The city’s wealthy, who had made a fortune by peddling the desert to foreign corporations, vigorously denied there was any downside to development. They ignored the environmental disaster created by the maquiladoras, just as they denied that Ciudad Juárez had become a major narcotrafficking center. Image became more important than reality; local politicians pressured the Mexican attorney general to issue an edict that legal proceedings could no longer refer to the Ciudad Juárez drug cartel but rather to the cartel of Vicente Carrillo, the drug mafia’s local kingpin.

When the bodies of young women began appearing in the desert around Ciudad Juárez in the early 1990s, few people paid attention. Many were unidentified; having left their families behind in the Mexican countryside, no one here reported them missing. Yet Esther Chavez noticed. A retired accountant who ran a small dress shop, Chavez was a middle class woman who was shocked by the 1993 rape and murder of 13-year old Esperanza Leyva. She started a list, going back months through newspapers to note 13 similar cases. By the summer of 1996 she had documented 86 cases, most of them young women who worked in the maquiladoras. Some had been raped, many mutilated.

As Chavez’ list grew, she raised the voice of alarm, leading marches, writing editorials, pressuring maquiladoras to increase security and the police to get serious about the investigation. She finally closed her shop to dedicate all her time to the struggle to defend the women of Ciudad Juárez. In 1999 she opened Casa Amiga, a crisis center for women who have suffered rape or domestic violence.

Yet few in positions of power wanted to listen to Chavez. Or if they heard, they didn’t care. Maquiladora managers refused to accept any responsibility for the deaths of their young employees. The bosses at a General Motors-affiliated maquiladora even refused to let workers take up a collection to help the family of a murdered co-worker pay burial expenses. Politicians were no better. The state governor at the time claimed the deaths were part of “the social cost of modernization.” The state attorney general blamed the victims, suggesting that the women put themselves in harm's way by dressing provocatively and frequenting unsavory nightclubs after work–the length of their skirts had provoked their death. The state prosecutor even suggested that the solution to crime was for people to stay home so they wouldn’t become victims. “If you go out in the rain you’ll get wet,” he warned.

Chavez had little patience with such attitudes. “These are people that talk like stupid old priests from the middle ages,” she says. She recalls how officials tried to blame one young woman’s death on exposure. “They said she died of hypothermia. That’s true, but she’d been stripped and tied up. That’s more than hypothermia, it’s murder. But they don’t want to call it that because it’s bad publicity for Ciudad Juárez.”

The police have arrested some suspects in connection with the killings, but activists worry the ones in jail are at best scapegoats for official inaction. In 1995, an Egyptian chemist named Omar Sharif, a man with a 25-year history of sex crimes in the U.S. before he found his way to Ciudad Juárez, was arrested and initially charged with the murders of nine women. Yet as Sharif remained in prison, the killings continued. In 1996, police arrested a dozen members of a gang called “The Rebels,” charging that they were paid by Sharif to carry out murders and thus disprove that the jailed Egyptian was the one responsible. In 1999, police arrested four bus drivers who also claimed they were paid by Sharif. They later recanted their testimony, saying they were tortured by police into confessing.

The bodies of eight young women were found in a vacant lot near the city center in November 2001, an apparent change in modus operandi. Earlier victims had been discovered on the outskirts of town. Chavez says the location of the eight bodies–directly across the street from the headquarters of the maquiladora association and near where President Vicente Fox delivered a speech promising to solve the murders–was not accidental. “They’re making fun of the authorities and the community, reminding us of the impunity with which they operate,” she says.

Following the uproar over the eight bodies, police arrested two more men, who in turn claimed their confessions were coerced under torture, something activists have no trouble believing.

“The police have not done a professional, serious job of investigating the killings. They now have equipment to do DNA testing but they can’t figure out how to make it work,” says Graciela de la Rosa, a sociologist who directs a health education program in the city’s poor neighborhoods. “The police have no professional vision of their work, but rather an attitude of submission to power. It’s the ones in power who decide what the police will do and what the limits are to their investigations.”

According to the president of the Council of Bishops of the Methodist Church of Mexico, the situation in Ciudad Juárez is a scandal for the entire country. “It starts with this machismo, this aggression against women, and then on top of that there’s the laziness and lack of responsibility of the authorities, which is part of the culture of impunity,” says Graciela Alvarez, the bishop of Mexico City and the first woman elected a Methodist bishop in Latin America. “Because the victims are women, there is no prompt or correct investigation. Simply because they are women.”

Some activists in Ciudad Juárez even suggest that a group of police officers may be involved in the killings, though they admit they have no evidence. Others suggest the killings are not the work of one man or group of men, but rather the random work of many men, perhaps turned at random into sexual psychopaths by the altered gender relations that Ciudad Juárez has provoked. Although they remain poor, most of the women who’ve migrated to the city and obtained maquiladora jobs come from rural environments where women didn’t work outside the house. Now they earn more money, in many cases, than the men in their families. De la Rosa and Chavez say this transformation of traditional power relations is one ingredient in the city’s high levels of domestic violence. Both wonder if it’s also sufficient to convert several men, their machismo threatened, into killers.

The September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States brought significantly heightened security to the border area. Yet a year-end meeting between Tom Ridge, director of the U.S. Office of Homeland Security, and Mexican National Security Advisor Adolfo Aguilar Zinser did not include the murders on its agenda. Squads from the Mexican army and the Texas National Guard were deployed along the border, and Mexico agreed to spend millions of dollars on high-tech databases and passport-screening contraptions, all in an effort to catch Middle Eastern terrorists along the border. Yet the funds and political will necessary to catch the gender terrorists in Ciudad Juárez remained lacking.

The arrests made to date have not convinced young women in the city that the danger has passed. According to de la Rosa, the killings have left young women afraid. “There is lots of fear here, and it never goes away,” she says. Twenty-year old maquiladora worker Yolanda Acevedo says she’s afraid of strangers, doesn’t go out on the city’s streets alone, and locks her small shack with a padlock from the inside at night. “If there’s a strange noise at night, I huddle with my baby daughter and pray it’s not the people killing the women,” she says.

De la Rosa has worked for years in popular education programs, and more often than not the maquiladoras have refused her requests to talk with the women inside about health issues. She compares the situation of women in Ciudad Juárez with that of Afghan women. “We have a lot of people here who are like the Taliban,” she told me. “They don’t make us wear burkas, but they kill us. They kill women. It’s part of the despotism of the border region. They also don’t want to let us educate ourselves, to let us into factories and educate women. They say we might organize unions, and they’re deathly afraid of authentic unions.”

The greed of Ciudad Juárez’ wealthy elite caused a lot of today’s problems, de la Rosa argues. “The business class here was so ambitious about getting even richer that they never bothered to develop a rational vision of economic expansion,” she says. “There was no planning, so the city became a rapidly expanding hole that swallowed the workforce. People started coming from all over the country to this inhospitable stretch of desert. They knew no one here, but Ciudad Juárez offered them work, along with cheap consumerism. By earning enough money to buy blue jeans or cheap radios from Taiwan, they felt they’d made it to the first world.”

According to Carlos Vazquez, director of a church-sponsored community center in Ciudad Juárez’ grimy Independencia neighborhood, the quality of life in the city should serve as a warning that unplanned growth is a Faustian bargain. “We’ve had maquiladoras here for 35 years, and many of the families in this neighborhood arrived back then at the start of the maquiladora boom. Yet look around at how they live,” he instructed me, waving his arm at the shacks and simple block houses. “What’s changed since they moved here? Not much. The plants were supposed to resolve the problem of poverty. But poverty is still here. And in many families today there are three or four people working in the maquiladoras. They work hard, and yet the family just survives.”

Vazquez isn’t opposed to the maquiladoras, but argues that the irrational, frenetic way they grew in Ciudad Juárez precluded any prudent discussion of how they could best become part of the border economy. Their lack of sustainability as a model of development struck home in 2001 as the recession in the north, along with improved trade relations between the U.S. and China, brought the closure of several maquiladoras and cutbacks at others. Some 68,000 maquiladora workers in Ciudad Juárez–a fifth of the maquiladora workforce here–lost their jobs.

For many who came here in search of work, the future looks bleak. Luz María Marquez lives in a shack a stone’s throw from the fence that marks the border with the U.S. She lost her job putting together telephone operator consoles a year ago when the factory where she worked laid off half its workforce. Today she and her husband, who also lost his job at the same plant, sell bread around the neighborhood. Under the watchful eye of an Immigration and Naturalization Service officer that keeps watch in his car on the other side of the fence, they barely survive. “I can’t go back home to [the Mexican state of] Durango, for there’s even less work there,” says the 20-year old mother of two. “And they won’t let me cross to the other side. So I guess we’ll stay here. I don’t know how we’ll make it, but what other choice do we have?”

Going back home is simply not an option for many of the urban migrants. After eight years of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the countryside is in even worse shape than when the migrants left. Some once-rich agricultural areas are rapidly losing their populations to Mexican cities and the U.S. “They could go home, but to what? The countryside is destroyed,” says de la Rosa. “And there are no concrete proposals to reactivate agriculture. There is no infrastructure, no water, and there’s unfair competition from foreign agricultural products. There may be ways to solve those problems, but the government has no will to do so. So no one is going home from here.”

Chavez says laid-off maquiladora workers come to Casa Amiga every day hoping for job leads. Many try to get work as domestic servants. Others end up working as prostitutes in a city that has more brothels than schools. “When their other options run out, it’s the only place they can get hired,” Chavez says. “It’s a dangerous environment, and many women get addicted to alcohol and drugs there. But if they haven’t fed their kids all day, what other choices do they have?”

María Sagraria Gonzalez has no choices. The 17-year old Catholic catechist, who directed the choir at her local parish, disappeared on April 16, 1998, on her way home from her job at a maquiladora.

“She never went anywhere except straight home. She got off work at 3:30 and by 5 was getting off the bus and walking in the front door,” says her mother, Paula Flores, sitting in the family’s simple home in Rancho Anapre, a dusty barrio on the western outskirts of the city. “At 5 that day I was standing in the door watching for her, but she never arrived.”

Thirteen days later, Gonzalez’ mutilated body was discovered in the desert.

As she encountered official indifference to her daughter’s fate, Flores helped form a group of mothers of the dead and disappeared. They painted black crosses on a pink background on utility poles around the city to remind young women of the ever present danger. They pressured authorities, putting up a cross in front of the local prosecuting attorney’s office to remind officials of the unsolved cases.

“The authorities have to be covering up somehow,” she told me. “Usually when there’s a murder they find the killer. But with our daughters they are always unable to figure it out.”

Flores says her faith has been tried by the experience. “When this happened to María Sagraria, I called out to God, asking where God was when this happened. We read in the Bible that God could make the lame walk and the blind see. So how could God permit so many daughters to be killed? Maybe it’s too much to ask that God would appear at the moment of an assassination and stop it from happening. Maybe that would be too much to ask. . .”

Flores and her family migrated to Ciudad Juárez in 1995 from Durango. Most of the family got jobs in maquiladoras. “Maybe we never should have come,” she now admits. “We were poor there but we were together, a complete family. I’d much rather be poor and have María Sagraria still with me.”