Content note: this piece is about the ongoing femicide crisis in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and describes references to sexual violence, the murder of teenage girls and young women, and the killing of a mother who was searching for her daughter’s killer. It also names specific victims and their families’ grief. It does not describe individual injuries in graphic detail.
The Pink Crosses
Look at that picture for a second before you keep reading. That is a photograph of a desert in northern Mexico. There are eight wooden crosses standing in the dirt. They are pink. The color is not a coincidence. It is a color a woman named Norma Andrade and other mothers like her started using in the late 1990s because they could not get the government of Chihuahua to acknowledge that their daughters existed, let alone that they had been killed. If the state would not paint a monument, the mothers would paint the crosses themselves, and they would paint them the color of the daughters they had lost, and the crosses would say, in a language that did not need to be translated, that these were women, and these were murders, and everyone should have to see it.
The eight crosses in that photo are at a place called Lomas del Poleo Planta Alta, on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez. In 1996 the bodies of eight women and girls were found on that scrap of desert. Nobody has ever been convicted for their murders. The pink crosses were painted by their families, and by the families of women killed nearby, and by strangers who came to help. The crosses are still there. New ones have been added over the years. They will keep being added.
This is not a piece about one killer. There is no killer in this piece to catch. That is what makes it a harder piece to write than the others on this site, and it is the reason I have to write it.
The Word
Before we go any further, I need to give you a word, because the whole piece rests on it. The word is femicide. In Spanish, feminicidio. It means the killing of women because they are women, and it means specifically the pattern of those killings when they happen at a scale a society tolerates without stopping them. It is a word academics coined in the 1970s and Latin American feminists picked up in the 1990s, and it is a word that has, in the last thirty years, become the only word that fits what has been happening in Ciudad Juárez since 1993.
I know the word feels political. I know the word makes some readers uncomfortable. Good. That is the job of the word. The English word “murder” is neutral about who dies, and part of the reason Ciudad Juárez became what it became is that everybody kept using neutral English words for what was happening to a very specific class of person — young, poor, brown, female — and the neutral words kept letting the state off the hook. Femicide is not a neutral word. Femicide names the pattern.
Since 1993, between four hundred and one thousand five hundred women and girls have been killed in Ciudad Juárez in ways that fit the pattern. Nobody knows the real number, because the government of Chihuahua never counted properly, because the family reports were dismissed for years, because bodies were found in mass graves and could not be individually identified, because bodies were never found at all. The lower estimate of four hundred is the count of confirmed cases with a body and a family. The higher estimate of over fifteen hundred includes the missing — women reported gone, never accounted for, presumed dead. The truth is somewhere inside that range. If you want a single figure I trust, put it at somewhere over a thousand. Any way you count it, it is not a number that any city in a country at peace should be able to produce.
How It Started (1993)
Ciudad Juárez sits on the north bank of the Rio Grande, directly across the river from El Paso, Texas. It has always been a border city. But in 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, went into effect. And in the years leading up to it and the years right after, the city transformed. American corporations built factories — maquiladoras — on the Mexican side of the border to take advantage of the labor cost difference. The factories made televisions, wire harnesses for cars, medical devices, small appliances. Cheap goods for the American market. And they needed workers.
The workers came. Young women, mostly, from the rural south of Mexico — Veracruz, Oaxaca, Chiapas — migrated to Juárez for the maquiladora jobs. In the 1990s and 2000s, the industry preferred women. Women had smaller fingers for the fine assembly work. Women, the theory went, were more docile, less likely to organize. Women could be paid less. So the factories hired women. Tens of thousands of them. Whole neighborhoods on the outskirts of Juárez sprang up around the factory shift patterns, populated by young women who had come alone or with a sister or a friend, living in one-room shacks with dirt floors, working double shifts, sending money home to families they had left behind in states they might not see again for years.
Then the killings started.
The generally accepted starting date is January 1993. That is when the first case in the pattern — a young woman, teens or twenties, found dead in the desert, showing signs of sexual assault — entered the record. But the pattern is what makes it a pattern. It was not one girl. It was one, and then another, and then another. By 1995 the local newspaper El Diario de Juárez was tracking it. By 1996 the bodies were being found in groups. By 1998 the mothers had started organizing.
A Shift Bus in the Dark
I want to describe, as best as I can from the reporting, what the pattern looked like from the inside.
A girl works a maquiladora shift. She is fifteen, maybe sixteen. Legally you have to be eighteen to work in a maquiladora, but the factories look the other way, because a fifteen-year-old will do the same work for less money and complain less. She has been at the plant for ten or twelve hours. It is dark when her shift ends because the shifts are engineered around the American clock, not the Mexican daylight, and it is often two or three in the morning when she is leaving. There is a company bus that takes shift workers home. Sometimes the bus is running. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes it drops her a mile from her house because the road to her neighborhood is unpaved and the driver will not go all the way in. So she walks. Or she takes a private ride from a driver who has parked outside the factory. Or she catches a ride with someone she has seen at the plant before. And she does not arrive home.
Her mother reports her missing. This is where the pattern gets specific, and this is where the state failed everyone, over and over, for thirty years. Police in Ciudad Juárez, in case after case documented by international human rights bodies, told the mothers to wait. Told them the girl had probably run off with a boyfriend. Told them she was probably fine and would come home. Refused to file reports. Refused to search. Told the mothers, over and over, that girls of a certain kind — poor girls, factory girls, girls who came alone from the south — often disappeared and were not really missing, they had just gone to be with a man, and the mother should stop making a fuss about it.
Days would pass. Sometimes weeks. Then a body would be found in the desert. Sexual assault. Torture in some cases. Dumped in a cotton field, or a vacant lot, or a stretch of scrub between the city and the border. The mothers would identify their daughters — not always, because sometimes the bodies were too decomposed or too damaged to identify, and the state’s forensic labs were, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, an actual scandal. The Chihuahua state forensic service was documented, more than once, giving mothers the wrong bodies. Handing over remains that DNA testing would later prove were not their daughters. Losing evidence. Contaminating evidence. Refusing to run tests. Refusing to release remains at all.
This is what “impunity” means in the language international human rights bodies use for Ciudad Juárez. It is not that killers were caught and released. It is that killers were never seriously looked for, that evidence was never seriously handled, that families were never seriously treated as people who deserved answers. The impunity is not a failure of the system to work. The impunity is the system working exactly as it was set up to work. That is the harder truth about Juárez.
The Cotton Field
On November 6 and 7, 2001, in a former cotton field on the edge of Ciudad Juárez — a piece of land locals called Campo Algodonero — the bodies of eight young women were found dumped together. Eight. In one field.
I am going to name the three whose case became the international precedent, because the international precedent matters, and because these three names have to be held out of the general count.
Esmeralda Herrera Monreal. Fifteen years old. A domestic worker. She had come to Juárez from the state of Durango. She was last seen on October 29, 2001. Her mother, Irma Monreal Jaime, reported her missing that afternoon. The police told Irma that Esmeralda had probably gone off with her boyfriend. Irma insisted. The police did not search. Eight days later, Esmeralda’s body was in the cotton field.
Claudia Ivette González. Twenty years old. She worked at the LEAR Corporation, an American auto-parts maquiladora. On October 10, 2001, she arrived at her shift two minutes late. The factory turned her away at the door because she was late. She left the factory grounds to head back home. She was never seen alive again. The factory that decided she was late enough to send home never checked on whether she got home. Her mother, Josefina González, went to the police and was told that Claudia was probably with her boyfriend. Twenty-nine days later, Claudia’s body was in the cotton field with Esmeralda’s.
Laura Berenice Ramos Monárrez. Seventeen years old. A student. She was last seen on September 22, 2001. Her mother, Benita Monárrez, reported her missing the same day. The police, again, refused to search. When Benita would not stop pushing them, they told her Laura had probably run off with a boyfriend. Forty-six days later, Laura’s body was in the cotton field.
Their three mothers — Irma, Josefina, and Benita — refused to accept what happened next, which was nothing. Chihuahua state authorities arrested two bus drivers, tortured them into confessions, and closed the case. One of the bus drivers died in custody. The other later recanted. The international human rights community started paying attention. And the three mothers, working with Mexican and international lawyers, took the case up the human rights ladder, out of the Mexican courts entirely, and to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San José, Costa Rica.
On November 16, 2009, that court ruled. The case is called González, Monreal and Monárrez v. Mexico, and it is more commonly called the Cotton Field ruling. It was the first time an international court held a state responsible not just for a single failed investigation, but for a pattern of state failure to protect women from gender-based violence. The ruling ordered Mexico to publicly acknowledge responsibility, to build a memorial at the cotton field, to reform its investigative practices, and to pay reparations to the families. Mexico did some of those things. Mexico did not do enough of them. The femicides continued.
But the ruling matters. It is the ruling that made the word femicide a legal category in international human rights law. That is not nothing. That is the three mothers, and their three daughters, giving the rest of the world a legal vocabulary that other women in other countries have since used to hold their own states accountable. Esmeralda, Claudia, and Laura died in the cotton field in the fall of 2001, and the language they left behind is still doing work in courtrooms twenty-five years later.
The Names We Have
I want to name more of them, because too many pieces about Juárez name only the three from the Cotton Field ruling. There are hundreds. I cannot name them all — nobody can, that is part of the horror — but I can name some.
Silvia Elena Rivera Morales. Seventeen years old. Disappeared in July 1995. Her body was found nearly two months later. Her case is the lead name in another international human rights case, Silvia Elena Rivera Morales et al. v. Mexico, which represents seven women and girls including María Elena Chávez, Olga Alicia Carrillo Pérez, Brenda Berenice Rodríguez Bermúdez, Cecilia Covarrubias, and Cecilia’s 24-day-old baby daughter, all disappeared from Juárez between 1995 and 2003.
Read that last part back. A 24-day-old baby.
María Sagrario González Flores. Seventeen years old. Disappeared April 1998. Her mother, Paula Flores, reported her missing. The police dismissed the report. Sagrario’s remains have still, as of this writing, not been fully identified. Paula Flores went on to become one of the founders of the movement of mothers of the disappeared.
Lilia Alejandra García Andrade. Seventeen years old. A worker at a maquiladora. Disappeared February 14, 2001 — Valentine’s Day. Ten days later, her body was found. Her mother, Norma Andrade, and her teacher, Marisela Ortiz Rivera, co-founded the organization Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa — May Our Daughters Return Home — in February 2001, in direct response to Lilia’s murder. It is one of the oldest continuously running mothers’ organizations against femicide in the Americas.
Rubí Marisol Frayre Escobedo. Sixteen years old. Killed in 2008 by her boyfriend, a man named Sergio Barraza. Her mother, Marisela Escobedo Ortiz, spent the next two years chasing him herself, doing the investigative work Chihuahua state authorities refused to do. She found him. She got him arrested. He confessed in open court. And in April 2010, three judges acquitted him anyway, citing “lack of evidence.” A week later an appeals court reversed them and convicted him — but by then Barraza had fled. Marisela spent the next several months publicly demanding the state re-arrest him. On December 16, 2010, she was shot in the head while standing outside the Chihuahua governor’s palace, protesting. Her killing was captured on the palace’s own security cameras. She was fifty-two.
Read that whole paragraph again, slowly. A mother who caught her daughter’s killer, brought him to court, watched three judges acquit a man who had confessed, watched him escape into the free world, and was shot dead in front of the governor’s palace for continuing to demand justice. That is the case of Marisela Escobedo Ortiz. That is what happened to her while the state of Chihuahua watched.
The mothers of the disappeared in Juárez do not have the option of grieving privately. They do not have the option of trusting the process. The mothers of the disappeared in Juárez became detectives, forensic technicians, community organizers, international litigants, and, in Marisela’s case, martyrs. They did all of that because the alternative was letting their daughters go permanently missing from the public record, and they refused to let that happen. Every pink cross in that desert was painted by a woman like Norma, like Paula, like Josefina, like Irma, like Benita, like Marisela.
Who Is Doing the Killing
You may have noticed I have not named a single killer in this piece. That is not an oversight. That is the case.
Over three decades, Chihuahua state authorities have arrested and prosecuted a small number of men for individual Juárez femicides. Some were low-level criminals who confessed under torture and were later exonerated. Some were bus drivers, framed for the Cotton Field murders. Some were foreign nationals, held up as scapegoats. Some were the boyfriends or husbands of specific victims, in cases that fit the pattern of intimate-partner femicide that exists everywhere, not just in Juárez. And some of the killers are almost certainly members of the drug cartels that have controlled Ciudad Juárez since the late 1990s, using violence against women as an instrument of territorial signaling and internal discipline, in ways that are documented but almost never prosecuted.
What there is not, and has never been, is a single serial killer to blame. This is not a Cottingham case. This is not a Yoo Young-chul case. There is no one man whose arrest will end the pattern.
What there is, instead, is a set of conditions. Extreme poverty. Migration of very young women from the rural south into a border city where they know almost no one. Factory shifts engineered around the clock of a country hundreds of miles away. A police force that has spent three decades treating the disappearance of a poor teenage girl as a rumor rather than a crime. A drug war that turned the city into one of the deadliest places on earth for the entire population, and specifically the deadliest place on earth for women. And a cross-border economy that quietly benefited, for decades, from a Mexican labor force willing to work for wages that made no sense in the United States, kept willing partly by not being told that they were being killed at a rate no other city on the continent had ever produced.
That is the killer. It is the whole city. It is NAFTA. It is the cartels. It is a state police force that categorically will not investigate this class of victim. It is thirty years of not caring, from every direction at once. Femicide is a killing machine, and the machine has a shape, and the shape is Ciudad Juárez.
The Count That Nobody Finishes
How many women have been killed in Ciudad Juárez since 1993? I told you earlier that the number is somewhere between four hundred and over fifteen hundred. I want to explain why that range exists, because the range is a moral document.
The government of Chihuahua, throughout the 1990s and much of the 2000s, refused to keep a single unified database of femicide victims. Different agencies kept different counts. Different agencies used different definitions. Cases that involved sexual assault were sometimes counted; cases that did not were sometimes not. Cases in which the body was too decomposed to determine cause of death were sometimes excluded. Cases in which a girl was reported missing but no body was ever found were almost always excluded, because on paper she was not dead, she was just gone.
Independent researchers — academics, journalists, Mexican and international human rights organizations, and above all the mothers’ groups — kept their own lists. Their lists have always been longer than the state’s. The state, more than once, has been caught destroying or losing physical evidence and case files, which means even the state’s own low number cannot be fully audited. There are cases whose paper trail was thrown away.
The lower boundary of about four hundred is the count of Juárez women whose deaths in the pattern were documented rigorously enough that even the state could not deny them. The upper boundary of over fifteen hundred adds the disappeared. The truth is not a mystery. The truth is that some official in some Chihuahua state office in the 1990s decided that the exact truth was not worth the labor of writing it down, and thirty years later we are still living with what that decision produced. A number that starts with a four and can go as high as one and a half thousand, and nobody can pin it more tightly than that, because the paperwork never existed.
And I have to tell you something harder, which is that the killings did not stop. Juárez had a horrifying peak in the early 2000s, and then the drug war of 2008-2012 turned the city into a war zone in which femicide competed for headlines with the general homicide rate. The femicide never dropped. Mexico as a whole has, in the last five years, seen a national rise in femicides. Chihuahua is still a leading state in that count. Ciudad Juárez is still a leading city inside that state.
Every year the pink crosses in the desert get more crosses.
What This Piece Is For
I want to end by saying what this piece is for, because it is different from every other piece on this site, and I want you to know why I wrote it anyway.
Almost every case on Killer Case Files has a killer with a name and a face and a courtroom outcome. That is the shape of most true crime, and there is a reason for it. It gives the reader an ending. Someone did it, someone was caught, someone is now in a cell, and the reader closes the tab feeling that the story has finished. I am not going to give you that ending in this piece, because the case does not have that ending, and I refuse to pretend it does.
What I want you to leave this piece with, instead, is a specific kind of moral discomfort. Which is: this is what femicide at scale looks like. This is what happens when a state decides, for reasons of class and race and economic convenience, that a particular category of woman is not worth investigating when she goes missing. This is what happens when a global economy is built on cheap female labor in a place where women can disappear without consequence. This is not Mexican. This is not particular to Juárez. Femicide happens in Egypt. Femicide happens in the United States. Femicide happens everywhere women exist and cannot rely on the systems around them to notice when they stop.
Ciudad Juárez is the case where the mothers made the pattern visible. Where they refused to let their daughters be reduced to entries in a badly-kept file. Where they took the state that failed them to an international court and won a ruling that named the failure by its real name. Where they got themselves shot on the steps of governors’ palaces for insisting that their daughters had been people. Where they painted eight pink crosses at Lomas del Poleo and then eight more and then thirty more and then hundreds more, and where they are still painting.
The names I could give you today are:
Esmeralda Herrera Monreal, 15. Claudia Ivette González, 20. Laura Berenice Ramos Monárrez, 17. Silvia Elena Rivera Morales, 17. María Elena Chávez. Olga Alicia Carrillo Pérez. Brenda Berenice Rodríguez Bermúdez. Cecilia Covarrubias and her 24-day-old daughter. María Sagrario González Flores, 17. Lilia Alejandra García Andrade, 17. Rubí Marisol Frayre Escobedo, 16. And Marisela Escobedo Ortiz, Rubí’s mother, 52, shot dead for demanding justice.
There are a thousand more. There are two thousand more. There are more today than there were yesterday. The list does not close. That is what a femicide is. That is what femicide at scale is. That is what has been happening in one city in one desert on one border for thirty-three years and counting.
Say the names you can. Hold the ones you cannot. And when someone tells you the killings in Juárez are “solved” or “over,” tell them what you know. Tell them the mothers are still painting crosses. Tell them the count still does not close. Tell them femicide is not a mystery to be solved. It is a system, and it is still running.
Sources
- Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Case of González et al. (“Cotton Field”) v. Mexico, November 16, 2009 — full judgment.
- London School of Economics — case brief for González et al. v. Mexico.
- RFK Human Rights Center — Silvia Elena Rivera Morales et al. v. Mexico.
- RFK Human Rights Center — on Mexico’s public acknowledgment.
- Amnesty International Public Statement AMR 41/023/2009, April 28, 2009 — on the Cotton Field ruling.
- Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) — Crying Out for Justice: Murders of Women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
- The Seattle Times — Disappearing Daughters, 2020 project.
- Latin America Bureau — Femicide in Mexico: the Cotton Field Case and its Sequels.
- CIPDH-UNESCO — on the Crosses of Ciudad Juárez as a site of memory.
- Opinio Juris — Murdering Women, Killing Childhood, 2024.
- RFK Human Rights Center — visual narrative of the femicide epidemic.
- Norma Andrade, Marisela Ortiz Rivera, and the ongoing work of Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa A.C.