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INSIGHT
INSIGHT
Aired June 10, 2003 - 17:00:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JONATHAN MANN, CNN ANCHOR: Bodies at the border. In one Mexican town, impoverished women by the thousands come to make their living in the clothing industry. Hundreds have turned up raped, mutilated and dead.
Hello and welcome.
The people of Ciudad Juarez have invented a word you won't find in any Spanish dictionary, femicilio (ph). It English, you might translate it as femicide (ph), the murder of women.
The truth is, there is no easy way to describe what's 7going on in that city. For 10 years now, women have been disappearing. Some never turn up. Others do reappear, their dead bodies dumped like garbage, showing evidence of abuse and mutilation.
The police have investigated, arrested and convicted suspects, but the killings continue. On our program today, the years of murder in Ciudad Juarez.
CNN's Harris Whitbeck begins our look.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HARRIS WHITBECK, CNN MEXICO CITY BUREAU CHIEF (voice-over): Miriam Alfaro Luna (ph) is scared every time she leaves her house for school. She lives in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Less than two miles from El Paso, Texas, sister border cities that are a world apart.
While El Paso has the 5th lowest murder rate in the United States, Juarez is considered the most violent city in Mexico. The murder rate for women doubles that for men.
Miriam's (ph) sister Brenda is one of those statistics; 5-1/2 years ago, Brenda took the same route Miriam (ph) takes to go to school to get to her housemaids job. She never made it to work. Her family never saw her alive again.
Brenda was kidnapped, sexually tortured and murdered. Her body found in the desert three weeks later.
Each of these crosses represents a victim like Brenda, more than 300 women murdered in Juarez in the last 10 years. 89 of those cases have been classified as sexual murders. State and federal authorities have explored and discarded several theories about the murders. The latest investigation theory, that women were being killed for their organs, has not been proven. Most of the recovered bodies just skeletons.
Other theories that the women were killed during the production of snuff films or during Satanic rituals have been dismissed by investigators, but the fact that no motive or killer has been found for most of the cases is distressing to the victim's families.
Maria Esther, Miriam (ph) and Brenda's mother, still bears the emotional and physical scars of her daughter's murder. She regularly suffers panic attacks that cause her to black out. Last time it happened, she fell against a hot stove, severely burning her hands.
If she knew her daughter's killer were found, she says, it would be easier.
"The people in charge of justice here need to do more," she adds. "When I was looking for my daughter, I asked for help and never got any."
In fact, she got so little help, it took Maria Esther five years to recover her daughter's body to give it a proper burial. The authorities kept it, saying they weren't sure it was in fact Brenda Alfaro.
"Come back tomorrow," she says they told her. "Bring back more documents. That's how they treated me for so long."
To victim's rights activists, the handling of Brenda Alfaro's case is symptomatic of the authorities lack of interest in solving the murders, official apathy that they claim has led to so many more murders.
"It's like watching a movie over and over," she says. "A young girl disappears on her way to or from work or school. Three weeks later, a body turns up. Eventually, it is identified as the disappeared girl. It's the same thing always."
The state has named a special prosecutor to handle the cases, but only a handful have been solved.
"These are the most difficult type of homicide to solve," he says. "We have to be honest. There is a good chance many of these cases will never be solved."
(on camera): But the victim's survivors say they will not find peace until they find answers, and they say it's up to the state and now federal authorities to provide them. But they doubt that will happen. They say the authorities aren't interested in looking for them.
(voice-over): Victim's rights activists say there is no real political will to solve the murders.
"It is machismo, misogyny," she says. "These are gender crimes. Crimes that are committed because they are women. And the authorities do not want to accept that."
Former investigators say the special prosecutors office is overwhelmed and not properly trained.
The special prosecutor hired a former FBI investigator to consult. While he says progress has been made, mistakes have also been made.
ROBERT KESSLER (ph), CRIME EXPERT: In recent years, again, there's been some mistakes made. The forensic expertise is not here to the extent that you might find it in, say, some of the major cities in the United States.
WHITBECK: Mexican officials recognize those mistakes have damaged the public's trust, trust they say they need to solve the murders.
"We've asked for patience," he says. "There have to be witnesses to what happened. If witnesses do not come forward, our task will be very difficult."
The FBI office across the border in El Paso says the environment in Juarez makes it difficult to stop the murders.
FREDERICK CRAWFORD (ph), FBI: The atmosphere of impunity that's allowed to exist because of the torture, the kidnappings, the murders, the disappearances associated with the drug trade, allow for all of these freelancers, all these other psychopaths, to operate, because they understand that there's not likely to be a meaningful police investigation that's going to detect them.
WHITBECK: The FBI has offered help and training to their Mexican colleagues.
CRAWFORD (ph): What pains me is that there are mothers and fathers over there that know that their daughter has been murdered or is missing, and no one is doing anything meaningful to find those and bring them to justice.
WHITBECK: But the murders continue as they have for the last decade, approximately more than two a month.
And for many women here, living in Juarez is living in a nightmare.
Harris Whitbeck, CNN, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
MANN: We take a break. When we come back, a closer look at all of those cases.
Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MANN: Ciudad Juarez has long made its money supplying Americans with things they can't find at home: liquor during prohibition, narcotics today, and cheap labor in the hundreds of factories that serve the U.S. market. The murders there are hardly a secret, but men and women keep coming.
Welcome back.
Activists and outsiders don't have a lot of faith in the city police. Even the courts have found serious problems with some of their work on this case. And after 10 years of killings, the case has hardly been solved.
Joining us now from New York is Ed Vuillamy, of the British newspaper, "The Observer," a journalist who visited the city and was appalled by the killings.
Thanks so much for being with us.
Let me ask you first of all about all of those women. Did they have something in common? Did the men or people who killed them have something in common in the way they went about it?
ED VUILLAMY, "THE OBSERVER": Well, as regards the men who are doing these things, or the gangs of men doing these things, of course we're supposed to not know who they are, although like many people in Juarez, one can develop a pretty good idea of what sort of category of people they might be. We can move on to that.
As regards the young women themselves, yes they do for the most part have a great deal in common. They are, as we said, they're young. They have come in variably from the south or interior of Mexico to work in what are called the maquiladoras. These are bonded factories where mainly American companies can employ way below what anyone would consider a fair wage and have staff literally across the Rio Grande, as though it were in the United States, duty free.
They, as I think one of the activists on your item told me, they provide the meat for the killers. Their response, also, by the way, has been fairly callous to the killings. They're not doing anything to help.
The people, the men, who are involved, you're item mentioned various theories to do with Satanism or organ trade or whatever. My feeling, and nobody really knows, is that this is a grotesque sport. This is -- I mean, to use the word crime for these incidents is to be rather generous. I mean, this is malefaction, unimaginable violence against young women.
I always think of these things as, you've got to think inside their heads. These are the last days or weeks of their lives that this is happening to them. It's a sick sport, in my view.
As regards the people who are doing it, I -- my investigations lead me to the conclusion that it is at best people who are known to the authorities but not prosecuted or, at worst, the authorities may even be complicit in some way.
MANN: No one seems terribly impressed with the police work. What is so wrong-headed about what the police are doing?
VUILLAMY: Well, and rightly so. I have just for the small part that I can add to this from my own knowledge, which is only what I've worked on, direct experience of an attempt by the authorities to conceal the existence of three bodies which were found just before I last paid a visit to a napra (ph), a colonia (ph), a shanty, above Juarez. These were recently recovered and handed over to the police, take by the police. And when I asked the authorities about the statistics for January, which was that month, the answer was none, and they were very insistent that there were none (AUDIO GAP).
This leads one to think that there is something worse than just ineptitude going on. There is also some sort of concealment or cover-up going on.
MANN: Federal authorities, though, have intervened. They're looking into this. Has that made any difference?
VUILLAMY: Well, they have -- the federal authorities don't have jurisdiction over murder. That's a state crime, which leaves it in the hands of the devolved -- and I must be careful what I say -- the not necessarily straightforwardly, clean, working state police authorities.
One of the other things which even former police investigators and forensic experts have left in disgust, left the service in disgust at what's going on have told me, is that we've got to remember the entwinement between authorities in these places and the narcotraficantes, the vast and powerful drug cartels.
Juarez is now the main corridor of hard drugs, cocaine in particular, into the United States from Mexico and points south. And no one who has worked in the police or government service will tell you other than that there is a very close entwinement between political and judicial authority in Juarez and these drug cartels, who have taken over in effect a sort of shadow government, certainly, obviously, the shadow economy of the town.
MANN: Ed Vuillamy, I'm going to cut you off there, because we want to hear from the government now.
Joining us now on the line is Manuel Esparza of the Special Prosecutors Office in Chihuahua state.
I don't know if you heard what Ed Vuillamy, of "The Observer," said, but he repeated something that many people say about Chihuahua. They say that narco-traffickers are very, very influential. They have the police frightened if not actually paid off, and that there really is no effective law enforcement. Certainly there's been no effective approach to all of these murders.
What do you tell people who have that suspicion?
MANUEL ESPARZA, SPECIAL PROSECUTORS OFFICE: Well, one thing I can tell you for sure is, I don't know what numbers they're handing you regarding our cases, but all around the world it seems that everyone thinks that we have over 300 murders that have occurred here in Juarez, and that's completely false.
That's not accurate at all. We've had 74 cases regarding sexual homicide in the city of Juarez dating back to 1993 and up to today, which is June 10, 2003. In a 10 year span, we've had 74 sexual homicide cases in Juarez involving around 89 victims.
Out of those cases that we've had, 25 of them have (AUDIO GAP) have been solved. One thing I can tell you is we don't handle any drug cases. We're not involved with drug traffickers. That's something that is no jurisdiction for us. That's part of the federal jurisdiction here in Mexico. And certainly the cases that we handle are not involved with drug trafficking at all.
MANN: Well, you raised two issues, so let me approach both of them. When it comes to numbers, some of the women, some of the activists, say that in fact when women disappear in Juarez and those close to them go to the police, the police treat it as a disappearance -- that unless a body is found, and even sometimes if a body is found, unless it is positively identified, the women don't count as murder victims. There's terrible trouble even getting the bodies retrieved for their families to bury them properly. People speak of that taking years.
So the disparity in numbers could simply be that the police are not reporting these crimes, which is in fact what people are saying. And they're also saying the same thing when it comes to the drug traffickers, that the influence that they have over local police is virtually complete.
ESPARZA: I can tell you one thing. The situation with the murder of women here in Juarez is inaccurate regarding the cases that we handle.
You have to -- I don't know if you're aware of this, but we have three homicide units working in Juarez. One of them is our special prosecution unit, which handles sexual homicide, and those particular cases in a 10 year span add up to 75.
We have another special prosecution unit that handles organized crime homicide. That would be handled by the state authorities also, because we're dealing with homicide, not much drug trafficking. And we also have the regular homicide unit.
We're talking about different motives in the murders. If we add up all the motives, all of the women that have died in violent circumstances over a 10 years span, I guess they would add up to 300-and-some victims. But the cases that have drawn international and worldwide attention are the sexual homicides that have occurred in Juarez, and those cases only add u to 74.
All other figures would rest in regular domestic violence homicide, drug-related homicide, what we call situational (UNINTELLIGIBLE) homicide. Basically, not sexual homicide.
MANN: You're working very hard to try to dispel some rumors, so let me ask you about one that is particularly startling and hear whether there's any truth to it.
There are press accounts which speak of people finding bodies of women who have had all of their internal organs removed. Is that going on? And have you figured out why?
MANN: Well, I can tell you one thing. Up until now, we have -- every person that dies under violent circumstances here in Juarez undergoes a medical exam through the medical examiners office.
In all of the 74 cases that our unit has handled, if we find that we have a victim that was viciously murdered or if we only find the remains, there has been an exam performed on those bodies, and up until now we haven't found any evidence of organ trafficking.
MANN: Manuel Esparza of the Special Prosecutors Office, we thank you so much for talking with us. Our thanks as well to Ed Vuillamy of "The Observer."
We have to take a break now. When we come back, a closer look at the crime scene, the city of Ciudad Juarez.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MANN: The Rio Grande is a stark dividing line for much of the border between the U.S. and Mexico. It is the river that divides Ciudad Juarez from the U.S. town of El Paso. The two cities have shared a culture and geography for several hundred years, but on paper they couldn't be more different.
Welcome back.
El Paso is considered one of the safest cities in America. Juarez is considered one of Mexico's most dangerous. But Juarez may suggest something about Mexico as a whole.
Joining us now from Mexico City is Mary Jordan of "The Washington Post."
Thanks so much for being with us.
I guess even without these killings, Juarez wouldn't really be a happy community or a good place to raise your kids.
MARY JORDAN, "THE WASHINGTON POST": Well, it's a huge city. It's in fact the largest city on the border. It's got 1.5 million people and there are upper middle class neighborhoods, there's Blockbuster Videos and nice restaurants.
But the part of Juarez that we hear in the newspaper and on television is about the seedy, very violent, very, very poor part.
In the 1990's, when the city was growing by 10 percent a year, hundreds and hundreds of people a day were streaming in there setting up little shacks in the desert. I mean, Juarez is in the desert. And they would just put pieces of cardboard and aluminum together and make a house right in the sand.
MANN: I would suppose that's part of the problem here, that in any city it's hard to fight crime when so much of the population is transient and knows so little about its neighbors.
JORDAN: Well, that's key. And think about it. I mean, it's where the first world meets the third world. If you can just get across that fence, you can get a job. But if not, you're going to stay here in a shack with no running water and at best if you work 10 hours you can get about $4.
You somehow break through the fence, you cross the river, and you can get a $10 an hour job.
MANN: Two things, though, do cross the fence. One of them is drugs, the other is clothing. Do those two industries exist in parallel universes that don't interact or do the people in each of them know the people in the other?
JORDAN: Well, that's a good question. I mean, many people say that they think that the same immunity that allows drug trafficking to flourish in Juarez has allowed the killers of these women to go free, and we don't know if the police are involved. But we do know that the police have been extremely inept in keeping human smuggling, drug trafficking and other crime down, and it's just a place where, if you commit a crime, you're almost guaranteed that you're not going to get caught.
MANN: What about the political authorities, the people that the police work for?
JORDAN: I would say that Mexican politics is very, very complicated, but in Juarez, it's outright ugly.
It's not uncommon during election day that there's actually fist fights in the street.
It is more like the wild west than in other parts of Mexico. I mean, Mexico City is a cosmopolitan place with nice French restaurants and limousines and then you have Cancun, where Europeans come to go to the beach.
Well then you have the border, and Juarez is the poster child for the border. It's a place where politicians fight. When someone is declared the winner, the other person says, "Oh, no you're not," and then there's recalls and it goes to court. It's a very politically divided town. No one party has a majority.
And one of the problems with this murder case is that the governor of the state is from a different party than the president, President Vicente Fox. And until very recently, and we're just talking weeks -- and this murder has gone on for years -- he would not let federal authorities into the city even though they were better equipped to deal with organized crime and serious crime.
MANN: We don't want to suggest and I don't think you want to suggest that all of Mexico is like the worst districts of Juarez, but is there something here that Mexico should be learning from? Is this the new face of Mexico as globalization changes its demographics, as its population becomes more transient, as the narcotics industry more deeply entrenches itself?
JORDAN: No, I don't think so. I think Mexico's beauty is in its complexity. There are places like Monterey, Mexico, that when you fly in, you think you're in any city in the first world. That's growing by leaps and bounds.
There are many parts of Mexico. There's the indigenous population, where they make beautiful crafts, where it is safe. But then there is the border, and the border is growing.
So yes, there are more and more people going to the border area where rule of law is to say the least weak, where the police doesn't function well, and there are several million people up there who are kind of huddling on the border, many of them trying to get into the United States illegally or trying to make a fast buck in some illicit business. It's only one part of Mexico.
MANN: On that note, Mary Jordan, prize-winning correspondent for "The Washington Post," thank you so much for talking with us.
JORDAN: You're welcome.
MANN: That's INSIGHT for this day. I'm Jonathan Mann. The news continues.
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