Thread: KILLINGS IN MEXICO: Fear for women's safety spreads

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3839399.html

May 4, 2006, 8:19AM



KILLINGS IN MEXICO
Fear for women's safety spreads
Is the violence of Juarez being repeated? Victims' advocates see chilling parallels to unchecked killings in six other cities
By MARION LLOYD
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Foreign Service

CHIMALHUACAN, MEXICO - In the past eight months, the raped and strangled bodies of young, working-class women have been turning up in construction sites in this dust-choked slum outside the Mexican capital.

The spate of violence itself is terrifying. But residents fear it's a sign of something even worse.

"We ask ourselves, is this the beginning of another Ciudad Juarez?" said Emerenciana Lopez, a human rights activist in this grim satellite community of 500,000 built alongside the capital's trash dumps and a reeking sewage canal.

At least seven women have been slain here since August 2005. That's a fraction of the roughly 400 women slain — one-third of them in chillingly similar circumstances — in the northern border city since 1993. But residents of Chimalhuacan are determined to prevent their community from becoming a repeat of Ciudad Juarez, which has become a symbol worldwide of violence against women and official incompetence.

"We're telling the authorities, not a single victim more," said Lopez, 65, a retired maid who has spent 20 years fighting crime and corrupt police.

In recent months, she has led local residents in patrolling the dimly lighted streets at night to ward off would-be killers and shame authorities into deploying more police. She has also held several candlelight marches, employing protest methods pioneered in Ciudad Juarez.

Most victims young women
The parallels in the two cities are hard to ignore. Most of the victims are young women — all between the ages of 15 and 24 in the case of Chimalhuacan. That, along with the savagery of the attacks, has sparked fears of a serial killer or killers.

Even more alarming, victims' advocates say, is that the unchecked killings of women plagues at least a half dozen other cities across Mexico, including Cancun, Nuevo Laredo, Tapachula and Toluca, according to Alicia Perez Duarte, the federal government's new special prosecutor for crimes against women. The common denominator, she said: The cities are all are hotbeds for organized crime, they contain large floater populations and neighborhoods dogged by extreme poverty.

In Ciudad Juarez, she said, the wave of killings began after Amado Carrillo Fuentes — the now-deceased kingpin of the Juarez drug cartel — set up operations in the city, sparking violence that continues today.

In wars over drug turf, "Women are just the bounty," said Perez Duarte, who was appointed in February to expand the investigation into violence against women beyond Ciudad Juarez.

The Juarez killings have captured the attention of everyone from international human rights groups to Hollywood filmmakers — two competing films starring Jennifer Lopez and Minnie Driver are currently vying for distributors. And on Tuesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the killings and urging the U.S. government to pressure Mexico to do more to resolve them.

Meanwhile, in Chimalhuacan, residents are preparing for battle. Perez Duarte argues that the city's problems should not be viewed as an isolated case, but as part of a broader climate of violence, in which women are most vulnerable.

"We're facing a social phenomenon and it's out of control," she said.

In Chimalhuacan, four of the victims were raped and five were strangled before being dumped in vacant building sites. Two more were cut into pieces, including one woman whose dismembered body was found in a cemetery on April 16.

Police say the latest victim, Veronica Andrade, 24, was killed by a Catholic priest, who butchered her after officiating Easter Mass. The priest, Cesar Torres, allegedly told police he had been having an affair with Andrade, who was pregnant, and that he decided to kill her after she demanded he support her unborn child.


Serial killings suspected
However, police say the remaining slayings may be the work of one or more serial killers, who found in Chimalhuacan an ideal scene for their grisly crimes. The community, which lies within Mexico State on the eastern outskirts of the capital, is a chaotic maze of unpaved streets, half-built cinderblock houses and sprawling trash heaps.


Police say such factors have made it harder to find the killers.

Meanwhile, residents live in fear of the next attack.

"The only security is what God provides," said Aracely Guiterrez, 34, who lives with her three children in a two-room cinderblock shack 30 yards from a mountain of rotting garbage.

Her adopted sister, Aydee Valdes, was found strangled with a nylon cord and dumped in a vacant lot Aug. 24, 2005. Valdes had a 2-year-old daughter, and forensic experts said that she was four months pregnant at the time of her killing.

Family members said it was not until other young women began turning up raped and strangled around the community that police began to pay attention to the case.

Guadalupe Solano, Valdes' mother, told how her daughter left at 5 a.m. for work in a plastics factory in southern Mexico City. The trip involved walking 10 blocks in the dark to the nearest major avenue to catch the bus — the stretch where the killer likely caught her.

"She was such a sweet girl. Everyone loved her," said Solano, her eyes watering as she told how her daughter always arrived at work 10 minutes early, in order to earn a bonus. She planned to use the money on a birthday party for her daughter, Monteserrat, her mother said.


Forced to quit job
Since the slaying, Solano was forced to quit her job as a maid to take care of her orphaned granddaughter and pursue her daughter's case. "I just want them to catch the killer, but who knows if too much time has gone by," she said. "They lost so much valuable time."


Days later, police said they had arrested their first suspect, a 30-year-old janitor identified only as Victor.

Police said Monday that they did not know whether he was involved in other killings.

Still, the state's attorney general, Abel Villicaña Estrada, said he's making headway and has 64 agents working on the Chimalhuacan killings.

In Juarez, where some critics say the police have provided a textbook example of how not to pursue killers, the investigations have become entangled in bureaucracy and mistakes.

In January, the defunct federal special prosecutor's office for the Juarez cases released a final report detailing a trail of botched investigations, official corruption and incompetence. It cited 177 local officials who were accused of obstructing the investigations, and recommended they be prosecuted. However, a local judge ruled that the statute of limitations in the cases had expired.

Perez Duarte, who took over the investigations, said she is unwilling to let the official abuse go unpunished. She recently took the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, requesting that it review the local court's decision.

"We have a very misogynistic culture that permits that violence against women is seen as part of the culture," she said. But "no one wants the violence of Ciudad Juarez to repeat."

marionlloyd@gmail.com

"We have a very misogynistic culture that permits that violence against women is seen as part of the culture," she said. But "no one wants the violence of Ciudad Juarez to repeat."

Illegal immigration has a NEGATIVE impact on women.[/quote]