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Unsolved rape and murder cases haunt Mexicans while pressure mounts on the government to put an end to the violence against women, reports Veronica Balderas Iglesias
Discrimination, incompetence and negligence have characterised legal processes related to the killings of women in Juarez, a city in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, bordering on the United States, and rapes, allegedly by soldiers, in the Guerrero state. That the murders in Juarez have not ended terrifies citizens, particularly women, and has made them distrust authorities. Confidence in the Mexican judiciary is also collapsing in the case of the Guerrero rapes. The military has jurisdiction over criminal cases involving crimes by soldiers against civilians, but neither the military nor state prosecutors took steps to preserve crucial evidence against the accused in Guerrero. Furthermore, in both Guerrero and Juarez the women victims are invariably blamed for what has occurred.
Semi-nude female bodies, most of them bearing signs of torture and rape, in some cases burned and with mutilated breasts, have been found since 1993 in Ciudad Juarez. "More than 300 women have been murdered and over 400 have disappeared," human rights lawyer Mario Patron Sanchez, coordinator of Integral Defence at the Human Rights Centre of Mount Tlachinollan, told Al-Ahram Weekly.
Numerous theories have been circulated to explain the mass killings, pointing to drug mafias, to traffickers in human organs and even to a satanic cult. However, the fact is that the murdered women have mostly been workers at Ciudad Juarez's maquiladoras -- factories which produce for- export products -- who earn very low salaries and are forced to work long hours. "In the late 1960s, important economic changes took place in Ciudad Juarez. For over two decades the maquiladoras offered jobs preferentially to women. This situation broke the traditional family structure, in which men provide for their wives and children," the head of Mexico's Commission to Prevent and Punish Violence Against Women in Ciudad Juarez, Guadalupe Morfin told the Weekly. "The cultural change was not accompanied by mechanisms to help the family assimilate the changes and give full support to the female workers. Instead, the unemployed male population started hanging out, drinking alcohol and becoming very violent. The consequences included staggering rises in the rates of separations and divorces," Morfin added.
Back then many unemployed people from other Mexican states and Latin American countries began migrating to Ciudad Juarez in their aim to cross the border and find better opportunities in the United States. "The city was not ready to deal with the situation. There were not enough educational and health services; the infrastructure was inadequate. The conditions though seemed perfect for the drug lords to establish in the area one of Mexico's most powerful cartels," Morfin recalled. "Because of negligence or complicity, the police forces have not provided security to the population, nor have they properly investigated the murders," she added.
A special prosecution office was established in 1998 to investigate the killings, but without positive results. Authorities have even argued that the female victims provoke their own tragedies by wearing revealing clothes, such as mini skirts, going dancing or simply walking in unlit areas.
According to a 2003 special report by Amnesty International, the authorities consider that most of the cases of violence against women in Chihuahua (such as domestic violence and passion crimes) have been investigated and closed; nonetheless only 79 suspects have been convicted and sentenced. "Regarding the killings specifically -- over 700 either murdered or disappeared -- 18 people have been detained but only one has received a sentence," Patron said. "It's also worrying that the people who have been detained until now argue they have been tortured to confess to a crime they maintain they have not committed," the Mexican lawyer further added.
On 9 November 2001 Gustavo Gonzalez Meza, alias "La Foca" or the Seal, and Javier Garcia Uribe, alias "El Cerillo" or the Match, were detained in relation to the murder of eight women. "To support their plea of innocence and torture allegations Gonzalez and Garcia presented a number of medical certificates showing body injuries, and in Gonzalez's case even burns on his genitals. Nonetheless, Gonzalez remained in jail until he was found dead on 8 February 2003 inside his prison cell (official information points out to medical complications after a surgery). Conspicuously his defence lawyer was murdered in 2002," Patron noted.
At the request of Morfin's office, Chihuahua's Governor Patricio Martinez agreed to transfer Garcia from the maximum-security prison located in the state's capital, where he spent two years, to a jail in Ciudad Juarez. "According to article 5 of the state's Penal Code, the suspect has to be judged in the area where the crime took place," Morfin told the Weekly. Garcia will remain in the new facility until psychological studies are carried out and the authorities decide the place in which he'll await his sentence in case of being found guilty. A third man -- so far the only person sentenced in relation to the Juarez killings -- Abdel- Latif Sharif, an Egyptian with US residency, was convicted for one of the first murders, but Morfin pointed out that "the sentence has yet to be finalised."
On 30 January, responding to international pressure, Mexican President Vicente Fox's government named Maria Lopez Urbina as special prosecutor in charge of supervising the investigations into the Ciudad Juarez killings. She will coordinate efforts with Morfin to uncover the truth of what has happened, to seek to repair the psychological damage and to prevent a recurrence of violence. Still, the biggest challenge that they face is to bring to justice those responsible, many of who, simply given the number of cases, must remain at large. It is not helpful that financial resources to adequately investigate the Juarez killings are dwindling. "The main obstacle my office faces in carrying out its job is this year's budget cut as ordered by the Mexican Congress," Morfin told the Weekly.
Like the Juarez killings, and despite having occurred in a far off geographical location and under different circumstances, the Guerrero rape cases also show the deficiencies of the Mexican penal and judicial system. Ines Fernandez and Valentina Rosendo Cantu pressed charges against soldiers who allegedly raped them in a rural area. They both informed the local Indigenous People's Organisation, better known as Mepha'a, of their tragic experience and received support from Patron and other legal advisors.
Montana Costa-Chica, in the Guerrero state, is a region characterised by a heavy military presence. When men go out to work in the fields, they leave their wives home alone. Three soldiers who entered her house without her consent allegedly attacked Ines. Furthermore, the region lacks basic services like drainage and water systems, so often women need to leave their homes to take baths in nearby rivers. Eight soldiers allegedly abused Valentina while she was washing clothes in a stream.
"The suspects should be charged with sexual assault, abuse of authority, torture and infliction of injuries. If convicted they would face a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison. The victims would also receive a monetary sum as compensation," Patron said. The fact, however, that the military has completely taken over investigations of the two cases renders it well nigh impossible for any form of objectivity to be guaranteed.
Daniel Wilkinson from Human Rights Watch told the Weekly that despite not being directly involved in these specific cases, the international body has underlined, "the military justice system is ill-equipped to investigate and prosecute abuse cases. It lacks the independence necessary to carry out reliable investigations and its operations suffer from a general absence of transparency." Local and international human rights activists have failed to force the government to try the cases in civil and not military courts.
As with the cases in Juarez, it is psychological pressure that most heavily takes its toll on the affected community. "Mario Lopez Gutierrez, in charge of the Nineth Military Division has in several occasions publicly declared that women make up stories to protect the real delinquents," Patron noted. He explained that when a woman presses charges the authorities often ask her questions suggesting that she might have given her consent. "If the medical examinations don't show physical aggression, the authorities view it as a sign that the woman is lying. They don't look into other important sources of evidence, such as the witnesses' testimony or psychological tests," the lawyer further added.
In this context, human rights activists and the families of the murdered and raped women lament that the Mexican authorities do not seem to have realised that they must enforce the laws or even modify them in order to ensure justice for the victims. Support should also be given to the governmental bodies and NGOs in charge of uncovering the truth and preventing the recurrence of these violent tragedies. Protecting the criminals, or reacting only to international pressure, clearly shows how weak and inefficient the Mexican penal and judicial system remains, and how vulnerable civilians -- particularly women -- in the country really are.
