A View From the Border (Ciudad Juarez)

We have posted a series of commentaries reporting on the trip of a delegation of UC Davis law students to the border during spring break.  Here is the group’s final entry:

One of our main motivations for choosing Ciudad Juarez as one of many border cities we could have visited was our concern with femicide. According to a 2005 statistic by Amnesty International, since the early 1990s 370 women have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez and at least another 400 are still missing. The murders are still occurring in similar patterns and perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of these murders is the impunity of law enforcement and government officials. Most of the women are young, poor women who work in maquiladoras, factories that export most of their products to the United States. Many of the stories are eerily similar: a young woman leaves for work at the maquila, never returns, and either remains missing or is found dead in the desert, with evidence of rape, torture, and marks of ritualistic mutilation. We met with women from a non-profit group called Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (“May Our Daughters Return Home”). It is run by 3 women, all of whom have lost loved ones to femicide. Their goal, loosely defined, is to end violence against women. More specifically, they work to assist lawyers in gathering information and pressure legal authorities to take actions in these cases. They also assist victims’ families by providing art programs for children who have lost their mothers to violence. Students in the program have been able to paint murals that have been shown in museums in the city and are even going to be featured at an art program in Madrid, Spain. Unfortunately, there are not enough funds for Nuestras Hijas to even pay the rent and electricity bills for the building, let alone to send students to Madrid. Their building was also recently broken into and they lost several supplies, including their computer. In addition to the art program for children, the organization tries to assist law enforcement in solving these cases. They meet with families and gather information for lawyers and law enforcement. They are met with several obstacles. When they ask for autopsy reports or crime scene photos, the police claim they do not have them. Evidence is not collected properly. Local lawyers are not willing to take on these cases because lawyers who have tried have been killed. The women we met with have received death threats because of the work they are doing. I was struck by the bravery and determination these women exhibited in the face of such obstacles and threats. However, it seemed that their bravery and determination speaks more to the horror and desperation of the situation and less about their own empowerment. They told us that the reason they keep working is because if they don’t, no one else will. They said they no longer fear violence against themselves because they have already lost their loved ones and thus feel they have nothing else to lose. If they cannot get this violence prosecuted, they said, they at least want to publicly denounce it. What could be bringing on this violence and why aren’t authorities doing anything about it? There seem to be very few answers being generated. There have been theories about cults, drug trafficking, and mass murderers. Some blame the women themselves, claiming that they may have been prostitutes, making them somehow responsible for the violence against them. Most people studying the violence suspect that people in power are involved due to the circumstances of the murders and the level of impunity. Our hosts at Nuestras Hijas noted that there is no clear reason for the murders. These women are not being killed for their religion or holding a political opinion. They are being killed merely because they are women. The same day we also met with law students in a human rights class at the university. They gave us a presentation about the Human Rights Commission and engaged us in a conversation comparing their legal system to ours. We were given an opportunity to socialize with the students later that evening. When we mentioned that we’d met with a group organizing against femicide, some students asked “what lies did they tell you?”

Among the many questions I was left with after our visit to Ciudad Juarez, I wondered how I could connect femicide with other issues we’d studied on the border. Some people would see this as an isolated problem in a city (or perhaps an entire country) wrought with violence and corruption. Some may see it as a product of “machismo.” Certainly patriarchy and corruption are enormous factors in violence against women, but they should not be seen purely as “Mexico’s problem.” Patriarchy and corruption exist everywhere, and the United States’ influence on Mexico cannot be ignored. If the violence has connections to narco-trafficking, shouldn’t we be examining the United States’ demand for narcotics as fueling a violent and corrupt drug trade? Shouldn’t we be questioning the ways we’ve been waging our war against drugs and its effects on the border? Is it only a coincidence that the women disappeared and killed have mostly been maquila workers, pulled into these jobs because of NAFTA policies? Is it pure irony that women started disappearing around the same time NAFTA was implemented? These questions are related to broader questions about the United States’ policies surrounding the US-Mexico border. Why are people still desperate to cross the border when NAFTA was supposedly designed to bolster Mexico’s economy? Why is the border becoming such a violent region when programs like Operation Gatekeeper and the war on drugs were supposedly designed to make the area safer? What responsibilities does the United States have in the wake of the violent consequences of its policies regarding Mexico and the border we share?

KJ