Some of those murdered in Ju�rez were students or children, but most worked at local maquilas or maquiladoras, better known in English as assembly plants or sweatshops. Many of these women migrated from other parts of Mexico in desperate search of work, with no resources or connections in the region. About 70 percent of this factory workforce is female, and when one of them disappears�or for that matter, when hundreds do�there are always more to replace them.
Hundreds of thousands of women and girls work at the 500 maquilas located in Ju�rez. "Eighty percent of these border factories are U.S.�owned, and they generate about $16 billion per year," says MSN's Wallach. "Despite that impressive number, their workers earn an average of $4�6 a day, in a nation where 40 percent of the population live in extreme poverty."
___________
More maquila workers live in Ju�rez than in any other city along the U.S.�Mexico border, where about two-thirds of Mexico�s maquilas are located. Most live in shanty-town type neighborhoods lacking real addresses, phones, electricity or roads. And certainly they lack resources to investigate the murders of their daughters or neighbors. Some of them don't earn enough for bus rides to the police station. The maquilas cement a system of poverty and vulnerability.
The maquilas� responses to a decade of murdered workers has been dismal. "Local advocates tell us their efforts to get the factories to provide more security for women workers have gone nowhere," says Wallach. Many of the victims have disappeared while waiting for or traveling on the buses that take them to and from work. Making matters worse, the factories sometimes change workers� shifts at the last minute, so the women find themselves unexpectedly traveling late at night or early in the morning, in the dark and alone. One girl who had always gone to and from work with the protection of her family was left to make the trip alone after an unexpected shift change. She was killed on the journey. A number of workers have been killed in these circumstances.
Dannah Baynton americas.org May�June 2003Chuck Bowden's
Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future
