Some people see the femicide in Ciudad Juárez as a product of a cultural image of women in Latin America. A female worker in a maquiladora is regarded as replaceable capital. By hiring submissive women, maquiladoras are more easily able to exploit the women who are to them simply bodies filling their factories. They are not only able to pay lower wages, but they are able to offer little or no benefits in dire work conditions. These working conditions wear down the women’s bodies, at which point they would be replaced. These conditions also leave the women vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault, which is perfectly acceptable and rarely prosecuted because it is frequently considered the woman’s fault that she was subjected to these actions. In fact, her mere presence in the factory violates cultural beliefs about a woman’s place. The men who rape and beat these women may believe that they have a right, even a duty to exert their force on these women to put them back in their places.
This dominating cultural image also places the intrinsic value of a victim of femicide in question following her death. Members of the media and the community alike try to categorize these women as either “good girls” or as fallen women (such as prostitutes, sluts, or barmaids). By putting emphasis on the identity of the women, a greater value is placed on the lives of the well-behaved women, which provides justification for overlooking or minimizing the crimes at hand. A few years after the murders began, government and police officials advised parents to keep an eye on their daughters and not allow them to go out at night. The implication was that good girls did not go out at night and since the unfortunate victims typically disappeared during the night, it followed that they were asking for it or had run off to engage in activities of the fallen woman archetype.
It is this role of disposability women play in Mexican society that has made way for the passivity that has allowed the murder of women in Juárez to continue.
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Andreas, Peter, and Kelly M. Greenhill. Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2010. Print.
“The City of Lost Girls.” Unreported World. Channel 4. Television.
Gaspar De Alba, Alicia, and Georgina Guzmán. Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera. Austin: University of Texas, 2010. Print.
Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman). Dir. Lourdes Portillo. DVD.
Washington, Valdez Diana. The Killing Fields: The Harvest of Women. Los Angeles: Peace at the Border, 2006. Print.
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