“El papel del narcotráfico en los feminicidios de Ciudad Juárez” (The role of the narcotraffic in the feminicides in the city of Juarez)

This document was written by Santiago Gallur Santorum in 2010, and is a secondary source compiling and analysing data about the disappearance and murder of women around the 1990’s in the city of Juarez in Mexico , which is considered one of the cities with the most feminicide occurences in the world. The author focuses on describing how time and time again the people who were actually guilty of the crimes went unpunished by the corruption of the police and the judicial system in Mexico.

The aspect of this document that caught my attention was how the author linked the base of the problem of impunity for the violent assaults and deaths of women on the corruption of the police. The major problem the documents brings is how the guilty perpetrators of these horrendous crimes go free while the police is constantly looking for escape goats and other people to blame the crimes on, because, many times, the criminals who did it are powerful people, or even have ties with the police itself. The article links this corruption back to the 1970’s cold war, when the narcotraffic started growing a lot and giving the guerrilas a lot of power. The guerrilas used all the money and power from the narcotraffic to manipulate the police and basically get impunity over a lot of things. Ever since then, this became common practice in Mexico and police corruption is a big issue to this day.

This document reminded me of week 12’s Dawson chapter when he talked about how the major population of Latin American countries were terrified all the time because they couldn’t trust in the government for protection, or in the guerrillas, and now not even in the police. It was a constant chaos of violence that went unpunished and unexplained. The madres who lost their children and grandchildren had no one to ask for help in their own country, so they had to turn and appeal to international help.  The same thing happened again in the 1990’s because the families of the girls who were disappearing couldn`t trust the police, so they appealed for international help. Nowadays the United states took interest in also investigating these crimes and finding the guilty perpetrators and more and more corrupt and negligent police officials are being brought foward.

Santiago Gallur Santorum. El papel del narcotráfico en los feminicidios de Ciudad Juárez. XIV Encuentro de Latinoamericanistas Españoles : congreso internacional, Sep 2010, Santiago de Compostela, España. pp.606-630. ffhalshs-00530094f