Harper\'s Magazine - 03.2020

56 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020

had been soundly beaten and doused

in gasoline. They escaped being

burned alive only because a state mar-

shal convinced Lorena and Jesús to

intercede with the crowd. Bruised,

bloodied, and reeking of fuel, the three

men were handcuffed in the back of a

police truck and driven to a hospital

in Toluca.

If she could do it over again, Lo rena

said she would have let the people of

Casas Viejas exact a fiery retribution

then and there. Her family’s descent into

hell, she told me, was just beginning.

T

he word “feminicidio” first

came into usage in Mexico in

the late Nineties, amid a sim-

ilar epidemic of unsolved killings in

and around Ciudad Juárez, on the bor-

der with El Paso. Nearly four hundred

murders between 1993 and 2005 left

the city with an enduring reputation

as a dark necropolis, a land of pink

crosses in the desert. Those deaths are

thought to have been caused by sex

trafficking and forced prostitution,

violence around drug smuggling, lax

law enforcement, an elevated level of

domestic abuse, and the deplorable

conditions in the shantytowns that

developed around the border factories

known as maquiladoras after the pas-

sage of NAFTA. But no one has been

able to fully explain the savage mutila-

tions and sometimes bizarre details

that characterized many of the kill-

ings. Several bodies were found with

one breast sliced off and the opposite

nipple bitten off; others had symbols

carved into their scalps; still others

appeared to have been dressed after

their deaths, sometimes in multiple

layers of clothing.

Gang members performing initiation

rites, organ thieves, Satan worshippers,

and snuff- film producers have all been

hypothesized. The idea that Juárez

might have been some kind of sick

playground for one or more foreign-

born serial killers became a prominent

theme in literary treatments of the

crimes, particularly after local author-

ities arrested an Egyptian chemist

named Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif— a

violent rapist with a long rap sheet—

and charged him with several mur-

ders. In Ro berto Bolaño’s thousand-

page novel 2666, which was in part

inspired by the killings, a Mexican

congresswoman uncovers a sinister

sex- trafficking ring that caters to narcos,

generals, bankers, and politicians. The

prime suspect, however, is an enigmatic

German-American computer-store

owner, whose blue eyes may be able to

see into the future.

In 2011, partly in response to inter-

national condemnation of the killings

in Juárez, the Mexican

Congress passed a federal

law making femicide a

distinct category of mur-

der that carries harsher

punishment, not unlike a

hate crime in the United

States. (Several other

countries in Latin Amer-

ica, including Argentina

and Honduras, have simi-

larly amended their pe-

nal codes.) Femicide is

defined as the killing of

a woman for gender-

based reasons, including

murder committed in

connection with rape or

kidnapping; murder pre-

ceded by stalking, harass-

ment, or abuse; murder

committed by a romantic

partner; murder charac-

terized by sexual violence,

degrading injuries, or des-

ecration; and murder fol-

lowed by display of the

body in a public place.

According to a judicial

ruling issued in 2015, au-

thorities must investigate

every violent death of a

woman as a potential

femicide, but police and

prosecutors do not apply

these criteria in any sys-

tematic way, and the rec-

A mother with a portrait of her two daughters, one of whom (left)

was kidnapped and murdered. Ciudad Juárez, 2004 © Maya Goded