The Women of Ciudad Juaréz
Sometimes called the City of the Lost Girls, Juarez is a poor, Mexican border town where hundreds (some say thousands) of women have been raped, tortured and then killed over the past decade. Many of these women work in the town's numerous factories or live there because it is close to the U.S. border, which they can cross for jobs. Amnesty International has urged Mexican authorities to make finding perpetrators a priority. But with an ever-intensifying drug war taking place in the country's poor neighborhoods and a government rife with corruption, little has been done to stop the assault on the women of Ciudad Juaréz. Marisela Ortiz, the coordinator of the non-governmental organization Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (roughly translating to: "May Our Daughters Return Home"), told the Latin American Herald Tribune on Dec. 14 that the murders are largely a result of the "toll of an internal war between the drug trafficking mafias who are fighting to conquer the territory." The date ticker on the group's website reads: "Today is Dec. 18, 2008 and that doesn't solve anything."