NY Times, February 28, 1999 Feminist Propels Outcry at Brutal Mexico Killings By SAM DILLON CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Within hours after youths passing by a Juarez drainage canal on a recent day discovered the body of a 13-year-old girl, the most recent victim in a long series of sexual killings here, Esther Chavez Cano was rushing to spread the dismal news. She was on the phone to members of the feminist organization she heads. She was typing e-mail messages to congresswomen and journalists. In news interviews, Ms. Chavez, a 65-year-old former accountant for Kraft Foods, was accusing the new governor of Chihuahua of breaking campaign promises to investigate the killings of women in Juarez more seriously than his predecessor did. "It's outrageous that these murders have been used to win votes, but the minute the politicians get in power they forget about the dead women," Ms. Chavez said. The victim, Irma Angelica Rosales, was raped and smothered with a plastic bag on Feb. 16, hours after she lost her $4-a-day job in an American-owned factory. She became the third such victim in this border city that faces El Paso since Gov. Patricio Martinez Garcia took office in October. But a trail of similar crimes preceded Miss Rosales' killing. Authorities have counted 184 women killed in Juarez since 1993. About 80 were raped and their bodies dumped in the desert. State officials say only 24 fit a pattern of serial sexual murder, but Ms. Chavez, who keeps detailed lists of the dead on her home computer, says she believes the figure is far higher. Just a few years back, as battered female bodies turned up here frequently, dumped in desert gullies and vacant lots, these crimes gained little notice. Even now, few of the killings have been solved. But this latest killing provoked considerable outrage, which is a testimony to Ms. Chavez's outspoken advocacy and the fledgling feminist movement she helps lead. Juarez newspapers made the young woman's death front-page news. Television editorials urged authorities to stop the violence. Demonstrations have been scheduled to protest the killing. As outrage grew, Martinez offered a $5,000 reward for information identifying the sexual predator. The continuing sexual murders pose a challenge to Martinez, who is a member of President Ernesto Zedillo's governing party. He won election last year partly by lambasting his predecessor, from the opposition National Action Party, for investigative mismanagement. Arturo Gonzalez Rascon, Chihuahua's Attorney General, said his government had made prosecuting the murders a priority. New initiatives, including restrictions on liquor sales and beefed-up police patrols, have reduced crime, and a shake-up of the unit investigating homicides in which women are the victims has increased efficiency, he said in a letter responding to written questions. "We've made good advances," he said. In response to Miss Rosales' killing, he said. "We've assigned our best elements to its investigation." But on Wednesday there was a setback when two Mexico City criminologists invited to Chihuahua to help out by the Martinez administration resigned in protest, asserting that the sexual homicide inquiries are in chaos, with case files and lab tests missing and inexperienced detectives in charge. "Governor Martinez told us that he'd appoint better investigators, but the officials he's named are worse than those they replaced," Rep. Alma Vucovich, president of the Mexican Congress' Committee on Sexual Equality, said in an interview. Many victims, like Miss Rosales, had migrated to Juarez from cities to the south. She arrived in January, moving into a mud shanty with her brother. He paid $20 for a false document stating that she was 16, enabling her to get an assembly job at the plant where his wife worked, Electrocomponentes de Mexico. She had trouble adjusting to factory discipline, and on Feb. 10 was suspended for a day for talking. On the morning of Feb. 16 she quit her job, plant officials said, but her sister-in-law said Miss Rosales told her in a tearful conversation at the plant that she had been dismissed. "Go straight home on the bus," the sister-in-law said she told Miss Rosales. "Don't walk, its dangerous." The teen-ager left about 9 a.m. Two youths found her body six hours later. Dozens of young factory women have been attacked walking through Juarez's desolate industrial parks, and Ms. Chavez's organization has urged owners to provide secure transportation. Thomas Creevey, an executive at the International Wire Group, based in Mishawaka, Ind., which owns Electrocomponentes, said the plant provided no bus service. He called Miss Rosales' salary "confidential," but her relatives said that during seven days of work she earned $27. Ms. Chavez was about to retire from her accounting career about the time the sexual murders began here in the early 1990s. Dismayed by officials' indifference, she began to speak out. She drew attention with criticisms of male investigators and politicians, who argued that women were inviting attack by wearing suggestive clothing. She attacked machismo, whose roots in a Chihuahua culture that glorifies ruthless desert horsemen who force women into submission may make it even stronger than elsewhere in Mexico. She became an advocate for working-class women whose brutalization was passing unchallenged to a degree inconceivable had the Juarez dead been drawn from a higher station. "She seemed very audacious," said Guadalupe Ramirez Lopez, director of a Juarez human rights group, who recalled seeing the short, slender Ms. Chavez stand to criticize a state prosecutor in 1995. "She was the only one daring to demand better investigations." Her criticisms of the official inquiries have been accepted widely. Chihuahua officials recently acknowledged that the state police have never even assembled a psychological profile of the serial killer or killers. The Federal Bureau of Investigation agreed this month to send profilers to Juarez to study the case, a spokesman in El Paso said. The Chihuahua police remain sloppy and indifferent, Ms. Chavez said. She cited the experience of Armine Arjona Baca, a physician, who told her story in a separate interview. During the night of Jan. 31, Dr. Arjona heard the screams of a woman coming from a canal behind her house, and phoned the state police. The officer who answered argued that it was not his agency's job to respond to emergencies but promised, grudgingly, to send a squad car. Dr. Arjona called back 30 minutes later. "Is that woman still screaming?" the agent responded, irritated, Dr. Arjona said. A woman's body was found later that day elsewhere in Juarez. It is unclear whether the cries Dr. Arjona heard came from the murder victim. Miss Rosales' killing threw Ms. Chavez's life into tumult as the teen-ager's family reached out to her. She held their hands in angry meetings with bureaucrats who delayed releasing Miss Rosales' body, and as coffin vendors tried to profit on the funeral. "Yesterday was a nightmare," she wrote in an e-mail she distributed on Feb. 20, the day after Miss Rosales' body was shipped to her hometown for burial. "The anguish of these poor people. I was in a volcano of pain." Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
