The Missing Daughters of Juarez (Alphabet City/MIT Press)
María de Jesús Ramos, daughter Barbara Araceli Martinez Ramos
“Barbara has been missing for five years. The government, when they campaign, they all talk about us and the women and this and that, but when they sit down on the chair, the fuckers are worth- less. Baeza asked me why are you so angry? And I told him what do you care? Just pray to God that this never happens to your family. He said no, no. I would die. And I told him, well fucker, this is our life, every day! The doctor told I needed to relax, told me that because of all the anger I had kept inside me I was about to die. I was almost a hundred kilos and lost thirty. The doctor told me that she didn’t know why I was losing so much weight. I was worried that I was all broken inside.”
The Missing Daughters of Juarez (Alphabet City/MIT Press) María de Jesús Diaz Alva, daughter Silvia Guadalupe Diaz
“Her name was Silvia Guadalupe Diaz. She was nineteen. She wasn’t working. The day that it happened she was on her way to look for a job and then she never came back. I went looking for her everywhere. To the hospital, the Red Cross, jail . . . they never told me where she was. They don’t care here. It only seems to happen to poor people. If it had happened to one of them, maybe the cops would actually do something about it. It’s been nine years and they don’t know who did it. Nothing. No suspects, nothing. They haven’t caught any of the murderers of our people. That’s why we’re angry.”
The Missing Daughters of Juarez (Alphabet City/MIT Press)
Rosaura Montañés Lerma, daughter Aracely Esmeralda Martinez Montañés
“Ten years ago my daughter was murdered. A very violent, brutal death that hurt me and my family profoundly. I was at the edge of madness. I didn’t see justice so I lost faith in God, in churches, and in myself. I was afraid of everything: I was afraid of people and mostly I was afraid of cops. As time went by, where they dumped my daughter they dumped another one. The murders kept happening, one after the other. They kill a human being that was loved—they kill their whole family. She rests, but we can never rest. We haven’t had any peace since our daughter’s death: this is eternal pain. The police, with all their follow-ups, their losing things, their outright carelessness, they have us on a tightrope. If the girls are poor no one cares if they are missing. A girl from a higher social class is much more valuable. Money is more important than a human being who lives in poverty, let alone a poor girl. If it had been the governor’s daughter they would have been caught, and not a scapegoat, but the real criminal. The government hasn’t done anything. Not the one before, or the one before that, or the one now. When we were going to ask about our daughters, well, they would tell us to come back tomorrow and then to come back tomorrow. I can be brave, but sometimes I just give in. I bend back. There comes a time when your brain and your body simply can’t handle it anymore.”
The Missing Daughters of Juarez (Alphabet City/MIT Press)
Martha Ledesma Hernandez, daughter Angelica Marquez Ledesma
“I ask God for strength, it’s going to be eleven years. I know she’s dead because they found her clothes. The cops burned the clothes and the evidence. God and the anthropologists, I have faith in both of them, because the police will not do anything about it. The media blames the girls for being murdered. They blame them for being bad women. I get angry because our girls were our girls and they were good. Angelica was fifteen years old. She disappeared on April 20, 1995. She disappeared around the maquilas in the Independencia neighborhood at 9 am. She was in the neighborhood going to maquilas to ask for work. Four girls have gone missing in the same area. Poor people are nothing but poor dogs that have no rights to laws. Rich people do, because they have money. The rich people ignore us as if we were little animals. They don’t under- stand our pain. It’s not just the mothers, it’s entire families that are permanently damaged and permanently scarred. Our entire family was damaged. Our son tried to commit suicide twice. It’s very sad for them and for me. I can’t control myself sometimes and I will not be able to until I find my daughter.”
The Missing Daughters of Juarez (Alphabet City/MIT Press)
Irma Monreal Jaime, daughter Esmeralda Herrera Monreal
“I know that it hurts differently for everyone, but for me I feel that an entire part of my life ended. Every day was a happy day with her. After what happened with my daughter, the music ended in my house. Everything ended. The body they said was my daughter was found after eight days of her being disappeared. When they found those bodies, hers was complete from the waist down but from waist up, there was nothing. It was just bones. There was no hair, nothing. She had a lot of hair and it was dyed blond. I must have looked crazy looking around Campo Algodonero for a single strand of blond hair so that I could know that this body they gave me was in fact my daughter’s. When the bodies were found, no one told me. I found out about it through people from work who saw it on TV. We went to a police station and they told me to buy the newspaper because it would tell me more than they would. I left there crying, and we went to the morgue. We were led to one where you could see the outline of a girl’s body underneath a sheet. I wanted to see the body but they said that I needed a warrant to see it, they just put a shirt and socks on top of it and asked me if I could recognize the clothes. It was my daughter’s favorite shirt. It was all torn and covered in blood and grease. Her socks, they were two weeks old, they were new, but the ones that were there were all torn up, they were destroyed like the shirt. They were covered in blood like the shirt.”
The Missing Daughters of Juarez (Alphabet City/MIT Press)
Lilia Irasema Mendoza, daughter Miriam Arlet Velasquez Mendoza
“My daughter was kidnapped on a Saturday on her way to work an extra shift, but she didn’t make it to the maquila. She was kid- napped between the bus and the factory entrance, but she wasn’t killed or raped there. They took her and they raped her Saturday and Sunday, and on Monday they dumped her body. I had already heard that other victims had been dumped there, so I went to the factory and around it to look for her. I had lost my mind. I looked in ditches, I looked under bushes, I looked everywhere. I thought I was going insane, yelling her name out loud at two in the morning. I would look for her in ditches hoping to find her half-dead, but still alive, and I never found her. They found her in a ditch outside of the maquila where she worked. They opened the doors to the morgue and the first thing I saw were her bangs. I thought to myself, ‘that’s my daughter,’ and almost collapsed. Her clothes were all torn. It looked like they had torn them up with a knife. The pants and her underwear were pushed to the side and she had eight stab wounds–really big holes. It was horrible. But it was my daughter. That was her, that was her body. She was still so young.”
The Missing Daughters of Juarez (Alphabet City/MIT Press)
Rosa María Gallegos, daughter Rocio Barraza Gallegos
“Juarez used to be very peaceful, but now it’s gotten really ugly. You could leave your windows open, now you have to lock yourself up, bars on windows, the whole thing. I remember when we moved here it was really relaxed. You could even trust cops. Now they stop somewhere near you and you have to run from them. If I am walking and suddenly I am stuck between cops on one side and a gang of thugs on the other, I would run towards the gang because at least they would kill you with more dignity. My daughter was killed outside the police academy, in a police car, with a police gun by an agent who was part of the team in charge of investigating the murders and disappearances of women. He was the nephew of the commander of the police force; they protected him so that he could leave. He is in Mexico City working for the AFI (Agencia Federal de Investigación). We went there to talk to President Fox and I asked him: ‘Can’t you smell death when you visit Juarez? In all of your trips, haven’t you realized what is going on? How can you reward someone that is a criminal in Juarez with a high-paying job here in Mexico City?’ ”
The Missing Daughters of Juarez (Alphabet City/MIT Press)
Victoria Salas Ramirez, daughter Guadalupe Ivonne Estrada Salas
“It wasn’t only the murders of our daughters, it’s the pain of knowing that the fact that we live in the hills and that we are poor families gives any person with money or power the right to come here and step on us, and not only step on us but murder our daughters. It’s the truth. These people, these murderers, are not from the barrios. They are people with money: they are people that can buy protection. That means cops, everything. All of them are mixed up in it. They think that we are afraid of saying things because they have power and they think that their power can keep our mouths shut. I felt triumphant when I yelled at authorities and told them the truth to their faces. My head started to boil and all of a sudden, I had stood up for myself: for the first time, I realized, I felt that I had avenged at least a little bit of what they had done. A tiny bit, but a bit at least. They are never going to shut me up, and if they do shut me up by killing me, others will raise their voice in my name. We were all born to die, and if we die in battle we will have died a heroic death!”
New York Times: Women of Bears Ears Are Asking You to Help Save It
