Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

The Women of Juarez

The phenomenon of the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, called in Spanish feminicidio ("feminicide") involves the violent deaths of hundreds of women and girls since 1993 in the northern Mexican region of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, a border city across the Rio Grande from the U.S. city of El Paso, Texas. As of February 27, 2005, the number of murdered women in Ciudad Juárez since 1993 is estimated to be more than 370.

After surveying 155 killings out of 340 documented between 1993 and 2003, a government committee found that roughly half were prompted by motives like robbery and gang wars, while a little more than a third involved sexual assault.

The murders of women and girls in Ciudad Juárez since 1993 have received international attention, primarily due to perceived government inaction in preventing violence against women and girls and bringing perpetrators to justice.

Nature of female homicides

Evidence suggests that a specific group of women and girls are being targeted in Ciudad Juárez. The victims share common characteristics, and there are many similarities in the violent crimes committed against them. Most of the victims are young women who come from impoverished backgrounds and work in maquiladoras, as factory workers, in other sectors of the informal economy, or are students. In addition, many victims share common physical attributes, including dark skin, slender physique, and dark, shoulder-length hair. In terms of the crimes, similarities across cases include the rape, torture and mutilation of the victims.

Homicide statistics

There are various media reports with different numbers ranging from hundreds to thousands of female homicides in the Ciudad Juárez region. For this reason, Amnesty International reports, "Inadequate official data on the crimes committed in Chihuahua, particularly accurate figures on the exact number of murders and abductions of girls and women, has led to disputes around the issues that obscure the quest for justice."

According to Amnesty International, as of February 2005, more than 370 young women and girls had been murdered in the cities of Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua. More recently, prosecutors from the state of Chihuahua reported that in 2010, 270 women were killed within the state, of these murders 247 occurred in Juárez. In 2011, Chihuahua's Attorney General, Carlos Manuel Salas, announced during a briefing in August 2011 that 222 women had been killed in Chihuahua since January of that year. Of these 222 murders, 130 of them occurred in Ciudad Juárez. In total, more than 300 women were murdered in the city in 2011.

A study was conducted in 2008 on the Feminicide Database 1993–2007 at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte which documented incidents of feminicide that occurred in Ciudad Juárez from 1993–2007. Of the various different kinds of murders that were analyzed, the study found two common patterns in the data which were classified as intimate feminicide and systemic sexual feminicide. Intimate feminicide refers to women who were killed by men that were close to them. According to the study, intimate feminicide accounted for 30.4% of the murders of women and girls in Juárez from 1993–2007. Systematic sexual feminicide refers to systematic patterns in the killing of women and children including kidnapping, sexual violence, torture, and body abandonment in areas such as desert areas, garbage dumps, and sewage ditches among others. According to the study, systemic sexual feminicide accounted for 31.8% of the murders of women in Juárez from 1993–2007.

Total number of homicides in Juárez

According to Molly Molloy, a research librarian and professor at New Mexico State University (also founder and maintainer of "Frontera List", a long-running mailing list dedicated to information and discussion about issues in the U.S.-Mexico border), the situation in Juárez is one of "impunity regardless of gender". She states that "female murder victims have never comprised more than 18 percent of the overall number of murder victims in Ciudad Juárez, and in the last two decades that figure averages at less than 10 percent. That's less than in the United States, where about 20 to 25 percent of the people who are murdered in a given year are women".