at her: One got stuck a few inches from her heart, the others shattered her shoulder, one arm and a hand. The central government placed her under police protection and hid her in a house in the south of Mexico City. Today, two massive iron grates have to be unlocked before entering her Mexico City office. There she works with Alejandra’s daughter Jade, whom she raised, as well as Caleb, Alejandra’s son.

«People kill because they can get away with it»

Andrade seems exhausted. She has asked all the presidents of the last 20 years for help in finding the women and the perpetrators. But there was no interest, she says. Instead, evidence is «fabricated» to incriminate innocent people, she tells us.

Violence against women has long since gripped the whole of Mexico. Every day, on average, ten women are murdered and eight disappear, half of them younger than 20. Imelda Marrufo from the women’s network Red Mesa de Mujeres in Juárez says that there are many motives behind these cases. Sometimes, a neighbor or even the woman’s own partner makes her disappear forever, she says – and then there are drug gangsters who keep female slaves for sex or to deal before murdering them. And prostitution rings and organ traffickers.

«But there are also cases of pure machismo; people kill because they can – and because they can get away with it,» Marrufo says. This is because the authorities are overburdened or even incompetent, she tells us, adding that there is also a lack of political will to solve these cases.

Security forces under suspicion

Politicians like President Andrés Manuel López Obrador like to blame drug cartels for violence against women. And they promise to help solve the cases. But they ignore the fact that femicides occur wherever the police or military are deployed, says journalist Romero. There have never been as many femicides in Juárez as there were in 2010, when the city was controlled by the military at the height of Calderón’s war on drugs. But the security forces are untouchable, he says.

José Luis Castillo continues to follow every lead to Esmeralda: In 2021, someone used Esmeralda’s data to enroll online at a university in Mexico City, he tells us. But the university refuses to release any information, he says, allegedly because of privacy issues.

In addition, he has contacted forensic scientists from Guatemala to have the bone fragment reexamined. But the forensic institute in Juárez will not release the evidence. Esmeralda’s father is stuck in an endless loop of that day 13 years ago when his daughter didn’t come home, Romero says.

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