STOPPING THE VIOLENCE by chris trani

From my porch I stare into the United States of America. If I shorten my sight and look just across the street I stare into the window of a drug dealer. To my right lives an old woman that looks after her nephew, who is also rumored to be dealing in narcotics. To my left is a shack that is overcrowded with a fatherless family. This often times can say a lot about contemporary Mexico. Fathers whom either head to the States in search of work or run off with the girl next door. Mothers who fear being beat by their spouse or at the very least getting pregnant every time their alcoholic husband forces sex upon them. Where I live is not all dark, but the view from my porch says a lot.
 

I live at a mission house that is less than a half-mile from the U.S./Mexican International Border. There are no cement roads in this colonia. There are mostly shacks made of wood palettes and adobe brick. The average income is $35 a week, which is not nearly enough to support a family. When you live in a country where 27% of the people live below the poverty line you can see the economic injustice very clearly.
 

On the opposite side of the fence though, there’s hope. The third biggest contributor to the Mexican economy is money sent home from the States. Labor that has come to the States, often times illegally, is becoming the backbone of the service industry. Many times the immigrant worker is willing to do the work that most people do not want for a wage that no American would work for. The meat packing industry thrives on such labor, the fruit picked in California depends on this labor, and many small businesses are able to turn profits because of such thrifty labor. With so many opportunities across the border, it is not uncommon to meet someone in this colonia, located on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, who is planning on paying a coyote to show them a way to the north.
 

It’s the conditions of this country that force people to make the trip to the States. The U.S. investment known as NAFTA has helped Mexico in the macroeconomic sense by improving gauging figures such as the gross domestic product. However, when workers receive only $6 each day of a six-day workweek, the advantage clearly ends up with the employer and the factory. For the past decade, however, the workers and residents of Ciudad Juarez have been dealing with much more than just poor wages.
 

There have been over 300 girls and young women kidnapped, raped, and murdered over the past ten years in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. An article published in the March 2003 issue of woman’s magazine Marie Claire quotes a higher number, but it is rare to find an exact number when discussing this ongoing tragedy. Many quote that roughly 300 women figure have been murdered, but are quick to cite its discrepancies, because it is also rumored that far more women have disappeared completely. Yet despite the numbers, these murders and abductions remain to be solved. They are a mystery that the Mexican government has not aggressively pursued, and are an ongoing problem to the poor young women and girls that I live with in Ciudad Juarez.
 

As a result of these ongoing murders, Juarez has become a main target of V-Day, a movement focused on ending violence against women. The organization started out as a grass-roots cause founded by playwright Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, but has now blossomed into a worldwide movement that has raised over $20 million in its first six years. It is a force that relentlessly demands that rape, incest, battery, genital mutilation and sex slavery end immediately.
 

In January 2004, minutes after the world premiere of the V-Day documentary Until the Violence Stops at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah Eve Ensler and Jane Fonda, a strong supporter of V-Day movement, took a few moments to speak with me about the crimes in Juarez.
 

“I think it’s an outrage that the Mexican Government has not simply stopped everything they are doing to apply all their attention to figuring out why women are being murdered at this rate in Juarez,” Ensler heatedly proclaims.
 

Many critics of the situation in Juarez site the Mexican machismo culture, saying that not only do the poor young women and girls of Juarez run the risk of being abducted and murdered, but they must also face a culture that not only contributes to the violence but also perpetuates a standard attitude towards the female Mexican.
 

“If 300 hundred men in one place had been murdered they would have done something about it,” Fonda contributes to the heated discussion.
 

Many contend that the violence manifested in Juarez can be done so easily because the victims are extremely poor, working for as little as $6 a day in U.S. factories known as maquiladoras. The workers are bused to and from the maquiladoras as early as 4:30 in the morning. These female workers must use restrooms with windows so the employer can watch how much time is used by the employee and how that time is used. A recent documentary on Juarez claims that females are preferred when it comes to Mexican labor because of their nimble hands and often-consenting attitude. The perennial poverty enabled by low wages and working conditions of the victims often leaves them powerless and often times voiceless.
 

It is this socioeconomic situation that not only enables these murders to happen, but also makes the future of life in Juarez very bleak.
 

In December of 2003 the playwright Ensler and her movement attended Radcliffe University where she spoke about current times in Juarez. She conveyed her point by saying that the women that work in the maquiladoras are used and then thrown away “like an empty Coca-Cola can.” She reiterates this thought now in the hotel bar in Utah:
 

“They’re poor and brown and so they don’t have value. They do have value, but they’re used as cattle in factories, they’re stepping up to the dominant global culture to be used, but they don’t have value enough to keep them alive because there’ll be more of them, because everybody is starving in Juarez.”
 

Unfortunately for the murder victims and their families in Juarez, their situation was unable to make it into the V-Day documentary. Until the Violence Stops, which aired on Lifetime Television on February 17th, covered a wide range of the V-Day movement, but the unresolved aspect of the Juarez murders left the footage too open-ended to be included in the film.
 

The film’s director, Abby Epstein, had tried doing a final cut with a segment on Juarez, but was unable to validate the V-Day movement as one that could take credit for any improvement of the situation in Juarez, mostly due to the fact that there has been little to no improvement to the situation.
 

“Ultimately the segment felt really different than the rest of the film, because we didn’t have any survivors to speak. There were no voices. There were just graves, which can be powerful, but it felt like this really unsolved mystery. You left the scene in the film feeling unresolved, and you didn’t really understand why people were being killed except that they were poor,” says Epstein.
 

Epstein’s assessment of the Juarez footage seems very similar to the current situation of the rape-murder victims: a mystery that remains unsolved. It is the ambiguity and lack of effort by the Mexican Government that has made the border town, which stares directly at El Paso, Texas the main focus of the movement’s last two marches. V-Day holds demonstrations and performances of the The Vagina Monologues every Valentine’s Day since 1997 in an effort to raise awareness for its cause. This past February 14th, V-DAY brought its founder Ensler, Jane Fonda, and Sally Field to Juarez in protest of the murders.
 

Unfortunately for many of the women in Juarez, despite the efforts by the growing movement, it appears that the violence has been perpetuating more violence.
“The level of violence that goes on with women in Juarez has been completely engaged and escalated because of these murders,” claims Ensler.
 

Many halfway houses of Juarez feel the strain of this escalation. La Casa Perigrina, a shelter for battered women, often times feels the weight of the domestic abuse from the Mexican city with a population of 1.3 million. Emily Anstoetter, a volunteer and house manager of the shelter, has seen the effects of the abuse right up to her doorstep. Late night visits from women fleeing from their husbands are a part of life when trying to combat this violence.
 

“You cannot simply say ‘end violence against women’, but instead you have to educate, reform, and address other needs. In order to fight domestic violence you have to deal with so many issues on a much larger scale, issues such as socioeconomic backgrounds, poverty, culture, and general attitudes towards women. For example, the machismo attitude is something that should be addressed, but by doing so one must look at so much more,” says Anstoetter, who describes herself as being a supporter of the V-DAY movement but an equally strong proponent of the war on poverty.
 

Jane Fonda, who has taken a backseat during the discussions at the hotel bar, pipes up on the subject of an attitude change to the machismo culture.
 

“It’s beginning to break the silence and talk about it a little more until people end up hearing that it’s wrong.”
 

Amigos de las Mujeres de Juarez is an organization located in Las Cruces, New Mexico that is dedicated to raising awareness for the victims of the Mexican border town. Their goal is to continue to raise awareness with these crimes until the violence stops, which fits their mission with the exact same title of the V-DAY documentary. Nancy Rushford of Amigos recently spoke to the El Paso Times about the V-DAY rally.
 

“I think it’s going to bring more international attention to Juarez regarding violence against women and the culture of impunity.”
 

Being frank and opening people’s eyes is a huge part of the V-Day movement, which describes itself as being fierce, wild, and unstoppable. Such tenacity may be why the movement has targeted Ciudad Juarez on V-Day for two years running. The young women and girls that are the victims of these rape-murders will need such a strong voice to demand that the Mexican Government solve these crimes against them.

Officials have arrested suspects, and even convicted some, but the bodies of these girls and young women continue to be found in the desert just outside of Ciudad Juarez.
I still stare into the States on a regular basis and I often wonder how many Mexican people do the same. I wonder if when they stare it is different for them. Because while I simply stare because I find it interesting that I am so close to my country and yet not in it, I wonder if they stare at it with different eyes. Eyes that see it as an opportunity or a way to escape - or an oppressor.

Chris Trani has spent the last year as a missionary serving the poorest of the poor in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. He writes about social and economic injustice and his passion is bringing awareness to things we would rather forget about. Please send correspondence to: christrani@hotmail.com

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