Mexico boosts police in violent border city

By Deborah Tedford, Reuters, 9/25/2003

MEXICO CITY -- Under pressure from human rights groups, the Mexican government has sent 700 more police to a city on the US border where up to 300 women have been killed in the past 10 years, justice officials said yesterday.

Federal Preventive Police officers began to arrive Tuesday in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, and will aid more than 2,000 other federal, municipal, and state police in an attempt to curb crime in the city of 1.2 million.

In 1993, women began to disappear from the city, which has been a magnet for young women from all over Mexico who go to work in maquiladora factories producing goods for export to the United States.

About 90 of the dead women may be victims of serial killers, police said. In some cases, the victims' bodies indicated that they had been sexually assaulted or tortured. Some were mutilated, and others were found in common graves in the desert.

Another 200 women were killed in Ciudad Juarez in the same period, some of them victims of domestic violence or feuds between drug traffickers. The attorney general's office said there have been about 60 successful prosecutions for those killings.

A report by the attorney general's office in May said that 258 women had been slain in and around Ciudad Juarez in the last decade. Nongovernmental groups put the number at around 300. The head of the rights group Amnesty International accused local police last month of being corrupt and negligent in investigating the deaths.

Ciudad Juarez is home to a large drug-trafficking cartel and is one of Mexico's most violent cities. Murder, kidnapping, and assaults are common.

The government of President Vicente Fox has recently beefed up security in the city. He sent 300 federal police there in July.

"Their presence on the street will inhibit property crimes, drug trafficking, and abductions," said Manuel Esparza Navarrete, coordinator of a police task force investigating the homicides. Women's rights campaigners said they were glad to see more police on the streets of the rundown city, which has been hit harder than most by a national economic slump, as exports to the United States drop. Fox announced this month the creation of a commission to oversee investigations into the women's killings, but police say it is unclear how the body would work.