Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif was branded “the Juárez Ripper” and “El Monstruo.” He was eventually convicted for Castro’s murder, though questions were raised about the quality of the evidence. Police ignored all doubts, insisting they had put the city’s serial killer in jail. But then, with Sharif incarcerated, the murders continued.
In April 1996, Rosario García Leal, an eighteen-year-old worker at the Philips maquiladora, turned up dead outside of town. She was wearing her factory identification card when she was found. Facing public pressure, police conducted raids on the city’s red light district, where they said several of the women had been spotted before their deaths. They arrested nine members of an alleged gang called Los Rebeldes, the Rebels. They announced that the gang members had been carrying out murders-for-hire paid for by Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif, as part of a plan to make himself look innocent. Families of the alleged gang members pointed out that the charges were absurd: the boys had no serious criminal records, and their “confessions” were tortured out of them. Nevertheless, “Los Rebeldes” remained in jail.
And still the murders continued. By late 1997, more than 170 women were dead. The state attorney general formed a Special Task Force for the Investigation of Crimes Against Women. As in Atlanta, bizarre conspiracy theories circulated. Satanists were said to be responsible. A ring of organ-harvesters was purported to be at work. The notoriously corrupt police and the similarly suspect army were each blamed. In return, Juárez authorities, like some in Atlanta, blamed the women, claiming that they were prostitutes, or loose women, or at the very least provocatively dressed. What did they expect, going out to bars with men? In cases where the women had never gone to a bar, police insisted that their husbands or boyfriends were the likely culprits. And if the girls were very young, police blamed their families for being inattentive: “Do you know where your daughter is tonight?” demanded the mayor in one statement. Many families reported having difficulty filing missing persons reports, even when their missing daughter was a young teenager. Police refused to fill out the forms, insisting the girls had probably gone off with their boyfriends.
Women’s rights activists pointed out that the sudden explosion of women working outside the home was a huge upheaval for a very traditional culture. Many pointed to Mexico’s ancient gender “cults” of machismo and marianismo, which prescribe public, dominant roles for men and passive, domestic roles for women. Economically unsuccessful men were frustrated in their failure to achieve machismo and might be displacing that frustration onto the bodies of women who “took men’s jobs.” Like so many of the highway killer cases, the Juárez murders could be interpreted as an expression of economic rage by those “numbered for the bottom,” an angry acting out of the “disposable” nature of others by people who may fear that they themselves are disposable.
Into this heated environment came former FBI profiler Robert Ressler, invited as a private consultant to advise the Chihuahua state government. Ressler took three trips to Juárez, during which he pored over the 160 cases the police had on file. Then he and the state attorney general held a press conference to announce the expert’s findings. Out of the 160 cases, Ressler told Mexicans, 76 were likely to be linked, because they all fit a similar pattern: a young, attractive girl abducted on her way to or from work in a maquiladora, and then raped and strangled. Ressler declared that the cases might be the work of one or more perpetrators, and he suggested that the serial killer or killers could be coming from across the border. “My leading theory,” he declared, “is that there’s a person living in El Paso who is going over to Mexico to take advantage of these less-sophisticated women.”
Mexicans were puzzled. Oscar Maynez, chief of the state’s forensics department, pointed out that there had never been a study of Mexican serial killers, but that didn’t prove there weren’t any. Besides, the person who had murdered the young women was clearly familiar with the deserts outside Juárez. Why would the American crime expert be so quick to assume the pathology must have been spawned in his own nation?
In fact, there was an odd propensity among Americans who paid attention to the Juárez tragedy—and their numbers were admittedly few—to feel that the United States must somehow be at fault. True crime author Simon Whitechapel, in his 2002 book Crossing to Kill, played up the theory that serial killers were coming from the United States to murder Mexicans, calling Juárez “the serial-killer playground,” as if those exaggerated hordes of mobile serial killers from the eighties panic had suddenly turned their vehicles south, toward Mexico. It’s a made-for-TV notion, but serious scholars were also revealing a quiet conviction that the United States must bear some responsibility for the Juárez tragedy. They were increasingly insisting the real culprit, rather than mobile serial killers, was NAFTA.
“NAFTA has not only increased jobs but also increased opportunities for criminal victimization and exploitation in the maquiladoras,” one scholar declared. Many feminist scholars linked the murders to the devaluation of women by the maquiladoras—and by globalism in general. The academics weren’t the only ones making the connection. A Carnegie Council report in 2003 found that “the impact of free trade policies and the ensuing population growth have weakened the city’s social fabric.” The ABC News program 20/20 did an episode on the murders in 1999. “These workers make things that you buy,” Sam Donaldson said, announcing the segment. “But you may be surprised to see how they live.” And in a long story about the killings, the Washington Post noted that “Ciudad Juárez epitomized the promise of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement,” but pointed out how that promise had quickly developed a dark side: “The killer or killers were preying on victims furnished in part by the global economic forces so vital to Juárez’s boom.”
Beneath all of these assertions lies a startling suspicion: that the violence in Mexico is the inevitable result of a culture that adopts American-style growth capitalism. In other words, the murders are not only the high cost of low prices, but an exaggerated reflection of something that happened in the United States too. Violence is what happens when a poor nation, a more vulnerable nation, is swept up in the same growth fever that transformed our own nation in less insidious but still significant ways. Mexicans, just as Americans had done fifty years earlier, were betting that a rising tide would lift all boats. To encourage that rise, they were building their lives on wheels. And as they became a nation of anonymous, mobile strangers, they, too, were experiencing an increase in violence, just as Americans had in the sixties.
The murders continued as the nineties wore on into the new millennium, with drug cartel violence becoming an increasing part of the mix. One of Mexico’s major drug cartels was based in Juárez, and the increased trade across the border had made drug trafficking even easier. The thousands of tons of legal goods crossing the border daily were a perfect cover for illegal goods, hidden in secret compartments, beneath false floors, or inside packages of apparently legal items. Once they got across the border, narcotics could travel via I-10 or I-25 throughout the United States, the world’s largest market for illegal drugs.
In July of 1997, in a bizarre turn that almost seemed scripted by Hollywood, the leader of the Juárez cartel, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, died on the operating table while undergoing surgery to transform his appearance. Two of his three doctors quickly turned up encased in cement-filled drums left by the side of a road; authorities said they had been tortured to death. But the pain quickly spread as a war of succession began. The level of violence in Juárez increased dramatically. Thirty-eight women were counted as murdered there in 1998. But now there were many men dying as well.
In early 1999, state officials invited a new crop of FBI profilers, this time current agents, to review the cases and weigh in on the murders again. News agencies were reporting that between five and ten women had been murdered in the first two months of 1999 when the four profilers from the Behavioral Analysis Unit arrived in Juárez that March. They spent five days reviewing the case file
s. Their conclusions were starkly different from Robert Ressler’s. Most of the murders, they said, were isolated events. There was probably no serial killer at loose in Juárez, though Sharif might very well have been guilty of a number of the earlier killings. They were not, however, convinced by the evidence that Sharif had orchestrated subsequent murders from prison, a conclusion largely ignored by the Mexican authorities.
After the FBI agents left town, a fourteen-year-old maquiladora worker was raped, strangled, and left for dead in the desert. Amazingly, she survived and identified her assailant: the bus driver of her maquiladora shuttle. He was arrested and allegedly confessed, naming three other men who were involved. Those men were also arrested, and police reported that they, too, confessed. The Chihuahua special prosecutor then told newspapers an incredible story: a ring of bus drivers had been committing the murders, and they had also been hired by Sharif. This story was received with more skepticism than previous ones. Once again, the suspects claimed their confessions had come about as a result of torture. Once again, the police were claiming that Sharif had orchestrated murders from prison with an efficiency that seemed highly improbable. The previous alleged coconspirators, the young men of the “gang” called Los Rebeldes, had by now been in jail for three years, awaiting trial. It seemed there wasn’t enough incontrovertible evidence to convict them, so police simply kept them locked up. They would wait five more years before being convicted in a trial considered by many observers to be a sham.
But the American mainstream media had lost their taste for the intricacies of official corruption and inscrutable violence in Mexico. The U.S. press took to blaming the drug war for everything. After newly elected Mexican President Felipe Calderón announced a drug cartel crackdown in 2006, the violence reached astonishing levels. In 2010 Juárez racked up around 2,800 murders, a number double that of the murders of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston combined. Wealthy people have been leaving the city, and many businesses have pulled out. Bars and restaurants that once catered to tourists are shuttered. Juárez is now considered the most dangerous city on earth that is not an active war zone.
But whether blaming NAFTA, American serial killers, or drug traffic—which is, in the end, just another kind of traffic headed for the United States—all accounts of the unfolding violence along the Mexican border reveal a detectable tone of misgiving. Mexico is modernizing, just as we did, committing itself to a world of national mobility and global flows. The dark underside of that new mobility is a loosening of the bonds that tie people to one another and to place. This must at least partly explain our feeling of deep discomfort as we watch the developing world striving to emulate the mobile lifestyle Americans built after the Second World War. Even as Americans themselves have come to recognize all the problems that automobility brings—pollution, traffic, sprawl, community breakdown—the developing world is buying cars and building highways as fast as it can, seeing them, as we once did, as a route to the good life.
“Highways and country roads are synonymous with progress,” declared Mexican President Felipe Calderón in a speech on transportation in August 2010, “because every new road creates more opportunities for everyone. That is why, in my government, we have invested in highway infrastructure as never before. Roads are followed by electricity, water and drainage; schools, universities and hospitals are built; trade and investment increase and above all, jobs are created.”
In 2007, the Financial Times group declared Juárez the number one “Large City of the Future” in North America, citing it in particular for its cost-effectiveness. Journalist Charles Bowden had beat FT to it by ten years. In 1996, he declared Juárez the city of the future. “This future,” he wrote in Harper’s, “is based on the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and industrial growth producing poverty faster than it distributes wealth. We have these models in our heads about growth, development, infrastructure. Juárez doesn’t look like any of these images.”
What does Juárez look like? It looks like an extreme example of what’s going on in many parts of the developing world. Where economic development and modernization go, serial killing frequently follows. China, for instance, appears to be experiencing an uptick in serial murder, much of it explicitly tied to the nation’s fast-growing mobility. Having declared roads essential to the nation’s economic growth, the Chinese government began building modern expressways in the 1990s, quickly building some thirty thousand miles of new roads. Officials proudly report that they expect to surpass the United States in highway mileage by 2020.
Not long after the highway construction program began, reports of Chinese serial murder began to emerge for the first time. There was Li Wenxian, a farmer who moved to Guangzhou, the rapidly growing industrial and transportation hub of south China. After being cheated by a prostitute, he began to kill them. Li allegedly confessed to thirteen murders after his 1996 arrest and was executed later that year. A few years later came Hua Ruizho, a cement truck driver in Beijing, who picked up prostitutes along his truck routes in Beijing and murdered them. He was arrested and executed in 2002.
In late 2003, China arrested four serial killers within the space of a few weeks. A couple in the southern Chinese industrial city Shenzhen reportedly lured twelve women to their deaths with offers of work. A drifter named Yang Zhiya, who worked as a cook at construction sites, was arrested for breaking into homes in four provinces and bludgeoning sixty-five people to death. And a migrant farmworker from central China, Huang Yong, was accused of murdering seventeen boys over the course of two years. “I always wanted to be an assassin since I was a kid,” he told reporters, “but I never had the chance.” It’s another strange echo of Charlie Starkweather: I always wanted to be a criminal, but not this big a one. The official Chinese news agency declared that Huang was driven to violence by movies and television, just as many in the 1950s had insisted that delinquents like Starkweather were the product of crime comics and violent films.
The next year, Wang Qiang was sentenced to death in Liaoning province for killing forty-five people, starting in the late nineties, and a gang of men was arrested in Shandong province for murdering at least thirteen women after luring them to a rented home to have sex for cash. “Reports of serial killings began appearing with unusual frequency in the media late last year,” mused the South China Morning Post. Serial murder may not be as new to China as the government insists, but pubic discussion of it is.
India has also recently begun a giant highway program based on America’s interstates. The National Highways Development Project, begun in 1998, is part of a national commitment to economic growth. Less than ten years after it started, in 2007, the rapidly growing city of Delhi experienced an outbreak of serial murder similar to that of Juárez in the early nineties. A local businessman named Moninder Singh Pandher—manager of an earth-moving equipment dealership—was arrested along with his servant Surendra Koli. Both were charged with murder after the remains of seventeen children were discovered in drains outside Pandher’s upscale suburban home. Newspapers reported a surprising fact: children had been disappearing for over a year from a nearby slum called Nithari, but little attention had been paid. “One of the villages which had been gradually engulfed by the burgeoning suburb over three decades,” wrote India Today, “Nithari is now a slum spilling over with thousands of dirt-poor migrants from West Bengal and Bihar.” These “dirt-poor” migrant laborers from the countryside were ignored by police when they attempted to file reports about their missing children. “They always told me she had run away with someone,” reported the mother of a missing thirteen-year-old. Other parents claimed they were beaten or asked for money when they sought police help. By the time the gruesome cache of body parts was discovered, thirty-eight young people, half under age 14, had disappeared. Upon hearing news that human remains had been found, frantic parents showed up at the site to dig through the drains for clothing and bones. After the arrests, enraged crowds threw rocks at both the suspects and pol
ice. Six policemen were ultimately suspended for dereliction of duty.
As in Juárez, economic change was fingered. “The globalised world is throwing up new variations in criminal behavior, especially in a society which is alienated and where the administrative system is on the verge of collapse,” a psychiatrist told India Today. Less than two weeks later, the bodies of nine sodomized and murdered laborers were discovered in the fast-growing technology hub Hyderabad. Police arrested three men they said had collaborated in the killings. Then the bodies of four children were found in an abandoned rice mill in the northern state of Punjab. They too were reported to be the children of migrant laborers.
Indian newspapers ran articles analyzing the “new” phenomenon of serial killing. Earlier cases were mentioned: Raghav Raman, a schizophrenic arrested for killing forty-one “pavement dwellers,” or vagabonds, in the sixties, allegedly in an attempt to avert war with Pakistan; Auto Shankar—so nicknamed because he drove an auto rickshaw—arrested for killing nine teenagers in the 1980s and executed in 1995. News stories even brought up the Thuggies, an allegedly ancient group of murderous highwaymen, often said to be worshippers of the goddess Kali and believed to have killed millions of travelers along India’s roads between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet still Indians felt like they were seeing something new: India “had never before witnessed such an act of barbarism” as the Delhi murders, declared the Statesman. A commentator in the Hindustan Times called it “the silence of our lambs.” “Was I the only person to think as I read The Silence of the Lambs: could it ever happen here?” he asked. The answer to that question seemed clear after the Delhi murders came to light. The Indian press began using the term “serial killer” much more frequently.
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