Amid the drug wars bloodshed, the Mexican border city has been shaken by the disappearances of at least two dozen teenage girls and young women. Officials have few leads.
By Ken Ellingwood
August 9, 2009
August 9, 2009
Reporting from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico - The streets of Juarez are swallowing the young and pretty. Monica Alanis, an 18-year-old college freshman, never came home from her exams. That was more than four months ago. Across town, 17-year-old Brenda Ponce didn't return from a job-hunting trip downtown. That was a year ago. Hilda Rivas, 16, was also last spotted downtown. That was 17 months ago.
Two dozen teenage girls and young women have gone missing in this violent border city in the last year and half, stirring dark memories of the killings of hundreds of women that made Ciudad Juarez infamous a decade ago...There is no clear evidence of wrongdoing or links among the cases, which have been overshadowed by a vicious drug war that has killed more than 2,500 people in Juarez since the beginning of 2008...
...[Families] badger state investigators, but complain that authorities have no solid leads to explain why so many young women would drop from view at once."There is no theory. There is no hypothesis," said Ricardo Alanis, Monica's father, his voice thin with pain. "They don't have anything concrete after four months."
...Several say they believe their daughters have been seized and forced into prostitution, perhaps in the United States, by the same criminal bands that have turned this border city into the bloodiest front in the drug war."She's in the hands of those people. I don't know who they are or where they are," said Aiben Rivas, a carpenter and father of Hilda. She disappeared Feb. 25, 2008, after chatting with a friend downtown.
Relatives and activists see common threads in the cases. Most of the young women are attractive, dark-haired and slender. Most were last seen downtown, a scruffy but bustling precinct of discount clothing stores, cheap eats and honky-tonk bars. Four of the missing teens are named Brenda.
The profile looks different from that of the more than 350 women killed during a 15-year stretch from 1993. Many of those victims worked in the city's assembly plants and came from other parts of Mexico. Their bodies turned up, often with signs of sexual abuse and torture, in bare lots and gullies. Despite some arrests and the creation of a special prosecutor's office, the cases remain largely unsolved.
By contrast those missing today are, for the most part, local residents from stable, middle- and working-class homes."They are not only from the poorest families," said Marisela Ortiz, who directs a group representing families of the slain women that is now working with the families of those who disappeared recently. "The characteristics have changed."And this time there are no bodies...
The Chihuahua state attorney generals office, whose missing-persons bureau has jurisdiction over the cases, declined to make anyone available to comment, despite several requests. Investigators privately have told local journalists that they suspect the young women were seized by trafficking rings for prostitution.
Loved ones say they believe the young women are alive."God willing, someday I'll see her again," said Yolanda Saenz, who is Brenda Ponce's mother. The girl, dressed in bluejeans and a black blouse, went downtown July 22, 2008, to look for a store job to help pay for dental braces and school expenses, her mother said."I just want to know what happened to her so I can find peace," Saenz said...
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