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Feminicide: the ciudad juárez crimes

Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city on the border with the USA, has registered over a thousand killings of women in the last fourteen years, although data varies depending on the source. These figures reflect a phenomenon classified as feminicide, a concept coined for the first time in 1992 by two North-American feminist authors (Jill Radford and Diana Russell).

Both authors refer to feminicide as “the preventable death of women”, in the endeavour to find a term stretching beyond the traditional concept of violent actions against women. The Mexican anthropologist and congresswoman Marcela Lagarde also uses the term, defining it as genocide against women.

It is in Mexico that the definition of feminicide first took shape, above all when the Special Commission set up to investigate and prosecute cases of feminicide in the Mexican Republic established that this concept referred to “all crimes against humanity including the repeated killing, kidnapping and disappearance of girls and women in a context of institutional collapse”.

An explanation has been sought for this unceasing wave of crimes in many theories, from implication of the drug trafficking cartels in Ciudad Juárez, prostitution networks or organ trafficking, to sex and death orgies involving men from high-flying political and economic circles.

But we must also mention a number of other potential factors which may be related to these crimes and disappearances. The influx of thousands of immigrant women to this city on the border with the USA, often to work in the factories known as maquilas, employers of a great many of the murdered women, patriarchal violence, economic and social inequality form the context in which most of these women live and move. That’s why the typical murdered women are young, perhaps only girls, workers, who live in precarious circumstances, and whose disappearances are often never even reported given that many of them come from other parts of the country.

In 1998, the Mexican Human Rights Commission (CMDH) issued a series of Recommendations for preventing the killing of women, to which the Mexican State seems to have paid little attention, if the high number of denunciations is anything to go by. In fact, one of the few measures created by the Mexican Government to date is an Investigation Committee, although the victims’ families and non-governmental organisations dedicated to the cause consider that it has, in practice, very limited powers.

A report drawn up by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women appears to corroborate these limitations. This report underlines that investigations into these murders are marked by cases of “obstruction, delays in the search for the disappeared, tampered proof, procedural irregularities, pressure on the victims’ mothers, negligence and complicity among the police and torture to obtain confessions”. And as if this wasn’t bad enough, the victims are often scorned, and even criminalised, and their families prosecuted, accused of damaging the country’s image by demanding justice and bringing this problem to light.

Given this situation, groups of people affected by and aware of this problem call for greater implication by the Mexican Federal Government and the Human Rights Commission, and for the adoption of different measures including the creation of an investigating body to look for the young girls who have disappeared, inclusion in the Penal Code of forced disappearance, ignoring statements obtained from suspects under torture and the creation of a DNA bank for the young girls who have disappeared.

The point is that, not only does the phenomenon continue, but the number of deaths is steadily rising and most crimes remain unsolved. Given this situation, victims’ families and the NGOs which denounce these facts consider that the feminicide existing in Ciudad Juárez overshoots the purely local sphere, due to the fact that it is also found in other countries, to constitute a crime against humanity.

Furthermore, several international institutions have expressed their concern over generalised crimes against women, including the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and other parliaments and governments the world over.

• © 2010 8th Human Rights Film Festival