Esther Chavez, a Voice for Ciudad Juárez's Murdered Women, Dies at 76

Esther Chavez, a Mexican women's rights activist who fought long and hard to stop violence against women in Mexico's Ciudad Juárez, passed away last week from a long-term illness.

Chavez started northern Mexico's first shelter for women victims of violence, Casa Amiga. She spoke out frequently against the lack of government action to stop Ciudad Juárez's brutal femicides and criticized the overall inability of the Mexican government to protect women.

La Jornada, a Mexican daily, credits Chavez with bringing the plight of women in Ciudad Juárez to the attention of the international community.

Since 1993, over five hundred young women have been brutally murdered in this border city, most of them sexually assaulted and tortured before being left for dead in cotton fields or parking lots.  Recently, over a dozen women, all in their teens or early twenties, have been abducted -- they've simply disappeared off the city streets without a trace. Speculations fly that the girls have been sold into prostitution in the U.S., by either Juárez gangs, corrupt police, or both.

The situation in Juárez has reached horror-movie heights. Not only have hundreds of women been abducted in broad daylight, brutally raped and tortured, and abandoned, but the state has shown virtually no interest in bringing justice to their murders. Public protests in which women marched to demand justice for Juárez's murdered girls and widespread condemnation of the crimes in Mexico and abroad generated little or no response from the Mexican government (Vicente Fox famously admonished the international press in 2005 for making too big a deal out of the 300 or 400 unresolved murders).

Chavez carefully chronicled the girls' deaths, including their names, where and how they were killed, where the bodies were found, and where the murders were made public. Casa Amiga became a center for information about the Juárez femicides, where murders of women were recorded and investigated as much as possible. The careful research of Chavez and El Paso journalist Diana Washington Valdez made available detailed information about how many women have died, when, and where, and ultimately helped pave the way to a resolution from the Inter-American Human Rights Court accusing Mexico's government of human rights violations and holding the government responsible for the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez.

The case before the Inter-American court was presented by the mothers of three girls killed in the "cotton field killings" of 2001.  These mothers found no justice in the Mexican court system and took their concerns to the Inter-American court, where they won.  The Mexican government must make a series of profound changes to its criminal investigations in these cases, take drastic measures to protect women, and pay the victims' families $800,000.

Yet looking at the history of crimes in Ciudad Juárez, it's hard to believe that the Mexican government will lift a finger to protect women. In the name of Esther Chavez and her struggles for Juárez's women, I urge you to sign this petition drafted by Nuestras Hijas de Regreso á Casa (We Want Our Daughters Back) demanding the Mexican government take action to protect the women of Juárez.

Photo: Jim Winstead