The dead women of Juárez

Since 1993 over four hundred women have been abducted and murdered in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua (both are in in the state of Chihuahua, north Mexico). Many of the women are brutally beaten and raped before being killed and their bodies dumped in the desert or on a secluded street. Others simply disappear without trace.

When the murders first began to be reported, the authorities were openly discriminatory in their public statements. According to Amnesty, sometimes ‘the women themselves were blamed for their own abduction or murder because of the way they dressed or because they worked in bars at night’.

Often, the victims are young women who work in the region’s maquiladoras. For many impoverished women in Mexico working in these sweatshops is their only option. The assembly plants have been in operation since the 1960s but rapidly spread during the 1990s after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force and created a trading bloc between Canada, the United States and Mexico. Those unfortunate enough to work under sweatshop conditions make clothes for US -based companies such as Levi Strauss and Gap.