Five international caravans are traveling through 56 cities to raise tri-national awareness and support for disappeared and murdered women.
Mexican and American speakers and human rights advocates will visit the United States, Canada and Mexico and will be at the UNM law school today at noon.
For the last 10 years, the Mexican border town of Juarez and its neighboring city of Chihuahua have been the sites of more than 380 women's deaths, according to a news release. About half of the victims are employed at maquiladoras, or U.S. assembly factories, established in Mexico by the North American Free Trade Agreement, the news release states.
"The maquiladoras specifically recruit female workers, because they see women as more docile, less demanding, and they also get away with paying them less," said Kate Chanton, an organizer for the Mexico Solidarity Network.
Guadalup de Losantos and Cynthia Diaz will be at the law school at noon today to speak about the murders. Delores Huerta and the family of Cesar Ch†vez will join them at St. Francis Xavier church at 5 p.m. for a dinner.
Even though the women are employees of U.S. corporations, Chanton said there is an enormous lack of involvement by the government and police in the unsolved murders. Nor have employers or police offered the female employees any protection, she said.
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Chanton said most of the women are victim to sexual torture, rape and murder because of job insecurity. She said the maquiladoras view women as expendable and will fire anyone at any time, leaving her to walk home alone before the buses come - a likely time for abduction.
She said the maquiladoras, the police and the state government will not take any responsibility for the disappearances and deaths.
"Those who are murdered are all poor with no one in power to stand up to these injustices," Chanton said.
She said the police only look for scapegoats and find people whose guilt is not proven and torture them into giving confessions.
It is very significant that all of those arrested have been tortured, Chanton said, so no real criminals are caught, and no real justice is served.
She said Mexican President Vicente Fox seems to only be concerned with appearances. Fox created a federal component, Chanton said, which can only provide leads to the state of Chihuahua and not much else, because the case falls under state jurisdiction. From there it is up to the state to get the job done, which they haven't, she said.
