JUAREZ, Mexico -- Police in this manufacturing city across the border from El Paso are investigating the deaths of at least 70 women, many of them factory workers, who have been raped, killed and dumped in the surrounding Chihuahuan Desert over the past five years.
One, or perhaps several, sexual predators are prowling the vast industrial parks and honky-tonk saloons where the assembly-line workers go to wind down, police say.
Twice, authorities have charged suspects with multiple homicide and declared the problem solved. But Juarez women keep dying; a dozen bodies have turned up amid the cactus this year.
In the latest discovery, the body of an unidentified teenage girl, raped and strangled, was found beneath a railroad trestle Thursday, Juarez police said. Five more women have been reported missing.
The killings have focused a spotlight not only on the victimization of female workers in a city that runs on their $3-a-day labor, but also on the growing influence of a fledgling women's movement galvanized by the sexual attacks.
Many young women drawn by Juarez's 400 tax-free maquiladora assembly plants break with the conservative customs of their rural villages, often pooling resources to live with other women and pursue an independent social life. Feminist groups and congresswomen say they believe that the violence is fed by a male backlash, and they critize the official investigation as an example of mismanagement, mediocrity, and machismo.
"Juarez is the ideal place to kill a woman, because you're certain to get away with it," said Astrid Gonzalez Davila, a founder of the Citizens Committee Against Violence, a group that works with the relatives of homicide victims. "The failure to solve these killings is turning the city into a mecca for homicidal maniacs."
Juarez has always been violent, but previously there was no reason to suspect that the killings of women may be part of a chain of related events. The government says that 95 women have been killed in the city of 1 million in five years; feminist groups have counted 118.
The killings have become a national scandal and have put pressure on the governor of Chihuahua state, Francisco Barrio Terrazas, for a stepped-up investigation. Barrio said the homicide rate for women is no higher in Juarez than in most other Mexican cities (although Juarez women are twice as likely to be killed as New York City women) and defended his government's inquiry.
"It's been very well-handled," he said.
But several Mexican federal congresswomwn who traveled to Juarez in February on a fact-finding mission disagreed. "This investigation has left a bad taste in our mouth," Rep. Laura Itzel Castillo said. "There's been no professionalism."
The killings first attracted attention in 1993, when a criminology professor at the Chihuahua State police academy, Oscar Maynez Grijalva, noticed that virtually all the victims were poor, young, slender women with cinnamon skin and long dark hair. He tried to convince Chihuahua officials that a serial killer was loose, but he was ignored. He later resigned in protest.
"The authorites were just indifferent," said Irma Perez Franco, the mother of a 20-year old shoe store clerk who was killed in 1995. The police treated her with disdain from the moment she reported her daughter's disappearence, she said. "This didn't matter to them at all."
Perez finally persueded detectives to question her daughter's coworkers to determine who had seen her last. "But all they wanted to do was look at the cowboy boots and flirt with the clerks," she said. "They had no investigative plan."
During the same week in which Perez's daughter was killed, eight other bodies were discovered in one stretch of desert, and the public began to clamor for police action.
In October 1995, authorities arrested Sharif Sharif, an Egyptian chemist, after a Juarez prostitute accused him of raping her at his home. The authorities discovered that before moving to Juarez in 1994, Sharif had been convicted twice of sexual assault in Florida during the 1980s. He had served six years of a 12-year sentence for the second crime, the beating and rape of his live-in housekeeper in Gainesville.
The authorities announced that they had found the Juarez predator. They charged Sharif with the slayings of six women, but a judge dismissed those charges in 1996. The day of Sharif's release, prosecutors filed new charges, accusing him of killing another woman.
In an interview at his prison quarters, Sharif acknowledged that he frequented bars where some homicide victims have been kidnapped, but said, "Raping and killing people is not my business."
Irene Blanco, a Juarez woman whom Sharif has appointed as his advocate, said, "The authorities needed a scapegoat and chose Sharif."
Police in Florida, however, have urged Mexican authorities not to release Sharif. "He's demonstrated himself to be a vicious predator of women," said Gainesville police Capt. Sadie Darnell.
Sharif's guilt is debated hotly in Juarez. But what is indisputable is that since his arrest, the killings have continued.
In April 1996, authorities raided several bars and detained nearly 200 Juarez youths, including Sergio Armendariz, a 28 year old nightclub security guard, along with several members of a gang he was said to lead. Armendariz and half a dozen others were later charged with killing 17 women.
But the investigation came under attack when Chihuahua human rights officials accused the police of torturing several Juarez teenagers to coerce their testimony against the gang members. Armendariz said that after his arrest, police battered him for days, demanding that he sign a confession. Jorge Lopez Molinar, the state's attorney in charge of the investigations, said that police matched bite marks on several victims' bodies to Armendariz's teeth.
But since Armendariz's detention, the bodies of at least nine raped women have been found in the desert. Lopez acknowledged that about half a dozen recent killings fit a pattern of serial murder.
Robert K. Ressier, a former FBI agent who specialized in serial killings, said investigators should remain alert to the possibility that a psychopath is traveling to Juarez from the United States. "You could have a guy in the U.S. who goes down there periodically to do these things," he said.
In recent months, women's groups have staged protests accusing Chihuahua authorities of ignoring signs that a sexual predator remains on the loose. A leader has been Esther Chavez Cano, an accountant who pieced together a detailed list of victims that has helped their families monitor the investigation.
Chavez said that machismo, rooted in popular culture across northern Mexico that glorifies ruthless desert horsemen who force women into submission, may be stronger around Juarez than elsewhere in the country. Yet in recent decades, thousands of women have taken factory jobs in Juarez, and the numbers of single mothers have surged.
"Women have not become liberated; they just have a double workload," Chavez said. But some men resent what they perceive as women's newly independent lifestyles, she said. "A patriarchal backlash has accompanied these murders," Chavez said. Authorities often suggest that slain women have invited attacks by wearing miniskirts or going out dancing, she said.
"They minimize the crimes and blame the victims," Chavez said.
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