Thread: El Paso Reporter Risked Her Life on a Mass Murder Story

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El Paso Reporter Risked Her Life on a Mass Murder Story
August 11, 2006

By Barbara Bedway, Editor & Publisher

NEW YORK - By 1999, when the El Paso (Texas) Times' Diana Washington Valdez began reporting on a string of murders of young women across the border in Juarez, Mexico, the killings had been going on for six years. But the level of U.S. media frenzy generated when a young blonde woman goes missing somewhere was notably absent in Juarez, even as the number of victims -- most of them poor, attractive girls attending school or working at one of the city's many large assembly plants -- steadily grew into the hundreds.

Many of the women were raped and mutilated prior to their deaths, their bodies dumped in ditches or vacant lots in the desert. State law enforcement authorities responsible for investigating the crimes (at least 90 women were raped and killed in similar ways) consistently failed to preserve crime scenes, collect evidence, or interview witnesses. Valdez, a bilingual reporter with plenty of experience investigating corruption on the U.S. side of the border, says, "Even I had no idea how bad it was, and how high up the corruption was occurring."

Valdez, who now covers health and environmental issues, can no longer report from Juarez "because of the serious threats against me." The FBI calls her every once in a while to see if she's all right. She has alternated in her career between editing and writing, but she says, "I always keep going back to reporting, because I like being out there, and I get bored sitting at a desk all day."

Her updated, English-language book based on her coverage, "Harvest of Women: A Mexican Safari," is due out this month (a Spanish edition, "Cosecha de Mujeres," came out in 2005). There's a new documentary film about her probe. Also in production are two Hollywood movies partly based on the killings, with Jennifer Lopez starring in one and Minnie Driver in the other. An HBO film and numerous plays and books are also planned.

Valdez says of the new edition of her book, "I have more of a conclusion and recommendations that I didn't have earlier. The idea in the first book was to get out information quickly and save lives. I make a case [in the new edition] why this issue needs to be taken out of Mexican hands and turned over to an international tribunal to investigate several Mexican presidents and governors, who ruled during the crime spree, for negligence. I challenge the Mexican authorities, because the same pattern of brutal murders began spreading to other places in Mexico in 1999 and 2000, places where drug cartels have a dominant presence," she adds. "This has to be investigated."

In the latest grim update, announced last week, federal officials in Mexico have quietly closed their unsuccessful three-year investigation into the killings of 14 of the women who were raped and strangled in Juarez, leaving relatives little hope authorities will ever solve the cases. In response, Jennifer Lopez, who is playing a reporter probing the murders in one of the upcoming movies, has joined Amnesty International in launch a new bilingual website aimed at raising awareness about what they call the "femicide."

Few in Mexico are convinced of their government's claims to have jailed the killers -- two bus drivers and some gang members supposedly led by an Egyptian chemist, who died this year in jail. Over the years, Valdez, whose mother is from Mexico, conducted her own dogged investigation, seeking elusive information. She worked without the tools and protections U.S. journalists rely on, and in June 2002 the El Paso Times published her two-part series, "Death Stalks the Border," in both English and Spanish.

"They don't have open-records laws, so I knew I had to find people with direct knowledge of the cases," Valdez notes. "That meant law enforcement, so I had to cultivate sources, get them to trust me."

Most of these meetings had to be face to face: "In Mexico, a public official wants to meet you and size you up. They're used to reporters being spies for different government agencies, so they assume you're playing that kind of role. But it doesn't take long for someone to figure you out."

Valdez, now 51, admits there were moments when she felt psychologically saturated: "The deaths really get to you, but that would pass. I feel all my previous years served as preparation. I couldn't have done this 10 years ago, I lacked the maturity and experience."

After her series -- which included various theories about the killers -- appeared in the El Paso Times, people linked to organized crime, she says, including some with important political connections, sent her warnings to "quiet down" because she was making some powerful individuals "very mad."

"I had to think twice about going forward," she acknowledges. "I had to realize what the victims had been up against. There's no way girls from poor families could protect themselves -- police were involved, the people being protected were directly involved in the murders. I felt the need to wrap up as soon as I could ... at least there would be some safety in having the information. That would be all the justice some of these families would ever have."

Her tenacity impressed Lorena Mendez-Quiroga, whose documentary based on Valdez's investigation, "Border Echoes," is now being released. Mendez-Quiroga, who had covered the murders herself as a freelance reporter for Telemundo and for a Fox affiliate in Los Angeles, notes that seven people who appeared in her film have since been killed. The dead include both lawyers defending the two bus drivers who claimed they were tortured into confessing to the murders of eight women found in a Juarez cotton field in 2001.

"If there's anyone who has really put her life on the line [for this story], it's her," asserts Mendez-Quiroga, who began filming Valdez in 2000. "I first heard about the murders in 1995, and people then were moved to cover how grotesque it is. They wanted to get the tears from the mother and the sound bites. What really touched me about Diana was that she was asking the right questions. I could tell she was someone destined to get to the bottom of things."

The filmmaker emphasizes the complexity of the story can be hard for outsiders to grasp: "It's not just about finding copycat murderers or serial murderers; it's the overall violence toward women, the way society there sees women as pretty much dispensable. You've got to question everything, and that's why the victims' families opened up to Diana."

She describes a scene in the documentary in which she confronts the spokesman for the state attorney general's office with the names of some suspects Valdez has turned up, and he tells her that no inquiry is necessary, since the five men are "upstanding citizens, very good people." He then warns her that Valdez "should be careful."

Diego Zavala, Amnesty International USA's specialist for Mexico, praises Valdez's book for ferreting out hard-to-find information, and laying out the systemic failures in both the government and police organizations that render them incapable of solving the murders.

"I think it's very courageous of her to do this," he asserts. "She identifies all the state officials involved directly or indirectly in investigations, and demonstrates how utterly inept and insensitive they have been. When she tried to get information from actual witnesses, they wouldn't dare say anything. These young women disappear from downtown Juarez in the daytime, and no one claims to have seen them. It makes you wonder -- who are these people they're so afraid of?"

The Juarez murders are no longer "just" a local story, thanks in part to Valdez's reporting. In May, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously approved a resolution condemning the killings and encouraging U.S. involvement in bringing them to an end. In Mexico, a special federal prosecutor has been named to investigate the crimes.

At the same time, Laurie Freeman of the Washington Office of Latin America notes a disturbing trend by "elites, government and business types, and one or more newspapers down there, to say the attacks are a myth, and they're exaggerated." Two years ago, when The Dallas Morning News did a story on how two Juarez newspapers differed markedly in their handling of the womens' deaths, one newspaper mentioned in the story, El Diario, sued the Morning News' publisher, Belo Corp., for libel and business disparagement (the case is still pending).

But Valdez is eager to point out, "The greatest support has come to me from my fellow journalists around the world, who worked to keep this issue alive. They kept calling, wanting an update. I feel my book reflects the best of the profession, because sometimes all we can do in an atrocity like this, is expose it."

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But Valdez is eager to point out, "The greatest support has come to me from my fellow journalists around the world, who worked to keep this issue alive. They kept calling, wanting an update. I feel my book reflects the best of the profession, because sometimes all we can do in an atrocity like this, is expose it."

Now, If someone in our MSM exhibited the same courage, and HONESTLY took on the illegal alien issue with all the ramifications. In addition to Lou Dobbs, of course.