WP: Unresolved Murders of Women Rankle in Mexican Border City

snip>
For years, the mysterious deaths and disappearances of women have frustrated officials and terrified families in Juarez, a transient city where thousands of women live in shantytowns and work in maquiladoras, the factories on the U.S. border that produce electronic circuit boards and auto parts.

About a fourth of the (377) victims were kidnapped, raped and strangled in a similar way, leading victims' families to believe that a sexual serial killer remains on the loose. The whereabouts of almost 40 other women who have disappeared since 1993 are still unknown. And this year, the number of homicides with female victims has surged to 30, although authorities attribute 80 percent of them to domestic or family violence.
....
Pressured by the international human rights community, which has kept a spotlight on the Juarez murders, Gonzalez agreed to hire a team of forensic anthropologists from Argentina to help identify the women found here and in the provincial capital. The team, which investigates human rights violations worldwide, this fall has examined 54 bodies, including 24 exhumed from mass graves where they were placed as desconocidas , or unknown women.

With the help of $5 million in U.S. aid, Gonzalez's office also has established a project to train police and prosecutors in criminal investigative procedures and accountability, and to help shift the state to a system of open, oral criminal trials. Currently, criminal courts in Mexico are closed to the public and depend upon written statements submitted to a judge -- a system that human rights groups say lacks due process and is highly vulnerable to corruption.

Some murder suspects are believed to have been framed as scapegoats and remain in jail.......

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/15/AR2005121501997_2.html

with no resolution. I believe I first read about it back in the mid-nineties - and the number of murders was signifcantly less. I pray for these women's families - and for all women in the area who remain prey. :cry: May we stop reading about this in the near future - except for reading about a big break in the case (a real one, not a manufactured one) and an end to the murders.