The Horror Next Door
In a new book about the killings of women in Juarez, Harvest of Women, reporter Diana Washington Valdez delves into Mexico's darkest secrets.
By Margaret Markham
It was an idyllic June day that found me in the Yucatan, at the edge of the Sacred Well at Chichen-Itza, recounting its ancient origin to my young daughter beside me. Amidst a scattering of cherished wells in a riverless region, that well was believed home to the God of Rain, prompting the Mayan Itza tribe to settle and farm there around 450 AD. Some centuries later, violent Toltec "outsiders" imposed their culture–including new gods in a "religion" incorporating human sacrifice on a scale never known, designating not only young men and girls as victims, but captured prisoners as well. Small wonder the site became legendary as the Well of Sacrifices.
Now, years later, reading a new book spanning a seven-year probe of murders along the Mexican border, Harvest of Women: Safari in Mexico (Peace at the Border Publishing) the words leap off the page with grim resonance across the centuries:
"Many drug dealers, including members of the Colombian and Mexican cartels, are highly superstitious, pray to special patron saints, or carry amulets and consult mediums, but the most notorious case on record was related to a criminal group that operated in Matamoros in the 1980s. The group conducted human sacrifices, and one of their victims was an American college student who crossed the border into Mexico during spring break in 1989. According to the Associated Press, one of the cult members testified that the late Mexican Interpol Commander Florentine Ventura Gutierrez [who committed suicide] was one of the cult's disciples. . . . At least three other federal police officials, including a high-level drug investigator, were included in the group suspected of participating in more than 20 human sacrifices on the border and in Mexico City."
What, I wonder, could have compelled so highly experienced an author as Diana Washington Valdez to leap into such dangerous, murky waters?
Valdez, a reporter for the El Paso Times who also teaches political science at El Paso Community College, tells me in no uncertain words why she wrote Harvest of Women: "I thought bringing it all out into the open would help change things."
The challenge was laid out by Juarez attorney Nahum Najera Castro, former state deputy attorney general. In a 2004 interview recounted in Harvest of Women, the Mexican official told her, "Officials lack the will, the capacity and the honesty to solve the crimes."
Back in 1999, when Valdez starting digging into the mysterious and brutal deaths of women in and around Juarez and Chihuahua, she could hardly have imagined the public spotlight that would be shining on the crimes by the time Harvest of Women got published. This spring, Bordertown, an independent film starring Jennifer Lopez, Antonio Banderas and Martin Sheen, is expected to reach theaters. The bare bones of the plot sound almost as though the movie could be based on Valdez' quest: "the story of a reporter investigating the killings of hundreds of women in Juarez." Filmed by Santa Fe director Gregory Nava in Juarez, Nogales and Albuquerque and boosted by the state of New Mexico's film-investment program, Bordertown is now scheduled to premiere at the Berlin Film Fest in February.
Earlier this year, a much "smaller" film, Virgin of Juarez, also dramatized the killings; it starred Minnie Driver as (again) a US journalist. Recently released on DVD, Virgin of Juarez will be screened next month as part of the CineMatinee series at the Fountain Theatre in Mesilla.
About Diana Washington Valdez Diana Washington Valdez is a veteran journalist who has worked at daily newspapers in New Mexico, California and Texas. Her 2002 series "Death Stalks the Border," published by the El Paso Times, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It received a First Place award from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors. She is considered a world expert on the Juarez women's murders, Mexican politics and the drug trade. Her book on the women's murders, Cosecha de Mujeres: Safari en el desierto Mexicano, was published in Spanish in 2005 by Oceano de Mexico and Oceano de Espana. The book in the Spanish language was a 2006 finalist for the international Ulysses Lettre Award. Harvest of Women: Safari in Mexico (Peace at the Border, 2006), the English version, is based on seven years of investigation and contains updated material. In 1998, Valdez was chosen to participate in the North American Journalism Exchange Program fellowship, selecting Mexico as her host country. She has collaborated on various projects related to US-Mexico border topics for publications and documentaries in the United States, Mexico, Spain, Great Britain, Poland, Austria, Canada and Germany. Over the years, she has received numerous journalism awards and other recognitions. She has a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's degree in political science from the University of Texas at El Paso. –from Harvest of Women: Safari in Mexico |
The Sept. 27 release of the English-language edition of Harvest of Women–a Spanish version was published in 2005–also coincided with the debut of a documentary partly based on Valdez' work. TV journalist Lorena Mendez-Quiroga made the documentary, which was screened in Los Angeles.
But it's not only Hollywood that's finally paying attention to this horrific string of crimes. Some notable public figures have called for action, including US Sen. Jeff Bingaman, State Sen. Mary Jane Garcia of Dona Ana County and NMSU criminal justice professor Cynthia Bejarano and professor Coco Fusco. In 2003, Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed a measure introduced by State Rep. Norma Chavez urging FBI involvement in assisting Mexican authorities investigating the crimes. Early in May 2006, both the US House and Senate unanimously passed a resolution–introduced respectively by US Rep. Hilda Solis of Los Angeles and Bingaman–calling for an increased US role in bringing to an end the brutal murders and disappearances of hundreds of women in the Mexican cities of Juarez and Chihuahua. That resolution marked a milestone in the harrowing, brutal scenario of murders and disappearances that have tainted Mexico's border areas since 1993.
For the plucky El Paso Times journalist, it all began on a cold winter's night in 1999, when she read far into the early morning hours, scrutinizing police records of atrocities. Starting with 1993, it appeared that far more horrific deaths had occurred than the Mexican federal attorney general had reported. Among them were two 28-year-old women–one from Albuquerque, one from the Netherlands–as well as a 22-year-old male from Fabens, Texas, several Americans from El Paso, and more than a couple of dozen in Chihuahua City. Nor did the toll include countless still missing.
For Diana Washington Valdez, who had grown up in El Paso and viewed the other side of the Rio Grande as "next door," it became an unbearable trail of horrors begging for answers. "The accounts I read that night were disturbing," she confesses in the prologue to her book.
In particular, the fate of two of the earliest victims began to haunt her. Janeth Fiero, who was raped, stabbed and strangled, was only 12 at the time of her death. Then there was the mutilated body of 17-year-old Silvia Rivera Morales, callously dumped in Lote Bravo just south of the Juarez International Airport.
"Initially what stopped me in my tracks was the brutality that came to light as bodies of young women were recovered at one site after another," she tells me.
I ask her bluntly, "In confronting such lethal events, weren't you afraid for your own life?"
"Yes," she answers pointblank. "I got threats more than once. But what I feared most was for my family's safety. Then the mental discipline from decades serving in the National Guard came to my rescue. I just had to finish what I'd started!"
In Harvest of Women, Valdez doesn't hesitate about naming names. Case by case, year by year, she unravels the grisly events and the sinister alliances that led to unprecedented sadistic violence. Such unholy forces also emboldened all types of predators–pedophiles, rapists, domestic abusers, sadists, sex-traffickers–to get on the gruesome bandwagon. As for serial killers, after examining nearly 200 cases, Canadian criminologist Candice Skrapee detected more than one such deviant at work
Nor was the carnage limited to the border areas. It spread rapidly in all directions–from Chihuahua City to Chiapas and Oaxaca, from Mexico City to Vera Cruz and Guanajuato, and even south to Guatemala where the Carillo Fuentes drug cartel is as active as in Mexico. In just the first four years of this century, 700 girls and women were reported murdered in Guatemala alone. As the New York Times noted in Oct. 21, 2005, it amounted to "an epidemic of gruesome killings," often with sexual torture or other mutilation.
In her saga, Valdez skillfully untangles an endless web of official deceit to reveal a social structure dictated by drug cartels. With civilized behavior abandoned, it became obvious to everyone profiting from the seductive flow of dirty money that "anything goes."
I ask her, "What amongst all that evil was for you the most chilling turning point?"
Without a moment's hesitation she replies, "It was a solid lead to a notorious pact between top Mexican officials and a major drug cartel." Her book reveals how details of a festive Chihuahua gathering came from two "insiders." Those partygoers included a general, a high-ranking police official, several federal judges and a bishop–and, most surprisingly, Colombians accompanying a former Mexican president. The latter came to announce, Valdez writes, that "Chihuahua State had been sold to the Colombian cartel and, like the spoils of war, the state had been divided into several territories. . . . Unimaginable sums of money were to be made as a result of this pact." A list of names was then passed around so everyone would know the "untouchables"–come what may, nobody should dare "interfere with any of the people on that list."
As Valdez sees it now, unprecedented international media attention plus mounting protests by both public groups and public officials, combined with Hollywood's voice through Bordertown, has changed the sinister playing field. She says, "Corrupt officials can no longer continue covering of the crimes or protect the killers. Because of their official complicity, the deaths truly are crimes of state."
What remains? "We need an international tribunal or a world court to try them for crimes against humanity as was done with postwar Nazi officials," Valdez advocates. "Otherwise, if justice is delayed, Mexico's democracy is truly at risk."
Longtime Las Cruces resident Margaret Markham is a freelance journalist and author, and a member of the National Association of Science Writers.
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