Remembering: The Forgotten Women of Juárez

Podcast Highlight — Forgotten: Women of Juárez, by Oz Woloshyn and Mónica Ortiz Uribe

Please permit me to interrupt your train of consciousness this evening to create awareness about a longstanding and an ongoing issue in Juárez, Mexico. For three years, my husband and I maintained a residence in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a US city that shares its borders with El-Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico. We have been to Juárez several times and even took our families and friends there last year for dessert on a Sunday to celebrate his residency graduation. I wrote about my initial visit here.

Recently, I learned about a crime wave that’s been ongoing in Juárez since the 1990s. Now, Juárez has been (and still remains) plagued with drug wars from feuding cartels. But this other crime is different. It targets women directly. It’s been linked to the cartel, but the culprits are not just the cartel. Since 1993, hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, tortured, and murdered. Often found in shallow graves in the city and some, whose bodies are yet to be recovered by their families. Most of these women fit into a profile — those of…