In 1993, the bodies of young women – many showing signs of rape, beatings, and mutilation – began appearing in the desert on the outskirts of Juárez, Mexico, a city of 1.4 million just across the border from El Paso. This was the beginning of an epidemic of brutal rape and murder aimed at Juárez’s young, poor women.
Over the past twelve years, nearly 400 women have been killed in the cities of Juárez and Chihuahua, 250 miles south. Of these, at least 137 of the victims were sexually assaulted prior to their murders. Because of the similarities in these “sexually motivated” murders, some suspect that they are the work of one or more serial killers who prey on young female students, store clerks, and assembly-plant workers. Their victims, some as young as 13 years old, were kidnapped, raped, strangled, mutilated, and buried in shallow graves in the desert or at construction sites and railroad yards around the city. Many other women have died at the hands of husbands, boyfriends, drug traffickers and other criminals. Very few have been punished for these crimes – they are murders that flourish in a city where everyone knows that you can kill a woman with impunity.