CIUDAD JUREZ OF DEATH

(On Border Town)

Lenyn A. Lara Bonfil

The number of victims still today vague. The government say it is around 400, but more than
1000 women are still disappeared. We are talking about young poor women; most of them
used to work in the many factories assemblage factories- of Ciudad Jurez, a border city
located in the middle of the desert. This is the dead land/ this is the cactus land, said T. S.
Eliot in The hollow Men; although this is not a question of poetry, the images produced by
those lines are a clear representation of the landscapes where hundreds of bodies have been
found since 1993.
Some say that this massive slaughter is related to home violence; some say it is the
work of serial killers; some even say the government, mainly- that it was the work a serial
killer alone: an Egyptian business men who was arrested and put in jail, where he mysteriously
died. But the murders went on even after this man was dead.
Despite the hundreds of factories in the city, most of its inhabitants suffer from extreme
poverty. Moreover, it is a dangerous city because of the operation of different drug cartels.
Some people think that members of those cartels and even the police are involved in the rape
and assassination of the muertas de Jurez as they are known today. This is a very liable
hypothesis, otherwise, why the government would make up the number of victims? Ciudad
Jurez is nowadays regarded as the most violent city in the world. It started developing as a
result of the trade agreement between Mexico and the United States and Canada more than
20 years ago; once the city reached such grade of industrialization the drug cartels invaded
and expanded through the whole city.
Most of them have been raped, tortured and strangled.
Border Town, the movie about the muertas de Jurez, suggests a net of complicity
which scopes from the public transport drivers to politic issues between El Paso and Ciudad
Jurez. A great number of the women working in the more than two hundred factories come
from distant places. The girl in the movie the one who escapes from her attackers- had left
her hometown in Oaxaca, in Southern Mexico. This fiction depicts the reality of many of those
women, though. Worst of all, they seem to be trapped that death city: their earnings are so low
that they hardly manage to make a living out of such jobs; they are doomed to starve in Ciudad
Jurez, if they go back home, theyll face a worst economic situation, and they could certainly
starve to death.
The money they earn from a whole labor day, is the money a worker earns in one hour
of work in the United States; a considerable amount of the electronic devices and clothes
manufactured by the women in Ciudad Jurez go to that same Country. Poverty and death
renders these women against the wall.