For thirty years, women have been killed or disappeared in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez. More than 2300 femicides have already been counted. But the investigation is not progressing.
“NZZ Accent”: Ciudad Juárez: City of Dead Women
authors
David Vogel and Marlen Oehler
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In this podcast episode:
62-year-old Norma Andrade remembers walking to school alone as a child. This stopped at the beginning of the 1990s, because more and more girls and young women disappeared in Ciudad Juárez – most of them between 13 and 18 years old. Andrade’s 17-year-old daughter Alejandra also disappeared. On February 14, 2001, she did not come home from work at the factory.
Alejandra’s body was found seven days later. She had been raped, choked and beaten to death. The DNA of three people was found in traces of blood and semen. But the investigation faltered. And when Alejandra’s job in the factory was occupied just one day after her disappearance, the mother was seized with pure desperation, says South America correspondent Thomas Milz in the new episode of “NZZ Akzent”. Along with other mothers, Norma Andrade founded the organization Nuestras Hijas, Our Daughters.
Norma Andrade told him how poor women on the border with Mexico were viewed as “disposable products,” says Milz. The inaction of the often corrupt authorities, the drug cartels, the opaque role of the security forces, the widespread machismo in Mexican society – all of this creates a climate in which women are not safe.
Violence against women has long gripped all of Mexico, says Milz in the podcast. On average, ten women are murdered every day, eight disappear, half under the age of 20. Norma Andrade’s fight against oblivion, against violence, against inaction seems like a fight against windmills.
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