Thread: Murders of women rising in Mexican border city

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Murders of women rising in Mexican border city
Wed Mar 16, 2005 3:39 AM GMT
By Tim Gaynor

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - The number of murders of women in a Mexican city on the U.S. border are rising, despite a government crackdown to end an 11-year spree that has killed more than 340 females.

The victims have been beaten and strangled in Ciudad Juarez, just south of El Paso, Texas, in a string of murders that has provoked outrage in Mexico and abroad. About a third of the victims were sexually assaulted.

Despite the appointment of a special prosecutor last year, officials said on Tuesday eight women had been killed in the industrial city since January 1 -- a four-fold rise on the number of cases reported in the same period last year.

The strangled and partially clothed body of the latest victim, a 17-year-old student, was found on a city street on Monday. Prosecutors said she had been raped and that her case fitted the profile of more than 100 sexual murders at the heart of the investigation.

Just two days earlier, another woman died after being stabbed in the head and neck. Other victims in the first three months of the year have been gunned down, strangled and stabbed. The body of one woman was tossed into a dumpster.

Claudia Banuelos, a spokeswoman for the state prosecutor's office, said the recent jump in murders was "worrying." But she declined to comment on possible reasons for the spike, which came despite the jailing of 11 men in two high-profile trials in recent months.

Analysts and women's groups in the city said some of the convictions were obtained from confessions under torture, leaving the real criminals at large to continue preying on women across the city.

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Under fire from Amnesty International and members of the U.S. Congress, Mexican President Vicente Fox sent an extra 700 federal police to protect women in Ciudad Juarez in September, 2003.

Special prosecutor Maria Lopez said earlier this year that the murder rate of women in the city had declined to 18 in 2004 following a move to discipline more than 200 negligent investigators and some success in bringing killers to justice.

At the most recent trial in January, a court in the state capital Chihuahua handed down hefty jail terms to 10 gang members after finding them guilty of a dozen murders in Ciudad Juarez dating back to 1999.

At a separate trial last October, a bus driver was jailed for 50 years for the rape and murder of eight women whose bodies were found at an abandoned cotton field close to the city centre four years ago.

The chief of the forensic investigation in the case, who has subsequently resigned after repeated irregularities by other officials, told Reuters the bus driver's conviction had been obtained by torture and was "unsafe."

"Torture is endemic and it was used in that case. The wrong man ended up in jail and the killings will continue as long as those responsible are free," said criminologist Oscar Maynez.

Esther Chavez, director of the Casa Amiga victims' support group in the city, also questioned the convictions, and said attempts by the special prosecutor's office to clear up the crimes were "window dressing."

"It is just an attempt to make the government look good. Meanwhile the killings continue," she said.

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