The femicide in Ciudad Juárez is a story made of extreme violence against women for different
reasons, by different actors, under different circumstances, and following different behavioural
patterns. All within a gender discrimination frame based on the idea that women are inferior,
interchangeable and disposable according to the patriarchal hierarchy still present in Mexico, but
strongly reinforced by a sort of conspiracy of silence provoked either by the high impunity rate, the
governmental incompetence to solve the crimes, or the general indifference of the population. It is
the story of hundreds of kidnapped, raped, in many cases tortured, and murdered young women in
the border between Mexico and the United States. The murders first came into light in 1993 and up
to now young women continue to “disappear” without any hope of bringing the perpetrators to
justice, stopping impunity, convicting the assassins, and bringing justice to the families of the
deceased girls and women.
The main questions about femicide in Ciudad Juárez seem to be: why were they brutally
assassinated?, why most of the crimes have not been solved yet?, why and how is Ciudad Juárez
different from other border cities with the same characteristics?, which powers are behind those
crimes in a city that implies mainly women as its labor force, and which has the lowest
unemployment rate in the whole country? But there are also many other questions dealing more
with the context, the Juarences’ lifestyles, the eventual hidden powers behind the crimes, the
possible murderers’ reasons, the response of the local civil society, or the international community
actions to fight against femicide there, among many other things, that are still waiting for an answer
and that this paper will ‘narrate’ in order to provide a holistic panorama for the readers. But above
all there is the need to remember that every single woman or girl assassinated there had a name, an
identity, a family, a story to be told time after time and as many times as necessary, in order to
avoid accepting these crimes just as statistics, as cold numbers that might make us forget the human
tragedy that has been flagellating the city since 1993. We must remember as well that their deaths
express gender oppression, the inequality of the relations between what is male and what is female,
a manifestation of domination, terror, social extermination, patriarchal hegemony, social class and
impunity.
The city is the perfect mirror where all the contradictions of globalization get reflected. It is there
where all the globalization evils are present and survive by sucking their women’s blood. It is a
city where some concepts such as gender, migration and power are closely related with a negative
connotation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unibo.it/oai:amsdottorato.cib.unibo.it:735 |
| Date | 27 May 2008 |
| Creators | Torres Trucios, Elvia Ernestina <1972> |
| Contributors | Pazzagli, Ivo Giuseppe |
| Publisher | Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna |
| Source Sets | Università di Bologna |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Thesis, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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