On Las Muertas de Juarez Femicide and Representation

on las muertas de juárez Femicide and Representation

» Paulina García del Moral

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Since 1993, at least 3792 young women have been raped, tortured, mutilated, and viciously murdered in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, a bordertown in northern Mexico known for its maquila (sweatshop) industry and the Juárez drug cartel. Mexican authorities have shown little concern or respect for these women’s lives and deaths, and the press has appropriated these cases for sensationalist purposes. In the meantime, a sense of rampant impunity prevails in Ciudad Juárez, as the number of murdered women, now known as las muertas de Juárez, continues to increase. It is necessary to emphasize, however, that it is only particular women who have been murdered: young women from a low socio-economic background, who were either sex workers, students, or maquila workers.3 Their murders need to be recognized as femicides4 because they embody these women’s institutionalized inferior status in Mexican society. These murders are not inexplicable, anomalous acts of violence against women; they are the outcome of a social order, based on specific cultural values that legitimate and endorse violence against these women in particular. In this article, I focus on the representation of the case of las muertas de Juárez in the local newspaper El Heraldo de Chihuahua. I argue that the representation of these murders in El Heraldo is violent in itself, since it re-produces the violence to which these women were subjected, along with hegemonic discourses of violence against women, which continue to legitimize such violence. Furthermore, El Heraldo’s sensationalism prevents readers from recognizing these murders as a social problem, that is, as femicides. Rather, these women’s horrible deaths have become a source of entertainment, and the violence and torture to which they were subjected have been rendered invisible. Therefore, in looking at the representation of these murders in El Heraldo, it is necessary to consider the reports . . .

. . . as a text situated first, within and alongside other texts, both literal and photographic, within the specific newspaper concerned. . . . [S]econd, [as] embedded within and drawing upon a system of cultural values that both assist and inform the writing of the report and in addition make available a specific interpretation or reading of the report.5 Specifically, I look at the construction of the image of the psychopath and at the classification of the young murdered women’s character into “immoral” or “innocent” as hegemonic discourses of violence against women, since they shape readers’ understanding of the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez. The Image of the Sexual Psychopath The development of the image of the sexual psychopath in El Heraldo has two stages: 1) the phase of the anonymous psychopath, and 2) the phase of Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif and his alleged accomplices, the gangs Los Rebeldes (The Rebels) and Los Ruteros (The Bus Drivers), as the ultimate sexual psychopaths. The image of the murderer as an anonymous psychopath was popularized during 1996, before any real suspects were convicted. Articles such as “The Seventh Victim of ‘The Depredator’ Has Been Found”6 and “Psychopaths Confess: They Would Meet Young Girls in Bars and Then Kill Them,”7 reveal a remarkable sense of fascination with the archetype of the psychopath. More important is, nonetheless, these articles’ insistence on the murderers being psychopaths: the presumed killers are automatically pathologized, for it would be unthinkable that a “normal” person could kill this way. The image of the bloodthirsty psychopath only became more complex as Sharif became the main suspect amidst a climate of social and political anxieties. Particularly important here is that Sharif is an Egyptian chemist, who lived in the U.S., and not a

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Figure 1: This image, taken from the February 26, 2001 edition of El Heraldo de Chihuahua, the local newspaper in Juárez, Mexico, positions an arrested suspect’s gaze down towards the feet of a woman he is accused of mudering. Photo credit: Paulina García del Moral

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Mexican man. Sharif had a long record of sexual violence against women in the U.S. and came to Mexico as part of an agreement he made with American authorities to get out of jail. After a young girl accused him of having raped her, he was blamed for some of the murders. In fact, he was accused of hiring the gangs Los Rebeldes and Los Ruteros to murder young girls while he was in jail to prove his innocence. As of today, he has been convicted of the murder of Elizabeth Castro García. It is crucial to emphasize the fact that Sharif is Egyptian to understand the Orientalist subtext that underpins the newspaper’s articles on him.8 In referring to Sharif as El Egipcio (The Egyptian), El Heraldo effectively draws on the Orientalist stereotype of the “dangerous Muslim man”9 as exotic, decadent, violent and dangerous to describe his character and, consequently, to make him seem unequivocally guilty. The article “Truculence of an Episode of Blood: The Rebels, The Bus Drivers and The Egyptian”10 (figure 1) is a perfect example. The layout of this article makes Sharif appear as if he is looking, without remorse, at his victim’s feet, at her dead body, as if he had just killed her. At the centre of the page, we have his “itinerary of blood,” that is, his record of sexual violence against women, which evidently renders him guilty. In addition, we have

an article next to the picture of the victim’s feet, “Between Pain and Uncertainty,”11 which talks about a mother who does not believe that her daughter is dead. Hence, Sharif is represented as the ultimate sexual predator, the psychopath behind all these murders. As such, this representation successfully obscures the fact that these murders are a social problem, as opposed to the doings of a psychopath. The image of the bloodthirsty psychopath negates societal responsibility for these murders. “Innocent” Versus “Immoral” Jovencitas The socially constructed image of the victim as an innocent young girl or, conversely, as an immoral young woman, lead the reader to think that some young girls were innocent and did not deserve to be murdered, while others brought it upon themselves. This “innocent versus immoral” divide is evident in the following articles. In “A 13-Year Old Girl is Raped and Killed,”12 the death of thirteen-year old Sonia Ivette Ramírez is depicted as a senseless murder: “A young girl of only 13 years of age was raped and brutally stoned to death, and her body was dumped in a deserted terrain.”13 Sonia Ivette is constructed as a completely innocent young girl: “the unfortunate jovencita had long dark hair, and was wearing yellow shorts, a shirt with a flower pattern, school shoes and white socks.”14 She is not blamed for her death, since she had only left the safety of her house in order to accompany her sister to the maquila Key Electronic. The second article, “Two Victims . . . Unsolved Cases,”15 needs to be understood in relation to the article “Prostitution of Young Girls, Out of Control,”16 located on the same page, since it sets the framework for its interpretation. In the latter, young women are described as morally and physically corrupt. The article starts by stating that “it is surprising that 16year old jovencitas dance almost naked in depressing settings and that the waiters of these bars offer

them [to customers] to have a good time at night.”17 The article centers itself around the image of Karina, an exotic dancer/prostitute “who has a tattoo on her ankle, has not yet reached legal age, but the strains of alcohol and multiple pregnancies have left her with an enormous belly that make her look as if she were 22 or 23.”18 Karina’s disfigured body, her tattoos and “the scars in her abdomen that indicate that she has had to be cut open more than once,” is represented as being as decadent, disgusting and depressing as the dingy bar where she dances, including its toilets: “in the inside of that place there is not even light, the carpets are dirty and completely burnt by cigarette buds. The toilets are truly disgusting, saturated with waste, totally scratched up.”19 This article implies that women like Karina put themselves at risk for leading that kind of life and that they are to be blamed if they are murdered. What is worse, it implies that if women like Karina are killed, their deaths are not worth worrying about; they were (social) waste already. The article “Two Victims . . . Unsolved Cases” illustrates this, since it recurs to the rhetorical images used in the previous article to describe the bodies of two exotic dancers/ prostitutes, Paty and Perla Patricia Sáenz, which were found in dumpsters. For example, the article details how Paty’s body was found naked, with her head completely disfigured, as it had been smashed with a rock and coyotes had torn off and eaten up the flesh.20 As such, it successfully implies that these two women suffered their horrible fate because they were already corrupted, worthless and disposable bodies. These “immoral” girls brought their murders upon themselves, whereas Sonia Ivette’s murder is seen as senseless. Sonia Ivette embodies the physical wholeness and the innocence of a school girl, while Karina, Paty, and Perla Patricia represent moral and physical corruption.

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Conclusion The reports analyzed in this article are just a few examples of how the sensationalist representation of the case of las muertas de Juárez in El Heraldo de Chihuahua hinders the possibility of identifying these murders as femicides, thus negating societal responsibility for them. These representations ignore the power relations that exist between women and men in Mexican society, and hence the social context in which violence against women takes place. Ultimately, El Heraldo re-produces the violence to which these women were subjected, in that it consistently depicts the murdered women’s bodies as worthless and disposable. . . . NOTES 1. The dead women of Ciudad Juárez. 2. PGR. Special Prosecutor’s Unit for Attention to Crimes Related to the Homicides of Women in the Minicipality of Juarez, Chihuahua, Final Report. Mexico: Office of the Assistant Attorney General, Attention to Victims and Community Services, 2006, p. 1. The acronym PGR stands for the Procuraduría General de la República, the Mexican Office of the Attorney General of the Republic. 3. Monárrez Fragoso, Julia and César Fuentes. “Feminicidio y Marginalidad Urbana en Ciudad Juárez en la Década de los Noventa” in Violencia Contra las Mujeres en Contextos Urbanos y Rurales, edited by Marta Torres Falcón. México: Colegio de México, 2004.

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4. I do not define femicide as “the killing of women by men because they are female,” (Russell, Diana E.H. 2002. “Introduction: The Politics of Femicide.” Pp. 3–11 in Femicide in Global Perspective, edited by Diana E.H. Russell and Roberta A. Harmes. New York and London: Teachers College, Columbia University). Rather, I define it as those murders that em-body the institutionalized inferior status of particular women in their society, as well as cultural beliefs in these women’s worthlessness and the disposability of their bodies. 5. Smart, Carol and Barry Smart. “Accounting for Rape: Reality and Myth in Press Reporting” in Women, Sexuality and Social Control, edited by Carol Smart and Barry Smart. London, Henley and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1978, p. 97 6. Rodríguez, Armando. “Hallan Séptima Víctima de ‘El Depredador.’” El Heraldo de Chihuahua, September 11, 1996; 3A. 7. Ortega Lozano, Marisela. “Confiesan Psicópatas los Homicidios: Conocían a Víctimas en Centros Nocturnos y Luegos las Mataban.” El Heraldo de Chihuahua. April 16, 1996; 1B and 9B. 8. In Said’s work, Orientalism refers to Western representations of the Orient, “as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” As such, Said argues that ideas about the Orient as the exotic, mysterious or violent ‘Other’ are, in fact, only stereotypes and cultural assumptions about what we think the Orient is supposed to be. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New Cork: Vintage Books, 1978, p. 3.

9. Razack, Sherene. 2004. “Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages,” Feminist Legal Studies 12: 129–174. 10. Meza Rivera, Froilán. “Truculencias de un Episodio de Sangre: Los Rebeldes, Los Ruteros y el Egipcio (Segunda Parte).” El Heraldo de Chihuahua, February 26 2001; 3B. 11. “Entre el Dolor y la Incertidumbre.” El Heraldo de Chihuahua, February 26 2001; 3B. 12. Ortega Lozano, Marisela. “Violan y Matan a Jovencita de 13 Años.” El Heraldo de Chihuahua, August 10, 1996; 7B. 13. Ortega Lozano, Marisela. “Violan y Matan a Jovencita de 13 Años.” El Heraldo de Chihuahua, August 10, 1996; 7B. My translation. 14. Ibid. 15. “Dos Víctimas . . . Casos Sin Resolver.” El Heraldo de Chihuahua, March 19, 1999; 3B. 16. Salinas, Víctor and Jorge Montes de Oca. “Prostitución de Jovencitas, Sin Control.” El Heraldo de Chihuahua, March 19, 1999; 3B. 17. Salinas, Víctor and Jorge Montes de Oca. “Prostitución de Jovencitas, Sin Control.” El Heraldo de Chihuahua, March 19, 1999; 3B. My translation. 18. Ibid., emphasis added. 19. Ibid., emphasis added. 20. “Dos Víctimas . . . Casos Sin Resolver.” El Heraldo de Chihuahua, March 19, 1999; 3B.

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