U.S COMMITTEE FOR REFUGEES AND IMMIGRANTS
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‘Justice for Our Daughters’: Murder and Disappearance of Women in Mexico

February 19, 2025

In 1993, the women of Ciudad Juárez started to disappear. Alma Chavira Farel was the first: at fourteen years old, she was found strangled to death. From there, the count of the missing and the dead rose. Bones surfaced in the desert expanse surrounding the city, fragments handed to mothers who wondered what happened to their daughters. Most of the women killed were young and working class, employed for a pittance $55 a week in the factories that cropped up after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) made doing business in a border town like Juárez advantageous. Some of the dead were replaced within the week, treated in both life and death as disposable labor.

Today, there are at least 2,526 murdered women from Juárez. The killings did not stop there, but spread, becoming a national crisis of murder and enforced disappearance. The militarization of Mexico’s security forces has only worsened the crisis. In 2023, 3,408 women were murdered across Mexico, more than a 50% increase from the count in 2015. Only two percent of cases result in a criminal sentence. Each count of the dead represents a person. Each crime that goes unpunished, a miscarriage of justice.

 

 

Click here to read the full brief.

 

USCRI, founded in 1911, is a non-governmental, not-for-profit international organization committed to working on behalf of refugees and immigrants and their transition to a dignified life.

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