Via Mexico Solidarity Network: Ciudad Juarez registered 81 femicides so far in 2008, more than doubling the worst years of 1996 and 2001 in which the city recorded 37 women murdered. El Diario de Juarez provided the following accounting of femicides since 1993, when Esther Chavez Cano, a local human rights activist, first called attention to problem:
Year Femicides 1993 19 1994 19 1995 36 1996 37 1997 32 1998 36 1999 18 2000 32 2001 37 2002 36 2003 28 2004 19 2005 33 2006 20 2007 25 2008 81
Of the 81 cases so far this year, 55 deaths resulted from organized crime, while the Special Investigator for Deaths of Women (FEIHM) is handling the other 26 cases. Sixteen of these 26 cases remain under investigation while the other ten cases have been declared resolved. Two twelve-year-old girls are among the victims.
In other news, I am in the middle of reading Roberto Bolaņo's magnum opus, his posthumously published last novel, "2666", which is largely a fictionalized account of the Juarez femicides (he sets them in a fictional city in the Mexican state of Sonora, "Santa Teresa", but it's an obvious stand-in for Ciudad Juarez). I'm reading part 4 of 5 of the almost 900-page book, and this part is basically a series of cold, almost police-report-style accounts of one murder after another, clinical descriptions of bodies found and what the police or neighbors know or find out. Hundreds of pages of that, with just a few side digressions into subplots involving Santa Teresa cops or a sheriff from Arizona. It's pretty grim. I keep thinking that if I hadn't already made a film about the murders, this book would have spurred me into doing so by now. The big criticism I have of the book and its treatment of the murders is that Bolaņo heavily, though not completely, de-emphasises the corrupt role of the police in the crimes, and does not touch upon the larger societal forces that contribute to the killings, which is the main focus of my film. Still, it's formally an incredible book, with the first 3 parts before this "Part About The Crimes" covering a Pynchonesque panorama of odd characters and happenings, including a small gang of euroacademics obsessed with a reclusive German novelist, a frustrated Harlem political reporter sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, and a slightly crazy Chilean philosophy professor who moves from Barcelona to Santa Teresa with his daughter, and decides to hang a mysterious geometry book out on his laundry line. Bolano is easily the most interesting and adept fiction writer to come out of Latin America in a generation, at least, in my opinion.
Posted by steev at Diciembre 16, 2008 04:55 PM