THE JUAREZ RIPPER

Article BY Chris Bartholomew - Art by VINCENT CASTIGLIA

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An exodus is driven by need. Wealth rarely trickles down from top-rank politicians, manufacturers and narco-traffickers to everyone else.

Those left behind often work in maquiladoras--sweat-shop factories producing goods for sale abroad--at wages averaging five U.S. dollars per day. Thousands of those workers are young women from outlying towns and villages. They come hoping for the best, but often find the worst. Squalid work conditions and sexual harassment can become mere annoyances in a city where life is cheap.

Machismo is an element of the problem. It exalts men over women to the detriment of both. Spanish-language dictionaries define it as "behavior of the man who believes himself superior to women," and it manifests itself in forms ranging from casual insults to ritualistic murder. Corruption plays its part, too. The legal system is thoroughly corrupted by drug money. Police earn so little that bribery is an accepted practice. Any crime can be overlooked for a price.

A long stone's throw across the Rio Grande from Texas and New Mexico, the Mexican boomtown remains the model of machismo in a New World setting.

When the serial murders first emerged, local police blamed the victims for wearing short skirts and makeup, even though 74 per cent of the murdered women were wearing trousers. Downtown, strip joints line the main street, and only men seem to walk freely, usually in cowboy hats, jeans, and stretched corduroy shirts.

In overcrowded, ramshackled shantytowns cut into rock and dirt, gunfights are routine. Even in well-heeled restaurants, where assassinations are not uncommon, diners are advised not to sit with their backs to a door or window.

Narco-traficantes are celebrated in local music, as are narco-murders, the slaying of small-time traffickers and turncoats who run into the hundreds every year.

For many women, though, the greatest crime is official neglect. Whether it is a demented serial killer or an angry husband, a woman's killer in Mexico is likely to live on in freedom.

Still, there is clearly something else at work in Ciudad Juarez. Otherwise, every border town from Tijuana to Matamoros would share in the rising toll of raped and murdered women.

The Day of the Dead is a holiday celebrated mainly in Mexico and by people of Mexican heritage living in the untied States and Canada.  The holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and relatives who have died. 

Pink crosses and offerings for the murdered women of Juárez were placed at Olvera Street, Los Angles on the Day of the Dead.

The phenomenon of the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, called in Spanish the feminicidios, or las muertas de Juárez ("The dead women of Juárez"), involves the violent death of hundreds of women (the estimates are 3-400) since 1993 in the northern Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, a border city across the Rio Grande from the U. S. city of El Paso, Texas.  Most of the cases remain unsolved.

Over the last six years, Juarez has been rocked by a series of grotesque killings of women, an average of two a month. Scores were abducted while going home from work and taken to the badlands outside the city, where they were raped and strangled with belts, ropes, and shoelaces.

Some had their breasts slashed. A few were found tortured with sticks or poles. Several corpses were mutilated with acid or burning tires, and left to hungry coyotes.

About 100 of the killings were similar, with the victims sexually assaulted, strangled and dumped in the nearby desert – leading to fears of serial killers. In the past, prosecutors have downplayed the possibility of a lone killer, but have mentioned the possibility of copycat murders or crimes committed by a group of killers.

There have been many suspects, some of those arrested, but they only account for ten or so victims per - that is a far cry from the massive deaths that have occurred. If you attribute 20 killings to one man or group, could there be 50 serial killers in a city of Mexico?

An expert at California State University, shows that of the 182 recorded victims, as many as 75 were sexually assaulted before their death. More than 30 were raped and killed by a group of three or four independent serial killers.

The first to die, officially, was Alma Chavira Farel, a young woman found beaten, raped and strangled to death in Ciudad Juarez on January 23, 1993. She may not even have been the city's first female murder victim in 1993, since local disappearances exceed known homicides each year. But Chavira remains the first acknowledged victim of a predator the media would later dub "the Juarez Ripper" or El Depredador Psicópata. While no mutilations were recorded in Chavira's case, many subsequent victims suffered "similar" slashing wounds to their breasts.

Police acknowledge 16 more murders of women in Ciudad Juarez by year's end, with the last recorded on December 15. That case was solved, along with three others. In the dozen cases still unsolved today, five of the victims remain unidentified. Of the 12, at least four were raped. Cause of death in those cases included four strangulations, four stabbings (with one set afire afterward), one beating and one gunshot. Decomposition ruled out a determination in the last two homicides.

In 1994 police acknowledged eight unsolved murders of women in Ciudad Juarez; "possible culprits" were named in three other cases, but none were arrested. Three of the dead are unidentified today; the others ranged in age from 11 to 35. This time, at least four were raped. Of those whose cause of death is listed, six were strangled, two stabbed, one beaten to death, and one burned alive.

1995 was worse, with 19 women slain by mid-September. Eight of the victims remain unidentified, with one case solved and "probable suspects" named (but not convicted) in two others. At least four of the victims were raped. Where cause of death could be determined, six were strangled, one stabbed and one shot. Three of the four victims found in September alone presented police with an obvious pattern: each had her right breast severed, with the left nipple bitten off.

It appeared that at least one serial killer was stalking the women of Ciudad Juarez, linked by a similar modus operandi to three of the most recent crimes. But authorities did not seem overly concerned.
Before that year of brutality ended, a state criminologist warned Ciudad Juarez police that some of their unsolved murders might be the work of a serial killer. His warning was ignored.

April 1996 at least 14 more female victims were slain in Ciudad Juarez. Their ages ranged from 10 to 30. Where cause of death was known, 10 had been stabbed, one shot and one strangled. At least four suffered unspecified mutilations after death, and one victim--Adrianna Torres, 15, fit the pattern of three other slayings, with her right breast severed and her left nipple bitten off. The brutal murders continued and community groups accused police of negligence or worse. At least 16 female victims were slain between late April and November 1996. Eight remain unidentified. Five were stabbed, three shot, and one was found in a drum of acid. In several cases advanced decomposition made determinations about cause of death or sexual assault impossible.

In 1997 there were 17 unsolved murders of females. Again they ranged in age from 10 to 30 years, and seven of the dead were never identified. While rape was confirmed in only four cases, the position and nudity of several other corpses suggested sexual assault. In the cases where the cause of death could be determined, five were stabbed, three were strangled, three shot, and two beaten.

Statistically, 1998 was the city's worst year yet. There were 23 on the books by December. Six remained unidentified. The killings reflected the usual pattern of stabbings, strangling, bullets and burning. Rocio Barrazza Gallegos was killed on September 21 in the parking lot of the city's police academy. She was strangled inside a patrol car by a cop assigned to the "murdered women" case. Authorities described the death of 20-year-old Rosalina Veloz Vasquez, found dead on January 25, as "similar to 20 other murders in the city."

By 1998 the long-running investigation had become a numbers game. In May, media reports referred to "more than 100 women raped and killed" in Ciudad Juarez. A month later, reports from the same source (Associated Press) raised the number to 117. In October 1998 another AP report placed the official body count at 95, while a woman's advocacy group, Women for Juarez, placed the total at somewhere between 130 and 150.
In the predawn hours of March 18, 1998 a 14-year-old girl staggered up to the door of a stranger's home on the city's outskirts. Bloody and sobbing, she told her story of rape and near-murder. She said she had been assaulted and nearly choked to death by the hands of a maquiladora bus driver named Jesus Guardado Marquez. His nicknames were El Dracula and El Tolteca. A background check on Guardado revealed one prior conviction for sexual assault. By the time police went looking for him, he had vanished from Ciudad Juarez with his pregnant wife.

The first quarter of 1999: eight more female victims.

While police were convinced of their latest conspiracy theory, the facts contradicted the theory. The media reported in May 1999 that "nearly 200 women" had been murdered since 1993--a substantial jump over October 1998's body count of at least 117. A team of active-duty G-men tried their luck at profiling the Juarez Ripper, with no success.

With another desert summer approaching, police and civilians alike feared that the situation would only get worse.

November 6, 2002 a construction worker stumbled onto the body of a slim, long-haired young woman in a ditch between two major intersections. Hours later, police searching the ditch found the skeletal remains of two more young women.

 

A week later, another body -- another slim, long-haired young woman, dead less than a day -- was found tossed in the middle of a street in a quiet residential neighborhood. And a week after that, another one.
Two teenage friends went for a stroll in the desert northeast of Ciudad Juarez on Monday, February 17, 2003. The two teenagers took their dogs along, searching the wasteland for bottles and cans, or any other cast-off articles that could be redeemed for pocket money. The last thing they expected to discover was a human body.

Much less three.

The boys ran home to tell their parents, who then alerted the municipal police. The officers were skeptical at first and responded slowly. But when detectives reached the scene off Mimbre Street at 2:00 p.m., any notion of a hoax evaporated. They saw the remains of three barely concealed women.

The police wasted little time carting the bodies from the scene. They had the third corpse in an ambulance and ready to depart by 2:30, when a neighborhood bystander called their attention to a fourth corpse, a little away from the others. Most local reporters had already left to file their stories.

These were not the first corpses found in the desert near the rundown suburb. Two other victims had been found a short distance away in October 2002; one of them later identified as 16-year-old Gloria Rivas. More recently, residents of nearby Lomas de Poleo had reported finding three more corpses in January 2003.

 

The story took an even stranger turn on Wednesday, February 19, when authorities identified three of the victims. They were 17-year-old Juana Sandoval Reyna, missing since September 23, 2002; 16-year-old Esmeralda Juarez Alarcon, last seen January 8, 2003; and 18-year-old Violeta Alvídrez Barrios, who vanished February 4, 2003. Each girl was last seen alive in downtown Ciudad Juarez. When reporters asked about the fourth victim, police spokesmen abruptly ended the briefing, and refused to acknowledge that there was another body.

That attitude was old news to the residents of Ciudad Juarez, where a mounting toll of brutal homicides had stunned the city--and attracted global attention--during the past decade. Body counts are a touchy subject in Ciudad Juarez. No two sources agree on the death toll of young women. The El Paso Times claims that there are "nearly 340" victims since 1993. Some of the cases have been solved, although unnamed "experts" speculate that "90 or more" may be serial murder victims. But no one seriously claims that one person is responsible for all of the murders.

In fact, police have jailed more than a dozen suspects --the first in 1995. Each new arrest is hailed as a "solution" to the grisly murder spree, but the body count still increases. Many residents and some discouraged investigators now believe that the police themselves may be behind some of the murders. At the very least, many think the police are involved in an ongoing cover-up.

In a society where men cannot be charged with raping their wives and domestic abuse is rarely prosecuted, authorities simply do not take violence against women seriously enough.

Whatever the truth, dozens of deaths remain unexplained, including many that appear to be the design of one or more serial killers who will probably strike again.

This year's death count surpassed 400 this week, fueled by an ongoing war between drug traffickers from Juárez and Sinaloa.  With this as a factor, you have to wonder if the police are really concerned over the deaths of women over a period of so many years.

A decade after the start of the official roster of the dead, only one thing is certain: All females are in danger on the streets of Ciudad Juarez.