Female Homicides In Ciudad Juárez

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**Updated Information/News Thing**

(Source: truTV.com)



Joe Lopez Jimenez wasn't looking for trouble when he and a friend went for a stroll in the desert northeast of Ciudad Juarez on Monday, February 17, 2003. The two teenagers took their dogs along, searching the wasteland for bottles and cans, or any other cast-off articles that could be redeemed for pocket money. The last thing they expected to discover was a human body.

Much less three.

The boys ran home to tell their parents, who then alerted the municipal police. The officers were skeptical at first and responded slowly. But when detectives reached the scene off Mimbre Street at 2:00 p.m., any notion of a hoax evaporated. They saw the remains of three barely concealed women.

The police wasted little time carting the bodies from the scene. They had the third corpse in an ambulance and ready to depart by 2:30, when a neighborhood bystander called their attention to a fourth corpse, a little away from the others. Most local reporters had already left to file their stories, but Miguel Perea, a photographer for Norte newspaper, remained to document the discovery of the fourth corpse.

These were not the first corpses found in the desert near the rundown suburb. Two other victims had been found a short distance away in October 2002; one of them later identified as 16-year-old Gloria Rivas. More recently, residents of nearby Lomas de Poleo had reported finding three more corpses in January 2003. But police and Attorney General Jesus Solis refused to confirm or deny the account.

The story took an even stranger turn on Wednesday, February 19, when authorities identified three of the victims. They were 17-year-old Juana Sandoval Reyna, missing since September 23, 2002; 16-year-old Esmeralda Juarez Alarcon, last seen January 8, 2003; and 18-year-old Violeta Alvídrez Barrios, who vanished February 4, 2003. Each girl was last seen alive in downtown Ciudad Juarez. When reporters asked about the fourth victim, police spokesmen abruptly ended the briefing, and refused to acknowledge that there was another body.


That stubborn attitude was old news to the residents of Ciudad Juarez, where a mounting toll of brutal homicides had stunned the city--and attracted global attention--during the past decade. Body counts are a touchy subject in Ciudad Juarez, a bustling city across the border from El Paso. No two sources agree on the death toll of young women. The El Paso Times claims that there are "nearly 340" victims since 1993. Some of the cases have been solved, although unnamed "experts" speculate that "90 or more" may be serial murder victims. But no one seriously claims that one person is responsible for all of the murders.

In fact, police have jailed more than a dozen suspects --the first in 1995. Each new arrest is hailed as a "solution" to the grisly murder spree, but the body count still increases. Many residents and some discouraged investigators now believe that the police themselves may be behind some of the murders. At the very least, many think the police are involved in an ongoing cover-up.

A decade after the start of the official roster of the dead, only one thing is certain: All females are in danger on the streets of Ciudad Juarez.


Most Americans outside west Texas know Ciudad Juarez--if they know it at all--from fictional portrayals in dramas such as the recent NBC-TV miniseries "Kingpin." These tales are replete with sex, drug-dealing, gunplay and intrigues—all of which exist in Ciudad Juarez. As is always true with television, these depictions are only glimpses into the city's history.

No one is sure how many people live in Ciudad Juarez. A Rand McNally atlas published in 1999 claims an impossibly precise 789,522 residents, while media estimates from 2000 onward range as high as 2 million. Many are street people, living hand-to-mouth and day-to-day, while others are simply in transit, passing through the city en route to the border and the promised land of the U.S.

The exodus is driven by need. Wealth rarely trickles down from top-rank politicians, manufacturers and narco-traffickers to everyone else. British author Simon Whitechapel, in his book Crossing to Kill (2000), describes Ciudad Juarez as "a kind of contact sore, a purulent wound ground out on the border by the rubbing together of American plutocracy and Mexican poverty, of American desire and Mexican desperation."

Those who stay behind often work in maquiladoras--sweat-shop factories producing goods for sale abroad--at wages averaging five U.S. dollars per day. Thousands of those workers are young women from outlying towns and villages, collectively described by adding an "l" to the name of their workplace: maquilladoras. They come hoping for the best, but often find the worst. Squalid work conditions and sexual harassment can become mere annoyances in a city where life is cheap.

Machismo is an element of the problem. It exalts men over women to the detriment of both. Spanish-language dictionaries define it as "behavior of the man who believes himself superior to women," and it manifests itself in forms ranging from casual insults to, according to some, ritualistic murder. Corruption plays its part, too. The legal system thoroughly corrupted by drug money. Police earn so little that bribery (mordida) is an accepted practice. Any crime can be overlooked for a price.

Still, there is clearly something else at work in Ciudad Juarez. Otherwise, every border town from Tijuana to Matamoros would share in the rising toll of raped and murdered women.

What your take on all this? (I personally think it's disgusting)

While I am not in favor of it, I have to say your numbers are wrong, outdated, some say it is closer to 2,000 since 1993, and last night thirteen young people were killed at a party.

Counting males, the police, and bystanders, about 15,000 since 1993. For a city about the size of New Orleans, murder capital of America, at less than 400 a year, Juarez hits 1,000.

In New Orleans near none are young women, in Juarez it is more than a hundred a year.

This is becoming Colombia on the border. Mexico has sent in the army, it still goes on.

Murder is bad. They should stop murdering.

Or at least confine themselves to murdering men, that doesn't count as real murder anyway if its a male victim.

I read about it but I still don't understand why most of these murders are targeted at women unless these petty criminals are afraid to pick on people their own size?

It's pretty sick and should be stopped.

And Bluemage anyone male, female, child, baby....killed is considered murder.

There seem to be mainly two types of murders going on in Ciudad Juárez: violence associated with the drug trade (particularly acute as Ciudad Juárez is a key transit point to the US, but by no means unique to the city), whose victims are overwhelmingly young men and random bystanders, and these murders of women, which seem to target young, impoverished, slender women with long hair, and which seem to be particular to Ciudad Juárez. What is obvious to me is that the authorities are at best protecting the killers, otherwise if only as a matter of public relations they would have done something.

Haven't been there in 15 years, but now it's actually more dangerous than Bagdad...

Due to a constant multi sided war, drug cartels fighting, then the Mexican and American taking out some big guy, it just stirs up the struggle for power all over. All drug factions bring in hired killers from other places, unknowns who can move about, and if you import a thousand killers, what do they do on their day off?

Another factor is, people who would be killed where they are, face long terms in Mexican jails, head for the border.

Many Mexican drug gangs have marketing in the US, they can get a job running drugs in some little town in Kansas. If they get caught, American jails, are better than being dead, and someday, you will be deported to Juarez.

It is not that the police take bribes, the offer is, Plata or Plumbo, silver or lead, lots do die. They are like American police, they do the job, but never look into what the Mayor and Chamber of Commerce are doing.

When the Mexican Marines recently took down a big boss, one was killed, his name mentioned, and a few days later his entire family was killed.

Anyone in their way gets killed, they are doing the same in America, seven found dead in an apartment, someone one else claims that market.

A lot of them were military or police, and still have uniforms, no one knows who is who, and they have the man power to send thousands across the border, as decoys, knowing that Border Patrol will be busy, as they move a load north with military trucks and machine guns.

One border county I know has three police, 2,000 square miles, and only work days. There are twenty Border Patrol, and sixty miles of border.

Assesting people they have to be cared for, given a lawyer, tried, before they can be deported to come right back. Just dumping them at the border bridge would work faster. Even when we do deport them, liberal groups are waiting in Mexico to give them food, water, and perpare them for their next crossing.

If the border patrol could just turn them around and march them south, it would cut down the traffic.

Two things are going to happen, the killing will spread to America, and enough will get through to soon be a majority.

The other proposal is we rent ten square miles in Mexico, and anyone found anywhere who is not American, does not have papers, is put on a C-130 and is half way down Mexico in a few hours.

California is spending several billion a year holding illegals in the process of deportion. All states have the same problem, local services being used and paid for, for a program that does not work.

Somewhere between fifteen and thirty million people are in the US because they just came. They run the drugs, fill the jails, and the costs just keep going up.

It has something to do with why we are short 15,000,000 jobs, they dont pay taxes or social security, Real wages have been falling, we are paying for this.

Send them back, or be living in Juarez Del Norte soon.