This Love Is Not for Cowards

by Robert Andrew Powell

  So why the emphasis on the fantastic? “People read mysteries like there is no tomorrow,” Gaspar de Alba told me when I reached her by phone in Los Angeles. “It’s one of the biggest-selling genres.” Bolaño’s 2666 features an American journalist trying to solve the murders of the dead women in “Santa Theresa,” an obvious stand-in for Ciudad Juárez. “No one pays attention to these killings,” the journalist says, “but the secret of the world is hidden in them.” Argentinean filmmaker Lourdes Portillo starts her documentary Señorita Extraviada by stating that she has come to Juárez “to track down ghosts and listen to the mysteries that surround them.” In Bordertown, a film released straight to DVD in 2008, Jennifer Lopez plays a crusading American journalist sent to Juárez to single-handedly solve the killings. (It was the bus driver!)

  “A story can haunt you forever, whereas statistics fade,” Gaspar de Alba elaborated. “ ‘Facts’ are not always ‘truth’ but rather pieces of well-crafted information that somebody wants you to know. If you base your opinion on so-called statistics and facts, before you know it you’re spouting inanities like that Molly Molloy, and femicide becomes a fable instead of an ongoing slaughter of young, brown fertile women’s bodies on the El Paso/Juárez border.”

  PEDRO ALBUQUERQUE IS a well-traveled anthropologist currently posted in the south of France. For five years, starting in 2002, he lived in Laredo, Texas, working at a branch of Texas A&M. The border intrigued him. He wondered why crime rates are so much lower on the American side of the Rio Grande than on the Mexican side, despite similar cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds. His research revealed that high levels of violence in Mexican border towns “originate from deficient law enforcement and legal systems, and from chaotic urbanization and high population densities.” That is, he found that a corrupt justice system and suddenly overpopulated cites—the mix in Juárez, for sure—cause the violence.

  Next he turned his attention to femicide. While noting that the murders of women, especially in Ciudad Juárez, have received a remarkable amount of attention, the vast amount of literature on the phenomenon originated mostly from “radical scholars, interest groups, international and nongovernmental organizations and political activists, usually with little regard to the evaluation of the available data.” Specifically, he cited “preconceived notions and ad hoc statements not supported by empirical investigation.”

  So he and a colleague looked at the data. Because erratic numbers are often the biggest problem in cross-border research, Albuquerque avoided newspaper reports and even police statistics. Instead, he and his colleague turned to the morgue.

  “Coroner data is very reliable,” he told me via e-mail from Marseilles. “Because coroners do not have any incentive to hide the work they do, and are relatively insulated from the criminal establishment.”

  Poring over the morgue’s records, Albuquerque found that cities with higher populations had higher male homicide rates. And cities along the border had male homicide rates that were higher still. The female homicide rates in every city—including Juárez—rose and fell with the male homicide rate. Women are being killed in Juárez because men are also being killed in Juárez.

  “Femicide rates in Juárez are high and worrisome,” Albuquerque told me. “However, general homicide rates in Juárez are even more astounding than femicide rates, and the femicide rates are not especially high when compared with other Mexican cities, if studied across many years. Perhaps even more important, the femicide phenomenon is clearly much more significant in many American large cities [and] particularly extreme in American inner city neighborhoods.”

  Drexel University’s ArtMarch was held in conjunction with Ni Una Mas, a proudly activist exposition intended “to stop the Femicide.” The goal, said the curators, was “to raise awareness about gender violence and, in particular, crimes against women in the Mexican border town of Juárez.” Yoko Ono contributed art. Amnesty International attached its name. Drexel’s athletic director published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer in which he escalated the terminology in Juárez from femicide to genocide. By definition, he argued that someone or a group of people are trying to kill every single female in Juárez.

  Before the exposition opened, its curators e-mailed Molly Molloy in Las Cruces, hoping she’d help them build a body of information. Their first question had to do with the total number of women killed in Juárez since 1993. Was it seven hundred, as they had read? Molloy responded that seven hundred sounded about right. (Her total at the time was 677.) “BUT,” she added, “I have a problem with the whole definition of femicide, that is that all of these women were killed for sexual motives or BECAUSE they were women.” She pointed out, as she does to anyone who mentions femicide, that ten times as many men have been murdered in Juárez over the same period.

  A back-and-forth ensued. One Drexel curator replied that, from what he had read, “There remains a great deal of evidence that the majority number [of women] have been snatched off the streets and then raped and murdered. This makes the context of their deaths different from the many men who have died as a result of the drug trade.”

  Molloy countered that the phrase “snatched off the streets” is a myth—a myth that particularly grates on her. “It has been documented that the majority of the killings of women were always found to be domestic violence related,” she wrote. The curator proceeded to question Molloy’s statistics, doubting any figures coming out of Mexico. Molloy wrote back in great length and detail, arguing that there are facts everyone should be able to agree on, that facts matter, and that the folklore surrounding the femicide story in Juárez can be harmful.

  She wasn’t persuasive. As part of the exposition, the university produced this television commercial, which aired on the Telemundo network:

  “Over 700 girls and young women have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez, México since 1993,” says a female narrator. “Some as young as twelve years old. These killings are still unsolved. And they continue to this day. Because there is no penalty.” On-screen, a woman in a pink shirt places her hand on the shoulder of a girl, the girl kneeling with her hands clasped in prayer. The girl also wears a pink shirt. “Our lives are being taken just because we are women.” The commercial ends with information on the then-upcoming ArtMarch, aimed at ending “this femicide in México and violence against women everywhere. Help save the girls.”

  The commercial did not say that girls are a very small minority of those killed in Juárez. It did not say that exponentially more men and boys are killed in Juárez every year, and that those male murders remain unsolved, too, and continue to this day. Most relevantly, Drexel did not say that, prior to the recent explosion of cartel violence, Philadelphia has historically been more lethal for women than Juárez, despite being about the same size.

  In 2006 in Juárez, 253 people were murdered. Twenty of those killed were women, or 7.9 percent of the total. In Philadelphia that year, according to a database compiled by the Inquirer, 406 people were murdered; forty-seven of those were women, or 11.5 percent of the total. Furthermore, most of the women killed in Philadelphia were of childbearing age, a descriptor frequently used for the dead women of Juárez. The first woman murdered in Philadelphia that year was a twenty-one-year-old bludgeoned to death by a young man she’d broken up with over the holidays. That man also stabbed the victim, murdered her grandmother, and burned down their house in an attempt to cover up his crime.

  DIANA WASHINGTON VALDEZ was the keynote speaker at the Drexel exposition. She’s a reporter at the El Paso Times and the author of The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, first released in 2006. In publicity materials for her book, Washington Valdez is described as “the expert on the ghastly border crimes.” Drexel posted on its Web site a video of Washington Valdez’s 2009 interview with Al Jazeera. The news network flew her to London, sat her in a studio, and described her on the air as “the woman who knows more about this story than anyone else.”

  On her own Web site, Washington Valdez documente
d her trip to England by posing in front of the Tower Bridge. She’s spoken about the dead women of Juárez in not only Philadelphia and London but also Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Cartagena, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Nashville, New York, Washington, D.C., Portland, Seattle, Boston, and more than a dozen other cities. When I met her for lunch, she told me she’d just accepted an invitation to speak at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Expenses paid, as always.

  “I check my calendar, and if I have room on my schedule and I think I can do some good, I’ll go,” she said. “Someone like me and others like me out there, we’re going to continue to keep very focused on what’s going on with the women, simply because we’ve made it our business to do so.”

  Washington Valdez got into the femicide business relatively late. Esther Chávez started tracking the murders of women in 1993, yet it wasn’t until 2002 that Washington Valdez published “Death Stalks the Border,” a series in her newspaper. That series led to her book, in which she claims to have solved the femicide crimes. I’ve read the book. Apparently, the killings of women were part of a circuit of orgies by prominent Juárez families. I say “apparently” because she does not name any of these families, nor any of her sources, nor any women specifically killed at an orgy. The book concludes in a Mexico City coffee shop. Washington Valdez meets with an unnamed source, a man talking in a shadowy way about a party he attended with unnamed powerful people. At the party, says the unnamed source, he learned that the state of Chihuahua had been sold to “bloodthirsty” Colombian narcos, some of whom “were known to practice human-sacrifice” rituals.

  Washington Valdez’s theories about the dead women of Juárez have evolved over the years. “The best information we have is that these men are committing crimes simply for the sport of it,” she told NPR in 2003, in a story that was strongly criticized by reporters based in Juárez. In a British documentary from 2005, she nailed down the killers with great specificity, though she did not name names, nor did she name her sources. “Mexican federal authorities have conducted important investigations of their own already that reveal who the killers are,” she says in the documentary. She pauses. She cocks her head slightly, her interviewer waiting quietly. Finally Washington Valdez delivers the goods: “Five men from Juárez and one from Tijuana get together and kill women in what can only be described as blood sport.”

  She adds: “I’ve discovered that these people that were revealed by these investigations were very important people. And some of the other people involved and named allegedly as killers are prominent men with important political connections that are considered untouchables.”

  She does not name any of these prominent men. In an article she wrote for Channel 4 news in London, she said that a “confidential source” had indicated that a number of women in Juárez were being murdered so their organs could be harvested and sold to Americans. She did not name anyone supposedly trafficking kidneys and hearts, nor did she name any gringo buyers. In her report, the “confidential source” said that murder for organ harvesting “had to be one of the main ways in which [women in Juárez] vanish.”

  I met Washington Valdez at a Mexican restaurant in El Paso, near her newsroom. I ordered beef tacos, and she sipped a bowl of tortilla soup flavored with avocado. When she spoke to Al Jazeera in London, Washington Valdez gave a list of “five lines of investigation” into the Juárez femicides “that even the FBI agrees with.” I asked her, just so I could fact-check, who at the FBI had endorsed her list.

  “I don’t know that they’re still there now,” she answered, “but they can speak about it.”

  I again asked for their names and for some way I could contact them. I repeated that it was simply fact-checking, that I needed to make sure they actually existed. “There are a couple people you can ask, but they’re not there anymore. And I’d have to contact them, okay?” she replied. Washington Valdez promised to contact them and get back to me. She has yet to do so.

  That list she read in London also traveled with her to Philadelphia for her speech at Drexel. She reads from it on camera in a video posted on YouTube. Printed on the list are the five likely reasons women have been murdered in Juárez:

  Drug dealers killed women with impunity, including to even celebrate successful crossings of drugs across the border.

  Violent gangs that have killed women to initiate new members.

  Two or more serial killers who are still loose, never been arrested.

  A group of powerful men who killed women at different times for different reasons.

  And then you have your copycats who have taken advantage of this situation to hide their own murders.

  Powerful men killing women at different times for different reasons? That sure is broad. Serial killers? An FBI investigation in 1999 concluded that the sex crimes were probably committed by many different men who did not know each other. “It would be irresponsible to state that a serial killer is loose in Juárez,” the agency reported. Reading her book and her articles on femicide and watching all her videos on YouTube, I started to wonder if maybe Washington Valdez is being pranked. That perhaps one of her unnamed sources told her that a serial killer from Tijuana was murdering women for blood sport just to see if she’d run with it. Orgies involving los juniors, the offspring of the wealthy elite? Harvesting of organs? Her published theories lack any possible path to reinvestigation. They can’t be checked out in any way.

  “It’s not my job to solve the crimes,” she told me at lunch. “It’s the investigators’. They know who did it.”

  Three times in our interview, she said she couldn’t answer a specific question because it would put her in too much danger. She told me she can’t go into Juárez anymore for her own safety, that she’s grown too high-profile. Spookiness, I suspect, is central to her appeal. She’s invited to travel the world on the femicide speaking circuit because she hypes the mystery. Since none of the murders have been prosecuted, none of her theories can be proven wrong. And her theories are much more exciting than what has been documented to be behind the majority of the murders, at least before 2007: domestic violence. Given what Washington Valdez includes in her list, it’s worth noting what she leaves out. She never mentions the word “boyfriend.” Or the word “husband.”

  “There are reporters in Juárez who actually think it’s a myth,” Washington Valdez told me at lunch. She was referring to the whole femicide phenomenon. From the expression on her face, I gathered that I was supposed to find this unbelievable. This reporter—who has blamed the dead women of Juárez on villains ranging from orgy throwers to “blood sport” psychopaths to organ harvesters to two or more currently active serial killers—looked at me as if the idea that there never has been a femicide in Juárez was the craziest thing she’d ever heard.

  “PEOPLE ARE INTERESTED in the dead women of Juárez because it’s a way not to look at Juárez,” Charles Bowden said in an interview broadcast on NPR. “If you say it’s young girls, sixteen to eighteen, being killed by a serial killer or rich guys for fun or whatever, then you have a finite problem and you don’t have to look at the city. And you can ignore the fact that while one to three hundred women have vanished, depending on who’s counting, 2,800 people have died. You can ignore the fact that seven hundred men have disappeared in the same period. You can just pretend that really the only problem in Juárez is this bizarre slaughter of young girls, and then you’re safe.”

  Bowden was one of the first journalists to bring wide attention to the dead women of Juárez. In Murder City he eulogized Esther Chávez as a champion for justice. Yet he regards his initial writings on femicide with some regret.

  “I created a Frankenstein’s monster without even knowing it!” he told me. “Suddenly there developed this cottage industry.”

  The longer I’ve lived in Juárez, the more I feel the city’s problems have little to do with gender. Girls are not being snatched off the street by serial killers or kidnapped and killed by U.S. Border Patrol officers
making snuff films or whatever it was Gaspar de Alba conjured up for her mystery novel. The problem is that life itself in Juárez, across the board, has been devalued. Murder is effectively legal. You can kill almost anyone you want just about anytime you want. To separate the killings of women from this larger truth is to misdiagnose what is really wrong.

  “Mexicans who have tried to solve cases of murdered women have actually taken real risks,” Molloy tells me. “They’ve organized and criticized the government. And they have suffered retributions of one kind or another. They’ve been harassed. That doesn’t mean the focus on this should be based on something false. The truth is bad enough. It’s just more mundane.”

  I believe her. I believe that what happened to the dead women of Juárez is bad. It is horrible! But it isn’t all that mysterious. What happened to them—what is still happening to women in Juárez—is what would be happening to a percentage of women in any city in the world where the government has given up on law and order. It’s remarkable, actually, considering the mayhem in this town, that more women aren’t among the dead.

  THE COTTON FIELD isn’t far from my apartment. At midday, the field broils in the sun. A woman walks past me, shaded under a pink umbrella. She swings a bottle of Coca-Cola in her free hand. A friend walking with her flips through PM, the daily documentation of fresh kills. They pass old cement blocks piled into mounds. I spy a box of aluminum foil with some foil still on the roll. An old cup of Danonino drinkable yogurt molds on the ground next to a flattened plastic Sprite bottle. And the fender from a truck, one work glove, a crushed Marlboro box, and countless squares of Styrofoam. This remains a place where things are dumped.

  Every documentary about the dead women of Juárez includes a scene filmed out here. Diana Washington Valdez, in both the author photo on her book and the profile photo on her Facebook page, is standing in the cotton field, in front of eight wooden crosses painted pink. The crosses have changed over the years. In some photos I’ve seen, the crosses are tall and feature the names of each woman found here painted in cursive letters. The crosses in the field this afternoon are shorter, have the words NI UNA MÁS stenciled on them in black paint, and feature a stenciled fist inside the symbol of Venus. Three of the crosses stand in the dirt, their stability bolstered by small piles of rocks. The five other crosses have toppled and lie in a pile.