On the Job
Chasing the Ghouls
The Juarez Serial Murders, and a Reporter Who Won't Let Go
Were they to occur in an American city, the serial murders of women in Juarez, Mexico, would be the crime of the century, assigned to teams of reporters coming at the murders from every angle. But because they happen in a Mexican border city, just across the sluggish Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, they are seen from the U.S. as a ghoulish curiosity. The exception is the El Paso Times, where reporter Diana Washington Valdez has covered the sexual homicides for the last five years, and not without some cost to herself.
According to Amnesty International, at least 137 women have been the victims of sexual homicide during the last ten years. The state government of Chihuahua puts the number closer to ninety. Their bodies, some mutilated, were usually dumped in ditches or vacant lots in the treeless desert. Most victims have been young, attractive women attending school or working at one of the city’s large export assembly plants, known as maquiladoras. Though the police claim to have jailed the killers, whom they identify as a cabal of bus drivers and gang members led by an Egyptian chemist, almost no one believes that they are the real culprits. Washington Valdez thinks she knows why.
The forty-nine-year-old investigative reporter has written a book, Harvest of Women: A Mexican Safari, based on her coverage, which is due out this spring. In it, she offers a widely circulated, though hushed, theory of why the authorities have failed to arrest the real suspects. She alleges that some of the murderers are young members of prominent Juarez families who have ties to the Juarez drug cartel and buy protection from the police. They are called Los Juniors.
“The best information we have is that these men are committing crimes simply for the sport of it. We know of girls who’ve told stories about escaping from certain parties — orgies — at which some of these people were present,” she says. “The Mexican federal investigators have enough information to put people in jail now. I know that.”
Protected by straight-shooting prosecutors, (mostly) honest cops, and the First Amendment, most American reporters have no idea what it’s like to work in the separate reality of a Mexican border town. The border has been called a separate country, a hybrid netherworld with its own distinct economy, cultural traditions, and immigration patterns. It is possible for a newcomer to visit these drab, sprawling border cities, to see the Blockbusters and KFCs, the stout women lugging immense shopping bags across the international bridges, and wonder what the fuss is all about. There is the economy you see — manufacturing, trucking, and retail — and there is the vast underground economy that runs, like an aquifer, beneath the borderlands. Every night, organizations of clever and violent men move cocaine, marijuana, heroin, sex slaves, stolen cars, avocados, frozen chicken, and bottles of Viagra back and forth across the divide. It’s impossible to understand the border, and border journalism, without acknowledging the ubiquitous role of contraband.
To name names of powerful families mentioned in police investigations, as Washington Valdez did, “es muy valiente,” says a longtime Juarez newspaper editor, who asked not to be identified.
Juarez, on one level, is a prosperous industrial city of 1.3 million inhabitants, with four universities, museums, and a sprawling slum of cardboard houses. On another level, it is home to the Juarez cartel, a drug mafia so wealthy and pervasive that local journalists say it has infiltrated every civic institution from city hall to the leading newspaper.
A few years ago, I attended a journalism conference at a Ciudad Juarez hotel about covering the border. During an afternoon panel, the police reporter for El Diario de Juarez took a call on his cell phone and rushed from the room. After the session, we strolled outside to find out why a police helicopter was hovering. Cartel hitmen had machine-gunned a judge, in broad daylight, in the sushi bar across the street from the hotel.
As the binational border affairs reporter for the Times, Washington Valdez quickly learned that working in Mexico requires habits not taught in journalism schools. There are few dependable statistics, no Freedom of Information Act, and ill-enforced constitutional protections. People prefer to meet a journalist in person rather than talk on the phone.
What’s more, local journalists are often viewed as government collaborators because some of them collect information for the officials they cover.
“I’ve worked with some Juarez reporters who would go back and tell the authorities what I was asking,” Washington Valdez says dryly. But she understands the reporters’ situation, too. “I used to be critical of my Mexican colleagues until I realized what it’s like to work here,” she says over chips, salsa, and a cold beer at the Sanborn’s coffee shop in Juarez.
Courageous Mexican reporters must learn their limits. Said one veteran newspaper journalist in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico: “On the border, reporters not only have to be investigators, but mathematicians as well, getting their equations right and carefully calculating how far they can go.”
Washington Valdez has gone further than nearly any other reporter to get to the bottom of the story of the murdered women of Juarez. She now finds herself largely alone in advancing an explosive theory, one that some say is highly speculative: “Mexican federal investigations contain accounts of officials and other persons who facilitated orgies where they abused women whose bodies were found afterwards. The investigators say that some of the people also participated in the murders,” she wrote, in an excerpt of her book published last October in the Mexico City daily La Jornada. She named fourteen people, many from prominent families, who “could have known of the crimes or are involved.”
She also wrote that “police corruption at all levels” and involvement by the cartel are critical to explaining the continuation of the murders. She asserted that certain Mexican state and federal investigators wanted to pursue promising leads but were blocked by supervisors because “rich and powerful people were involved.” Official reaction to the article was muted, but the excerpt set off a buzz on the streets of Juarez.
Her theory lacks critical details, however, such as the nature of the shadowy police-Juniors-narco nexus, as well as testimony from eyewitnesses or compelling evidence from police. Washington Valdez says she knows the theory appears sketchy now, but the book will answer many of those questions.
Art Werge, an FBI agent in El Paso, says the theory of Los Juniors is plausible because “on the border, we’ve seen members of these areas of society engage in drug trafficking and other crimes.” But at this point, he adds, “we haven’t seen any evidence to support that theory.”
The Juarez newspaper editor says he, too, has received extensive information on Los Juniors, and he thinks the scenario is credible.
“Los Juniors have business and family ties to the cartel,” he says. The editor says he has also talked to state investigators who were not permitted to pursue leads. But therein lies the major weakness of the Juniors theory. “It is raw intelligence,” he concludes.
Manuel Esparza, spokesman for the Special Women’s Homicide Unit of the state attorney general’s office in Juarez, claims his investigators have heard rumors about Los Juniors for years, but don’t find them credible. “There are no links between those people and the murders,” he says emphatically. “And if there were, we wouldn’t stop at prosecuting anyone.”
Over the years, there has been a host of lurid explanations for the serial homicides: satanic sacrifices, organ trafficking, snuff films, murderous street gangs, and blood sport.
“Los Juniors is one of many theories,” says Esther Chavez Cano, a longtime women’s rights activist who has closely followed the investigation for ten years. “Any theory is credible . . . . We just want to know what is happening in our city, where women are killed for being women.”
The lack of published evidence implicating specific individuals has not dissuaded some of the mothers of murdered girls, who subscribe to the Juniors theory. “Clearly, some very economically powerful people are connected to the murders. How else could these crimes go on for ten years without being solved?” asks Benita Monarrez. The body of her seventeen-year-old daughter, Laura Berenice, was found on November 6, 2001, along with the bodies of seven other young women, dumped in a cotton field in Juarez.
In the weekly column that Washington Valdez used to write, she once questioned the need for a new highway that ran from Juarez to a sleepy border crossing. She wrote what many Juarenses suspected — it was the perfect highway for the cartel to shuttle drug shipments to the border. It was not a popular story in official circles. But as a U.S. journalist, she had a degree of protection. It’s unlikely a Mexican newspaper would have printed the same kind of speculative story.
For example, when the gutsy Juarez daily, El Norte, published the names and photos of six policemen suspected of murdering a local attorney, the reporter was menaced by police thugs on the street and told to drop the story. It’s not surprising that El Norte occasionally reprints Washington Valdez’s stories as a way to publicize important but sensitive developments in the murders of women, sourcing it to the gringo daily across the river. “The journalists here know what I know,” she says. “They just can’t report it. So they tell me, ‘Go for it, Diana.’”
Yet, even though she works in El Paso, Washington Valdez has to be careful when she crosses the international bridge to work the story. A few days after she first wrote about Los Juniors in a 2002 series on the murders in the Times, owned by Gannett, she says she was approached by a Mexican intermediary and politely told, “Los Juniors do not want their names divulged.”
“I realized that was my cue,” she says. “How much money did I want to drop the story?”
Washington Valdez says she was warned by a Mexican friend who had spoken to police officers in Juarez that she should “quiet down” because she was making some powerful individuals “very mad.” But she refuses to do so. “It’s not just a story,” she says. “It has required everything of me. The challenge, getting to the bottom of things, the danger . . . I like that.”
For a journalist who is a woman, holds dual U.S.-Mexico nationality, and grew up on the border, the murder story has become personal. Her outrage grows with the body count. “These young women, girls, have no way to defend themselves,” she says. “There’s an atrocity being committed here. The authorities know who the killers are and nothing’s being done about it.”
Driving around Juarez, she radiates the casual paranoia of someone covering a story in which the authorities may well be the bad guys. She has fears. “Don’t mention the make of my car!” she tells me. We pull up to a crime scene guarded by three federal policemen with a video camera. “Damn,” she says, “they’re gonna have my plates now. Oh well, they’re going to have it sooner or later.”
Nearby, we walk to a large pink cross erected in the middle of a vacant lot, near a sprawling Wal-Mart. On February 21, 2001, the body of seventeen-year-old Lilia Alejandra Garcia Andrade was found on this spot, nude and wrapped in a blanket. She had been choked and savagely beaten, and parts of her breasts had been cut away. Washington Valdez says she came out here shortly after the crime to interview neighbors in the area.
“I started to cry,” she says. “The emotion had built up from previous years. I had managed to disassociate myself up to that point. I kept on crying. People must have thought I was a relative.”
She stares at the cross. “This has become my personal altar,” she says.
In February 2003, Washington Valdez wrote a note to the assistant managing editor and told him she didn’t think she could write about the discovery of another girl’s body. “In fairness to my editors, when they say I’ve gotten too involved, they’re probably right,” she says.
Nevertheless, today she still covers the femicides and the drug cartel, though she spends most of her time chasing stories in Texas.
“She has not burned out,” says Armando Durazo, the Times assistant managing editor. “Diana knows her job, and her responsibilities.”
The murders of women in Juarez continue to dog the Mexican government at every turn. Last year, Amnesty International and the Mexican National Human Rights Commission released highly critical reports faulting the Mexican authorities for grossly inadequate forensic work, faking evidence, coercing confessions and mistreating victims’ families. Representative Hilda Solis, a Democrat from California, has introduced a bill in Congress calling on the State Department to put the murders at the top of its bilateral agenda with Mexico. And, for the first time, last November President Vicente Fox met with a group of mothers of slain girls.
Many of the murdered women worked at maquiladoras, which produce things like TVs, car dashboards, and computer keyboards. Human rights groups criticize maquilas for not providing better security for their low-wage, largely female work force. The multinational factories are popular targets of labor, women’s rights groups, and antiglobalization groups, which regularly assign them indirect culpability in the women’s deaths.
But Washington Valdez disagrees. “This is a police story,” she says flatly. “It’s not about socio-economic conditions in Juarez. It’s not about the maquilas. It’s about people killing women and getting away with it. When the police catch the killers, that’s when the murders will stop.”
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