The Daughters Of Juarez

Despite the fact that Juarez is a Mexican border city just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, most Americans are unaware that for more than twelve years this city has been the center of an epidemic of horrific crimes against women and girls, consisting of kidnappings, rape, mutilation, and murder, with most of the victims conforming to a specific profile: young, slender, and poor, fueling the premise that the murders are not random. Indeed, there has been much speculation that the killer or killers are American citizens. While some leading members of the American media have reported on the situation, prompting the U.S. government to send in top criminal profilers from the FBI, little real information about this international atrocity has emerged. According to Amnesty International, as of 2006 more than 400 bodies have been recovered, with hundreds still missing. As for who is behind the murders themselves, the answer remains unknown, although many have argued that the killings have become a sort of blood sport, due to the lawlessness of the city itself. Among the theories being considered are illegal trafficking in human organs, ritualistic satanic sacrifices, copycat killers, and a conspiracy between members of the powerful Juárez drug cartel and some corrupt Mexican officials who have turned a blind eye to the felonies, all the while lining their pockets with money drenched in blood. Despite numerous arrests over the last ten years, the murders continue to occur, with the killers growing bolder, dumping bodies in the city itself rather than on the outskirts of town, as was initially the case, indicating a possible growing and most alarming alliance of silence and cover-up by Mexican politicians. The Daughters of Juárez promises to be the first eye-opening, authoritative nonfiction work of its kind to examine the brutal killings and draw attention to these atrocities on the border. The end result will shock readers and become required reading on the subject for years to come.

Duarte's latest novel is based on a string of real-life murders in Ciudad Jurez in the 1990s. Forced out of the house by her alcoholic mother, 13-year-old Evita takes to the streets, glimpsing newspaper columns about the murders, while struggling to survive. Petra, Evita's comely 19-year-old cousin, exchanges the country life for gritty Jurez to raise money for her ailing father. An acquaintance of Petra, Mayela, a 12-year-old Tarahumara Indian, lives in an orphanage where her artistic talent is discovered.

For more than twelve years the Mexican border city of Juárez has been the center of an epidemic of horrific crimes against women and girls: kidnappings, rape, mutilation, and murder, with most of the victims conforming to a specific profile--young, slender, and poor. Speculation that the killer or killers are American citizens has led the U.S. government to send in criminal profilers from the FBI, but little real information about this international atrocity has emerged. As of 2006 more than 400 bodies have been recovered, with hundreds still missing. Among the theories being considered are illegal trafficking in human organs, ritualistic satanic sacrifices, copycat killers, and a conspiracy between members of the powerful Juárez drug cartel and some corrupt Mexican officials who have turned a blind eye to the felonies. This book is the first to examine the brutal killings and draw attention to these atrocities on the border.--From publisher description.

Ciudad Juarez lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. A once-thriving border town, it now resembles a failed state. Infamously known as the place where women disappear, its murder rate exceeds that of Baghdad. In Murder City, Charles Bowden-one of the few journalists who spent extended periods of time in Juarez-has written an extraordinary account of what happens when a city disintegrates. Interweaving stories of its inhabitants-a beauty queen who was raped, a repentant hitman, a journalist fleeing for his life-with a broader meditation on the town's descent into anarchy, Bowden reveals how Juarez's culture of violence will not only worsen, but inevitably spread north. Heartbreaking, disturbing, and unforgettable, Murder City was written at the height of his powers and established Bowden as one of America's leading journalists.

One of America's leading interpreters of the Chicana experience dismantles the discourses that "frame" women who rebel against patriarchal strictures as "bad women" and offers empowering models of struggle, resistance, and rebirth.

"... More than 300 women and men gathered in August 2008 at a conference entitled Missing Women: Decolonization, Third Wave Feminisms, and Indigenous People of Canada and Mexico. Here, personal stories and theoretical tools were brought together, as academics, activists, family members of missing and murdered women, police, media, policy-makers, justice workers, and members of faith communities offered their perspectives on the issue of racialized, sexualized violence."-- Back cover.

Amexica is the harrowing story of the extraordinary terror unfolding along the U.S.-Mexico border—"a country in its own right, which belongs to both the United States and Mexico, yet neither"—as the narco-war escalates to a fever pitch there. In 2009, after reporting from the border for many years, Ed Vulliamy traveled the frontier from the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico, from Tijuana to Matamoros, a journey through a kaleidoscopic landscape of corruption and all-out civil war, but also of beauty and joy and resilience. He describes in revelatory detail how the narco gangs work; the smuggling of people, weapons, and drugs back and forth across the border; middle-class flight from Mexico and an American celebrity culture that is feeding the violence; the interrelated economies of drugs and the maquiladora factories; the ruthless, systematic murder of young women in Ciudad Juarez. Heroes, villains, and victims—the brave and rogue police, priests, women, and journalists fighting the violence; the gangs and their freelance killers; the dead and the devastated—all come to life in this singular book. Amexica takes us far beyond today's headlines. It is a street-level portrait, by turns horrific and sublime, of a place and people in a time of war as much as of the war itself.

It's the summer of 1998 and for five years over a hundred mangled and desecrated bodies have been found dumped in the Chihuahua desert outside of Juárez, México, just across the river from El Paso, Texas. The perpetrators of the ever-rising number of violent deaths target poor young women, terrifying inhabitants on both sides of the border. El Paso native Ivon Villa has returned to her hometown to adopt the baby of Cecilia, a pregnant maquiladora worker in Juárez. When Cecilia turns up strangled and disemboweled in the desert, Ivon is thrown into the churning chaos of abuse and murder. Even as the rapes and killings of "girls from the south" continue, their tragic stories written in desert blood, a conspiracy covers up the crimes that implicate everyone from the Maquiladora Association to the Border Patrol. When Ivon's younger sister gets kidnapped in Juárez, Ivon knows that it's up to her to find her sister, whatever it takes. Despite the sharp warnings she gets from family, friends, and nervous officials, Ivon's investigation moves her deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of silence. From acclaimed poet and prose-writer Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Desert Blood is a gripping thriller that ponders the effects of patriarchy, gender identity, border culture, transnationalism, and globalization on an international crisis.