The rate of women's murders in the Juárez area is not the highest in the country. According to a recently published Mexican health ministry study, Muertes por violencia en las mujeres de México (with data up to 2001), the highest is that of the state of Mexico: 5.3 per 100,000.
The state of Chihuahua, where Juárez is located, has a rate of 4.7 per 100,000 — so it would not be surprising if Juárez, with a population of 1m, reported up to 47 murders of women a year, rather than the average of 27 which emerge from AI's tally. That last figure is only slightly higher than the national rate of 2.6 per 100,000.
AI suggests connections between many of the Juárez murders and complains that the Mexican authorities deny their existence. However, the office of the special prosecutor for women's murders has reported that 76 of its 290 cases may be the work of serial killers; a proportion not unlike the 95 out of 290 cited by NHRC.
ANTIDRUG OPERATIONS | Army in border clash. Two members of an army antidrugs patrol which apparently crossed the border from the eastern state of Campeche into Guatemala on 29 October, were killed when they fell into an ambush, presumably set up by local drug traffickers. Other members of the patrol were injured. The soldiers say they were fired upon with assault rifles, possibly AK-47s.
Reinforcements sent to the area found nothing. The still unclear incident is being investigated by the PGR, the chief prosecutor's office. As we have been reporting (SSR-03-03), violence on Mexico's border with Guatemala, much of it drug-related, has been increasing.
`DIRTY WAR' INQUIRY | Supreme court open the door. In early November the supreme court has ruled that forced `disappearances' are to be considered `continuing' crimes which do not benefit from the statute of limitations. This aligns Mexico with the criterion adopted by Chile and Argentina in order to prosecute human rights offences otherwise barred by either amnesty laws or statutes of limitations.
The ruling strictly refers to one specific case: the abduction in 1975 of Jesús Piedra Ibarra, son of former presidential candidate Rosario Ibarra. However, the special prosecutor for `social and political movements of the past' (catchphrase for Mexico's `dirty war' of the 1960s and 1970s), after promptly issuing eight arrest warrants for suspects in the Ibarra case, said that it would set a key precedent for similar cases and become 'the engine [to establish] a democratic rule of law' inasmuch as it would afford justice to the victims of the 'dirty war'.
Following up on this, days later prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo said he would investigate within military bases, starting with those of Atoyac (Guerrero) and Culiacán (Sinaloa), where he hopes to find secret graves. Officially there are 275 `disappeared' persons unaccounted for, but rights organisations have put the total at somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000.
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