Internationally-known music and film celebrities are casting new public attention on the unsolved murders of women in Ciudad Juarez and the state of Chihuahua. In a March 27 meeting in Mexico City, a trio of English and Mexican celebrities conveyed their concerns for justice during a personal conversation with Mexican President Felipe Calderon.
Attending the meeting were legendary English rocker Peter Gabriel, Saul Hernandez, front man for the popular Mexican rock group Jaguares; and acclaimed Mexican actor Diego Luna, who had a role in the recent Hollywood biography of the assassinated US politician and pioneer gay rights activist Harvey Milk.
Also in attendance at the unusual encounter were Tamaryn Nelson, director of the Latin American and Caribbean desk for Gabriel’s pro-human rights organization Witness, and Patricia Cervantes, mother of 2003 Chihuahua City femicide victim Neyra Azucena Cervantes.
In a press conference prior to the meeting with President Calderon, Gabriel appealed to the Mexican government to support the justice campaign for murdered women.
“We know that Felipe Calderon confronts many challenges in many areas of his government,” Gabriel said. “We hope to inspire him to invest money, muscle and interest in this campaign.”
Released after the meeting, an official statement from the Mexican White House affirmed that President Calderon pledged that he will combat abuses of authority, promote reparations of damages to the relatives of femicide victims and struggle against impunity. Mexico’s president agreed to give special attention to cases like the Cervantes murder via a joint Internet page with Witness. Working together with local officials, federal forces are attempting to clear up the femicides, President Calderon reportedly told his guests.
Recognizing the work of human rights defenders, President Calderon said that the conviction and participation of activists motivated the three levels of the Mexican government to do a better job, according to the statement from the presidential office.
The meeting between President Calderon and the international celebrities came just weeks after a new fictional movie about the Ciudad Juarez femicides, “Backyard,” premiered in major theaters in Mexico. The meeting also took place one month before Mexico is scheduled to go on trial in the Inter-American Court for Human Rights for alleged human rights violations committed during the “investigations” of the slayings of three women found murdered along with five others in a Ciudad Juarez cotton field in 2001.
As a member state of the Inter-American Court, Mexico will be bound to follow the verdicts issued by judges.
Despite numerous high-level pronouncements by various officials from different branches of government over the years, the murder of women continues to be a grave problem in Ciudad Juarez and other parts of Mexico.
Perhaps it will never be known with one-hundred degree certainty how many women were murdered in Ciudad Juarez in recent years. Based on press reports and information from prominent Ciudad Juarez women’s activist Esther Chavez Cano, the US-based Mexico Solidarity Network reported 508 women were slain in Ciudad Juarez from 1993 to mid-December 2008.
A comprehensive list compiled by El Paso-based journalist and author Diana Washington Valdez reported 440 women were murdered for varied reasons in Ciudad Juarez from 1993 to 2004. If subsequent press stories are added to Washington Valdez’s total, then at least 622 women were slain in Ciudad Juarez between 1993 and most of March 2009.
The bloodiest year was 2008, when at least 86 women were murdered, according to a recent blog posting by Washington Valdez. In addition to domestic and sex-related violence as being leading causes of women’s murders, narco-violence is now a major reason for the high rate of women’s homicides. Ciudad Juarez press accounts signaled that the majority of last year’s female murder victims, 55, were killed because of the gangland war that raged in Ciudad Juarez.
Some officials downplay the violence, contending Ciudad Juarez is getting a bad rap in the media. Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, for example, was recently quoted in a maquiladora industry trade publication as saying his city now had a distorted image it could not shake because of negative publicity over the femicides.
“Something that was not precisely real and significant was left to grow like a snowball,” Mayor Reyes Ferriz said.
A recent report from the latest incarnation of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies’ femicide commission revealed that at least 2,232 women were killed in all of Mexico during 2006-07, mostly due to domestic violence.
While the country’s main population center of Mexico City and the adjoining state of Mexico accounted for the majority of women’s homicides (543), the much more sparsely-populated state of Chihuahua, which includes Ciudad Juarez, registered 84 slayings in the time period covered by the study. The official report concluded that gender violence is keeping women in a subordinate position in Mexican society.
“Violence against women, for the sole fact of being women, puts them in a relationship of inequality, oppression, exclusion, subordination, discrimination, and marginality,” the report stated.
Other Mexican states where women’s murders reached alarming levels during 2006-07 included Michoacan (202), Guerrero (129) and Baja California (105), suggesting that where narco-violence was at an extreme so were crimes against women.
The Chamber of Deputies’ report also noted a national pattern of governmental indifference and denial of justice for the family members of slain women.
In Ciudad Juarez, meanwhile, disappearances of young women who fit the profile of earlier femicide victims also continue unimpeded. In one of the most recent cases, a young mother, 22-year-old Marisela Avila Hernandez, vanished March 18 after going to a Bancomer bank branch where she had an account to process an unemployment claim. The bank is located near the San Lorenzo Curve, a section of the city where crimes against both women and men have been frequent. On March 27, friends and relatives of a young woman reported missing six months ago, 17-year-old Rubi Marisol Frayre Escobedo, joined Chihuahua state law enforcement authorities in a search for traces of their loved one.
Speaking to the Mexican press late last year, feminist activist and Casa Amiga co-founder Esther Chavez assessed the situation for women in Ciudad Juarez 15 years after Chavez helped alert the public to the rising tide of femicides. For Chavez, generalized impunity and rampant police corruption resulted in the creation of a monster that eventually reared its head against the entire society. “Now we can’t control it,” Chavez said.
Nonetheless, activists like Esther Chavez, Patricia Cervantes, Peter Gabriel and others keep up the fight to corral and vanquish the loose dragon.
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Sources:
-- El Diario de Juarez, March 28, 2009. Article by Luz del Carmen Sosa.
-- Presidencia.gob.mx, March 27, 2009. Press release.
-- Lapolaka.com, March 27, 2009.
-- Norte, March 21 and 24, 2009. Articles by Arturo Chacon and Pablo Hernandez Batista.
-- La Jornada/Notimex, March 14 and 27, 2009.
-- Cimacnoticias.com, March 4, 2009. Article by Sandra Torres Pastrana.
-- Juarez-El Paso Now, March 2009.
-- Dianawashingtonvaldez.blogspot.com,
January 26, 2009.
-- El Universal/EFE, December 6, 2008.
-- Cosecha de Mujeres, Diana Washington Valdez (Oceana 2005).
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Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico
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