The brutal murders of nearly 200 young women in and around this gritty factory town has fueled public anger toward Mexican authorities and US companies that employed many of the victims.
Ciudad Juarez - a city of 1 million that lies just across the border from El Paso, Texas - has long attracted young women from other parts of Mexico.
Nearly 600 people come to the city each day to find work in one of nearly 400 assembly-for-expert factories known as "maquiladoras".
The plants manufacture goods for large US companies such as Amway, TDK Honeywell, 3M, Kenwood and Dupont and pay wages of about $1 an hour - more than double Mexico's minimum wage.
Victims disappeared while commuting
Many of the victims - all between the ages of 13 and 20 - disappeared while traveling between their factory jobs and their shantytown homes on the edge of the city.
Their bodies were most often found beaten, strangled, stabbed, or raped in the nearby desert.
Police thought the case was solved in 1995 with the arrest of Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif, an Egyptian engineer at one of the maquiladoras. He also had a criminal record of sexual assault in the United States.
Sharif was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in jail for one of the killings, after being suspected of several others.
But the killings, which began in 1993, have continued.
Seventeen year old Sagrario Gonzalez disappeared at the end of her shift late last year.
Her mutilated body was found in a nearby river two weeks later.
"We thought there wouldn't be any danger in the middle of the day...Unfortunately, it was the worst moment for her. At broad daylight at 3 o'clock in the afternoon," said Guillermina, her sister.
Bus drivers arrested
Mexican authorities recently arrested five men in connection with the murders. Four of them were employed as subcontracted bus drivers for the maquiladoras.
The fact that many of the victims were below the minimum working age of 16 has reinforced the public perception that the companies have little regard for their Mexican workers.
"How in the world could they have hired such people to drive buses...with no background checks, with no controls?" said Esther Chavez, a Juarez resident who has started a campaign for justice for the slain women.
Police under fire
Mexican authorities have also come under heavy criticism.
"I don't know of any other case in the whole world where 186 women have been murdered and nothing has been done to resolve the case," said criminologist Oscar Maynez.
He said that the local police simply lack the resources and knowledge to investigate the case properly.
Some investigators have offered the theory that Sharif paid the bus drivers to continue the killings as part of an effort to clear his name.
Critics insist that the killings are the work of copycats.
"We can't call this anything other than a 'femicide'. They are killing women with so much hatred. When a woman is stabbed 23-24 times, well, that shows great hatred towards her," Chavez said.
Copyright 1998 Cable News Network, Inc.
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