Ramona Morales has been waiting 12 years for justice to be served. At the tender age of 16, her daughter Silvia Elena became one of the first in a group of young women whose lives were tragically lost in one of the most bizarre serial murder cases in history.
Silvia Elena worked at a shoe store to help her family make ends meet. Like clockwork, she arrived home every work night on the 8 o’clock bus, until that dreadful day when she never made it back home. A couple of weeks later, her body was found. She had been sexually assaulted and her body mutilated.
Since 1993, around 400 women and young ladies have been found dead or have disappeared in the Mexican town of Juarez, just south of the border from El Paso, Texas. Many, like Silvia Elena, were victims of sexual aggression. About half of the cases have been solved, but for the most part the details surrounding the murders remain a mystery. But that could be changing.
There is a renewed interest in the Juarez murders as a result of pressure put on by the families who have lost loved ones, relentless human-rights activists, women’s groups and other interested parties outraged by the apparent indifference and lack of action by Mexican authorities.
In “The Daughters of Juarez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border,” my colleague Teresa Rodriguez, who spent 10 years investigating the crimes, gives a human face to the dreadful statistics. The book is a chilling account of the atrocities committed against these women and an exposé of the ineptitude of local and state authorities in solving the crimes.
Earlier this month, more than 90 members of the U.S. House of Representatives — both Democrat and Republican — signed a letter directed to Mexican President Felipe Calderon asking him to take action on the murders of young women in Ciudad Juarez. The letter was the initiative of Congresswoman Hilda Solis of California.
The American legislators applauded a new law against violence on women that was approved in February, calling it a good start, but clearly more has to be done. The new law calls for integrated federal, state and local programs involving Mexican police, the courts, media, schools and other sectors to identify and combat violence against women.
Violence against women in Mexico is disconcerting. An average of four women and girls are murdered daily in that country, according to a 2004 report from the National Institute of Statistics and Geographical Information. Seventy-five percent of women murdered in Mexico die at the hands of their husbands. And in some parts of Mexico, stealing a cow is a more punishable crime than raping a woman.
In the case of the Juarez murders, according to Rodriguez the impunity surrounding the killings is astounding. “Those who have tried to get to the bottom of the crimes are either threatened, leave jobs under pressure, are fired or lose their own lives in the process,” she says.
After arrests were made and bodies of dead young women kept showing up around town, several theories surfaced on who could be behind the killings. “The Daughters of Juarez” supports some of these theories. “It could be a combination of a serial killer, a copycat that got involved or sons of well-to-do families that have taken up killing young girls as a blood sport of sorts,” says Rodriguez.
In the book, she does not rule out the possibility that some of the managers who cross the U.S. border to Mexico on a daily basis to work in factories known as maquiladoras could be getting their sexual pleasures with the young workers, then getting rid of the evidence with the help of corrupt officials. “Whoever it is,” she says, “it’s someone powerful with deep pockets.”
Whoever it was that killed her daughter Silvia Elena, Ramona Morales hopes they are soon brought to justice. The statute of limitations in her case will run out in two years. The voices speaking out for the daughters of Juarez are getting louder and aiming higher. The Mexican government needs to start listening.

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(Maria Elena Salinas is the author of “I AM MY FATHER’S DAUGHTER: LIVING A LIFE WITHOUT SECRETS.” Reach her at www.mariaesalinas.com)
© 2007 by Maria Elena Salinas
Distributed by King Features Syndicate