Juarez, I Still Hear You Crying

(I've written about this before, here (fiction), here and here. I confess that I can't get this out of my head. I can't just forget about this and move on. So here is more.)

This is far too short to be an essay. But it's long enough to be the beginning of a epitaph. Unfortunately, though, it can't be personal, because there are far too many unidentified, dead women and parts of them in the graves in the desert. It's impossible to talk about any one person. And many of the graves still have not yet been found.

Juarez, I hear you crying.

And maybe The New York Times hears Juarez crying, too.

I hope you can hear it, as well:

Roughly 60 women and girls have been killed here so far this year; at least 100 have been reported missing over the past two years. And though the death toll for women so far this year is on track to fall below the high of 304 in 2010, state officials say there have already been more women killed in 2012 than in any year of the earlier so-called femicide era.

Juarez, I hear you crying.

Mexican authorities have made promises to prioritize cases like these for years, and in the wake of international pressure, prosecutors now argue that more of the killings are being solved. But arrests and convictions are exceedingly rare. For the victims found in the mass grave in the Juárez Valley, even the most basic details were still a mystery months later: forensic teams said they were not even sure how many women were buried there.

To many, these women are now part of what looks like a slaughter with peaks and valleys, but no end. In the state office opened a few years ago to investigate violence against women, desks are perpetually covered with stomach-turning case files.

Juarez, I hear you crying.

“Here, the only one who gives us justice and obedience to the law is God,” she said. “And there’s no escaping.”

Juarez, I hear you crying.