On a recent trip to Mexico with two of my girlfriends, I picked up a paper while waiting for a bus to the airport in Juarez where I would board a plane to go home. I knew no Spanish before the trip, but had learned a little in my two weeks there. The front of the paper showed an incredibly graphic picture of a man lying bloodied in the street, and the headline, blunt enough for even me to make out, proclaimed Ciudad Juarez as the most violent city in Mexico.
This news made it to the United States and to my mother, who frantically left numerous voice messages on my cell phone. She was imagining me in the middle of bandito-style shootouts and opposing gangs' drug wars of men killing men. What she didn’t know was that most of the crimes being committed in Juarez were being committed against women. In fact, a CNN report estimates the number of murders for women in Juarez as double that of men. Women were and are being raped, tortured, and killed in Juarez, and unless you live in a border town, or have had a personal scare like my mother, these are crimes about which you may not have heard.
According to the Mexico Solidarity Network, a grassroots group that advocates human rights in Mexico and the United States, over four hundred women in the last ten years have been found dead in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, Mexico. Although a few cursory arrests have been made, these murders remain unsolved and new murders continue to occur.
Because I live in Las Cruces, New Mexico and am only an hour away from Juarez, I have known about these murders for the last three years; however, before I moved to New Mexico, I was completely ignorant of their existence. When I spoke to my mother about the murders after her worried inquiries concerning the violence of Juarez in general, I became aware that I had never spoken about these murders with her before. Why not? And if she didn’t know about them, just how many other women in America remained ignorant of this grisly situation?
On a recent trip home to visit my relatives in Kansas, I made a point of asking every relative—man and woman—if they had ever heard of the Juarez murders. Not a single one had. A couple mentioned having heard of some violence down there, knowing that it was a “rough city,” but nobody knew the details. And these were intelligent, well-educated persons, ranging in profession from accountants to lawyers to stay-at-home mothers. These people read the news; they were, supposedly, informed.
Just why has a massacre of women on a such a large scale gone mostly unnoticed? Is it because our media isn’t covering the issue? In short, no. The media has probably not granted this situation as much coverage as would be desirable, that’s true, but there have been attempts to raise awareness. V-Day, an organization dedicated to stopping violence against women that originated in response to Eve Ensler’s play Vagina Monologues, sparked interest by making its 2004 focus the missing women of Juarez. Media in the United States and abroad have run special reports addressing the problem. The United States Congress recently passed a resolution conveying the sympathy of Congress to the families of the young women murdered in the State of Chihuahua, Mexico, and encouraging increased United States involvement in bringing an end to these crimes. However, the fact remains that these murders are continuing today, and the average woman in America is not cognizant of them.
So why aren’t we talking about the women of Juarez and Chihuahua? Is it because their murders are occurring, just barely, across our borders? Is it because the women being murdered are mostly Mexican, and almost uniformly poor? Or is it because of a large-scale Mexican government cover-up conspiracy?
