Early last fall, authorities in the gray-brown factory city of Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, were prepared to declare a triumph. But there were no bodies.
Then, on November 6, 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. The next day, bulldozers uncovered five more. Authorities soon announced that the drivers had confessed to 11 murders of women over the previous 15 months. But after years of false starts and dubious arrests, few in Ciudad Juarez — including the families of the victims — were willing to believe that police had caught the real killers.
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. More than 60 percent of maquiladora workers are women and girls, many as young as 13 or At least 75 young women, many of them factory workers and most fitting the same description — slim, pretty, long dark hair — have been raped and murdered here since , according to most accounts.
Scores more are missing. Yet young women keep arriving, even as the city remains seemingly unable to protect them. Born of desperation and outrage, many of the groups are made up largely of housewives, mothers, and grandmothers, some of them relatives and friends of the murdered. Most have few means and little time, given the demands of tending to their families. Still, the women have become a force in Juarez. They have kept the murders in the news, drawn attention from human-rights groups in Mexico and the United States, and pressured President Vicente Fox to send federal investigators to look into the cases.
