BEAUTY AND PAIN: GLOBALIZATION, GENDER VIOLENCE AND
THE WOMEN OF THE MAQUILADORAS
{the following is excerpted from a manuscript that is forthcoming in the Seattle Journal for
Social Justice and titled Accountability for Murder in the Maquiladoras, Linking Corporate
Indifference to Gender Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border
PLEASE DO NOT COPY AND DO NOT DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S EXPRESS
PERMISSION.]
By
Elvia R. Arriolai
Professor of Law
NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY
Claudia Ivette-González might still be alive if her employers had not turned
her away. The 20-year-old resident of Ciudad Juárez–the Mexican city
abutting El Paso, Texas–arrived at her assembly plant job four minutes
late one day in October 2001. After management refused to let her into the
factory, she started home on foot. A month later, her corpse was
discovered buried in a field near a busy Juárez intersection. Next to her
lay the bodies of seven other young women.ii
The “maquiladora murders” have become a popular subject for writing and activism by
feminists, as well as the inspiration for numerous forms of art,iii literary fictioniv and
commentaries,v international conferences,vi movies,vii and marchesviii on both sides of
the border. A 2004 conference held at the University of California Los Angeles entitled
“Maquiladora Murders”ix drew worldwide attentionx to the cases of hundreds of young
Mexican
women
who
worked
in
maquiladoras—American-owned
transnational
factories—and met untimely, often brutal deaths. Who killed them is still a mystery.xi
What is not a mystery is that incidents of domestic violence and femicidexii in Ciudad
Juárezxiii have risen in the wake of heavy industrialization along the border that resulted
from the signing of the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between
Mexico, the U.S., and Canada.xiv
In less than a decade, a city that once had very low homicide statistics now reports that
at least 300-400 women and girls were killed in Ciudad Juárez between 1994 and
2000.xv Some murders fell into a bizarre serial killer pattern.xvi Others were suspiciously
linked to illegal trafficking gangs.xvii
Still others involve abductions of young, female
maquiladora workers who never made it to or from work and whose bodies were later
found dumped in Lomas de Poleo, the desert that surrounds Ciudad Juárez.xviii They
had been raped, beaten, or mutilated.xix
To be fair, the reference to “maquiladora murders” is a misnomer; not all victims have
been workers for the vast number of American companies lining the 2,000-mile border
that secures an interdependent economic bond between the United States and Mexico.xx
However, while the exact number of victims is still unknown, of the estimated 300-400
unsolved murders, about one-third involved maquiladora workers.xxi
Mexican
government officials have not appreciated the negative press surrounding their largest
export processing zone and symbol of Mexico’s participation in the global economy.xxii
And the public has not been happy either, confused by seemingly bungled and
incompetent investigations.xxiii The lack of coordination among public authorities has
only worsened the perception that the government is either too corrupt, indifferent, or
incompetent to address the problem of systematic violence against women.xxiv
In Mexico, the maquiladora worker is someone typically without much education or
property, and is often a migrant from even poorer regions of the country that now host a
conglomerate of factories owned by European, American, and Japanese multinational
corporations. Thousands of workers in these factories eke out sad lives in shantytowns
without water, electricity, or public lighting.xxv The most recent arrivals to the Mexican
frontera find cities unable to meet their housing needs. Dozens of families may stake
out plots of land near public utilities or industrial parks.xxvi There they camp out for
years, pirating essential public services and building by hand, or hiring itinerant
laborers to build, a shack made of sticks, cardboard, rags, or discarded construction
platforms. Some make their homes next to trash dumps.
Public discourse on the Juárez murders intensified after the 2002 release of the
documentary Señorita Extraviada by former Juárez resident and filmmaker Lourdes
Portillo.xxvii The documentary opens with various shots of factories bearing the names of
familiar American companies that sell U.S. consumers everything from cell phones to
televisions and stereo equipment, computers, electrical appliances, and toys.xxviii Juárez
is portrayed as Mexico’s symbol of the failed promises of free trade; in what activists
refer to as the “race to the bottom” of the wage scale, investors compete globally and
reap huge profits by creating low-skilled and low paying new jobs for the working
classes. Although a political and economic context is critical for grasping the breadth
and depth of the gender violence that accompanies globalization, the film does not dwell
on this context.xxix
Señorita Extraviada portrays Juárez as a city out of control, unable to respond to
violence against poor working women.xxx Highlighted are images of indigent, powerless
and grieving families confronting a law enforcement and political system that
systematically fails them.
The violence of poverty, graphically portrayed in Señorita
Extraviada, generates rage and fury as the camera pans over crime scenes littered with
the shoes, clothes and jewelry of a girl’s naked, bruised or mutilated body discovered
weeks after her disappearance.xxxi In another scene, a coroner confirms that one of the
victims in a dual-murder case had suffered several massive cardiac arrests as a result
of the terrorism she and the other young girl had experienced in their final moments of
life.xxxii Each story of grief produces waves of sorrow that spread over the families, the
city, and the lost image of Mexican culture as characteristically family oriented.
Instead, the bungled forensic efforts reinforce the violence toward the young murder
victim who left the house one day and never came home, leaving behind a family
desperate for answers and comfort from their community leaders. The film highlights
some of the outrageous official responses. For example, the governor of the State of
Chihuahua is shown publicly criticizing the murder victims for the way they dressed or
for attending night clubs, thus blaming the victims for their fate and turning the
demand for investigations into a mockery of justice.xxxiii After public outcry, the State
appointed a female special prosecutor who took on the job with little power or money to
produce satisfactory leads.xxxiv
While Señorita Extraviada portrays the problem as the systematic failure of law
enforcement and the political system, Diana Washington-Valdez, the reporter who has
relentlessly tracked the stories about the murders since the early nineties, argues that
true justice for the maquiladora murder victims may never come because rampant
corruption and secrecy surround efforts to track down the persons responsible for the
most chilling serial or ritualistic type killings.xxxv
Yet an important factor is constantly overlooked in the public discourse about the
Juárez murders.
Few seriously interrogate the relationship between the systematic
violence against women and the changes in the social environment of the city that
would allow such violence to occur. Changes that are a central feature of the rapid
industrializing produced by Mexico’s intense participation in the global economy at the
border, and especially so in Ciudad Juarez.xxxvi The unspoken element of the discourse
is the complicity of the multinational corporations in the disregard by Mexican officials
for the health, safety and security needs of Mexican women and girls who work in the
maquiladoras that have come to the border because of NAFTA. Multinational
corporations come into Mexico, lease large plots of land, run their factories twenty-hour
hours a day, pay no taxes, and do very little to ensure that the workers they employ will
have a roof over their heads, beds to sleep in, and enough money to feed their families.
Juarez, like many other border towns affected by NAFTA, may fill the cities with
factories and cheap jobs, but their activities do not enhance peace and prosperity to its
working classes, and instead intensify the conditions for hostility against the poor
working women who are the majority of those employed by the maquiladoras.xxxvii
To the activists for justice in the maquiladoras,xxxviii the undeveloped point that
surrounds the murders phenomenon is the fact that the very girl whose body was found
mutilated and dumped had worked hard, very hard in one of those factories, trying to
improve her lot in life, as well as that of her family and that no one, not even her own
government cares to take responsibility.
What of the fact that the same attitude about
the murders—we are not responsible—is reflected in the policies of employment that
encourage indifference to the workers’ needs or human rights whether in or out of the
factories?
This article argues that the Ciudad Juárez murders are an extreme manifestation of the
systemic patterns of abuse, harassment, and violence against women who work in the
maquiladoras—treatment that is an attributable by-product of the privileges and lack of
regulation enjoyed by the investors who employ them under the North American Free
Trade Agreement.xxxix I begin by acknowledging the critical relationship between women,
gender violence, and free trade that has been noted by some scholars.xl But, I also seek
to understand how the absence of regulation to benefit workers in standard free trade
law and policy perpetuates the degradation of maquiladora workers and creates
environments hostile to working women’s lives, including discrimination, toxicity in the
workplace, and threats of fatal assault.xli Noted feminist reporter Debbie Nathan rightly
criticized Señorita Extraviada for its failure to highlight the presence of the maquiladora
industries and their power to set standards of worker treatment that encourage general
hostility against poor working women.xlii The unquestioned right to exploit the mostly
female working poor in Mexico combined with the effects of rapid industrialization,
incites increased gender violence,xliii while securing Mexico’s significant role in the
globalization of the economy at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In Part I of this article, I present the argument, also made by activists at the border,
that the Juearez murder phenomenon is a story about the systematic abuse and
violence against working class employees, including exposure to toxicity in their
workplace, sexual harassment, and arbitrary disciplinary methods. This systematic
abuse is the result of investor privileges guaranteed under NAFTA, and repeated in The
Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA),xliv that virtually immunize the
transnational investor from accountability for harm to the worker, anticipated or not,
when conducting business in Mexico.
In Part II, I illustrate the legal framework for addressing the questions of accountability
that often arise when one is confronted with the realities of systematic violence against
women in places like Ciudad Juárez, and other locales that are newcomers to
globalization.
In Part III, I return to the stories of workers at the border with a focus on individual
efforts by workers to bring about justice in the maquiladoras.
Although it is important
to improve economic globalization analysis with attention to women’s experiences and
struggles, it is also important to transcend the essentialist image of all poor working
women as victims. Many workers in global factories do not sit passively by, accepting
the attitudes of indifference crafted into free trade law and policy and taken advantage
of by some companies. There is much that is wrong with current free trade policy and
law that could be changed with amendments to NAFTA or CAFTA or through litigation
involving statutes targeting corporations as actors under the color of law.
But even
without those changes, some Mexican workers have found ways to empower
themselves, like the legendary David against the giant Goliath corporation, by
organizing and protesting to have their rights enforced against abusive employers.
In Part IV, I remind the reader that the phenomenon of the Juárez murders is
inseparable today from the various forms of systematic abuse of mostly women
workers who have populated the American factories since the pre-NAFTA days of
industrialization at the Mexican border.
Given the enduring fact that more women
than men work in the factories, and the extreme example of abuse of women
symbolized in the systematic killings of women and girls who are part of the city’s
most poor and powerless, I make an appeal to the feminist activists who are busily
creating awareness about the murders. I urge them to take more seriously the issue
of the social and economic context for the Juárez murders so as to influence the
shaping of improved public polices that can remedy the gross absence of regulation
for corporate accountability or true protection of working women’s rights under free
trade law.
i
Associate Professor of Law, Northern Illinois University and Executive Director, Women on the Border
(www.womenontheborder.org). I am grateful to the workers and volunteers of Comité Fronterizo de
Obreras (www.cfomaquiladoras.org). Their ongoing commitment to working for justice in the
maquiladoras is a constant inspiration not to be afraid of power and to speak the truth. Thank you also to
many individuals who have helped with the production of this particular project: the members of the Board
of Women on the Border, the members of Austin Tan Cerca de La Frontera who encourage me to make the
activist perspective relevant to the work of the progressive scholar, to the various research assistants I have
been privileged to work with on the topic of justice in the maquiladoras: Ed Campbell, J.D. (2003) ,Yvonne
Lapp-Cryns, J.D. (2005), Kelly Varsho and thanks to Cathy Chapaty for editorial assistance.
ii
Debbie Nathan, The Juárez Murders, AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE, Spring 2003,
http://www.amnestyusa.org/magazine/spring_2003/juarez/print.html (last visited Sept. 10, 2006).
iii
E.g., Cristina De Leon, Artist Explores Murders of Juarez Women with ‘Tree of Life’ Altarpiece, THE
DAILY BRUIN, Nov. 3, 2003, available at http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/articles. asp?id=2612.
iv
See, e.g., ALICIA GASPAR DE ALBA, DESERT BLOOD: THE JUÁREZ MURDERS (Arte Publico Press)
(2005).
v
See, e.g., Rosa Isela Pérez, Ciudad Juárez: The Silence of Death, CUARTOSCURO, Feb.-Mar. 2004,
http://www.cuartoscuro.com/64/arteng1.html; Ed Vulliamy, Murder in Mexico, THE OBSERVER, March 9,
2003, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,910356,00.html; Laurence Pantin, 250
Murders Prompt Mexico Anti-Violence Campaign, WOMEN’S E-NEWS, Dec. 21, 2001,
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/763/context/archive; Evelyn Nieves, To Work and Die in
Juárez, MOTHER JONES, May/June 2002, http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2002/05/Juarez.html.
vi
The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, in conjunction with Amnesty International, hosted a
conference on the murders taking place in Juárez, named “The Maquiladora Murders, Or Who Is Killing
the Women of Juárez?” http://www.chavez.ucla.edu/maqui_murders/more.htm. [hereinafter The
Maquiladora Murders].
vii
See, e.g., LAS MUERTAS DE JUÁREZ (Laguna Productions 2002); MAQUILA: A TALE OF TWO MEXICOS
(Cinema Guild 2000); Performing The Border (Women Make Movies 1999); SEÑORITA EXTRAVIADA
(Missing Young Woman) (Xochitl Productions 2001); THE BORDER (Espinosa Productions 2000). See
also, John Hiscock, Hollywood Joins Search for Answers in Mystery of Juárez Mass MurderS,
INDEPENDENT (U.K.), June 23, 2006, at 23; Pat H. Broeske, 400 Dead Women: Now Hollywood is
Intrigued, N.Y. TIMES, May 21, 2006, at 223.
viii
Mexico Women March for Justice, BBC NEWS, Nov. 26, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/
Americas/2514511/stm (last visited Sept. 10, 2006); Hillary Chute, Eve Ensler and Amnesty International
March on Juárez to Stop the Murder of Young Women, THE VILLAGE VOICE, Feb. 17, 2004,
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0408,chute,51177,6.html.
ix
See, The Maquiladora Murders, supra, note 5.
x
Activists Protest Murders of Young Women at the Mexican Border, Feminist New Wire, Nov. 1, 2004,
http://www.feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=8722.
xi
John Burnett, Chasing Ghouls: The Juárez Serial Murders, and a Reporter Who Won’t Let Go,
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW (2004).
xii
Femicide is also called “female homicide” and is a gender crime. It is murder of someone based on the
fact that the victim is female. In the U.S., there has never been legal protection against femicide. BLACK’S
LAW DICTIONARY, 8th ed (2004). The only effort to restrain legally gender-based violence by creating a
cause of action for the victim for civil damages against a perpetrator was struck down as unconstitutional
by the Supreme Court. A recent statute that sought to restrain gender-based violence by allowing victims
to sue their perpetrators for damages was struck down by the Supreme Court. See United States v.
Morrison, 120 S. Ct. 1740 (2000), aff’d, Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 169 F.3d 820 (4th Cir.
1999) (striking down a gender-based civil damages provision in the Violence Against Women Act
(VAWA)).
xiii
Julia Monárrez Fragoso, Serial Sexual Femicide in Ciudad Juárez: 1993-2001, 25 DEBATE FEMENISTA,
(April 2002), available at http://www.womenontheborder.org/sex_serial_english.pdf.
xiv
INTER-AMERICAN COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS, THE SITUATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN IN
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, MEXICO: THE RIGHT TO BE FREE FROM VIOLENCE AND DISCRIMINATION, ¶42, (March 7,
2003), available at http://www.cidh.org/annualrep/2002eng/chap.vi.juarez.htm. [Hereinafter IACHR
Report]. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed on January 1, 1994 by
President William J. Clinton. It can be found at P.L. 103-182 or 107 Stat. 2057 (1993).
xv
IACHR Report, supra, note 13, at ¶41. See also, Monárrez Fragoso, supra note 12.
xvi
See Molly E. Moore, Nightmare in a City of Dreams: Part I, Epidemic of Murder in a Free Trade
Haven, WASHINGTON POST, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/onassignment/juarez/.
xvii
Id. See generally Diana Washington Valdez, HARVEST OF WOMEN (2004).
xviii
Michael Newton, Ciudad Juárez: The Serial Killers Playground, CRIME LIBRARY,
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/ciudad_juarez/index.html.
xix
Id.
xx
Ciudad Juárez has about 1.2 million residents. As of 2004, in this city alone there were about 220,000
maquiladora jobs, a drop from the figures preceding the economic recession that followed the bombing of
the World Trade Center. Then there were roughly 260,000 maquiladora jobs in Ciudad Juarez. Juarez
News, FRONTERA NORTE-SUR, www. http://www.nmsu.edu/~frontera/apr-may03/today.html. There were
over 4,200 factories lining the border by 1999. See Elvia R. Arriola, Voices from the Barbed Wires of
Despair: Women in the Maquiladoras, Latina Critical Legal Theory, and Gender at the U.S.-Mexico
Border, 49 DEPAUL L.REV. 729, 759 (2000).
xxi
Id. A fairly detailed breakdown of the backgrounds and occupations of murder victims from 1993
through 2000 was produced by feminist sociologist Julia Monárrez Fragoso of the Colegio de la Frontera,
a research institute located in Ciudad Juárez. See Fragoso, supra, n. 12.
xxii
The State of Chihuahua discredited Amnesty International’s report on the Juárez murders. Ciudad
Juárez: Gobierno de Chihuahua Desacreditó Informe de AI, en MUJERES HOY,
http://www.mujereshoy.com/ secciones/1123.shtml (last visited Sept. 10, 2006).
xxiii
This image distinctly emerges from the documentary film SEÑORITA EXTRAVIADA (Missing Young
Woman) by Lourdes Portillo, supra, note 6. See also, http://www.lourdesportillo.com/senoritaextraviada/
(last visited Sept. 10, 2006).
xxiv
Jessica Davies, Human Rights Groups Attack Decision to Close Juárez Murders Investigations,
INDEPENDENT (U.K.), July 29, 2006, at 35; Marina Montemayor, Mexican Families Seek Outside Help:
They’re Feeling Abandoned after Federal Prosecutors Gave Up on Women’s Slayings, HOUSTON
CHRONICLE, July 27, 2006, at A21. See also, IACHR Report, supra note 13 at ¶¶47, 71-87.
xxv
Elvia R. Arriola, Looking Out From A Cardboard Box: Workers, Their Families And The Maquiladora
Industry In Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, in FRONTERA-NORTESUR,
http://www.nmsu.edu/~frontera/dec00/feat4.html (also available in www.womenontheborder.org); see also,
MAQUILA: A TALE OF TWO MEXICOS, supra note 6.
xxvi
Examples of this are frequently viewed by delegations which travel through the assistance of two Texas
based organizations, Women on the Border, Inc. (http://www.womenontheborder.org) and Austin Tan
Cerca de la Frontera, an economic justice based project of the American Friends Service Committee
http://www.afsc.org/central/austin/EJthree2ndlevel.htm
xxvii
SEÑORITA EXTRAVIADA, supra note 6.
xxviii
Arriola, Voices, supra n. 19.
xxix
Deborah M. Weissman, The Political Economy of Violence: Toward an Understanding of the GenderBased Murders of Ciudad Juarez, 30 N. C J. Int’l L. & com. Reg. 795 (2005).
xxx
Ciudad Juárez is often portrayed as a laboratory for modernization and globalization, Mexico’s “city of
the future.” Lucinda Vargas, El Plan Estratégico de Juárez, Desde la Óptica de su Directora, Juárez
Strategic Plan, Dec. 21, 2004, http://www.planjuarez.org/ver_nota.ssp?id=111.
xxxi
The chilling effect of the documentary Srta Extraviada is that there are no graphic portrayals of dead
bodies as the message of why is posed over and over through the photographs of the girls, their families
and the details of who they were when they were alive.
xxxii
Newton, supra note 17; see Appendix (story of victim who suffered cardiac arrest from the rape).
xxxiii
This footage is captured in the documentary SRTA. EXTRAVIADA, supra n. 6.
xxxiv
The documentary captures the ridicule directed at Prosecutor Suly Ponce.
xxxv
Diana Washington-Valdez, HARVEST OF WOMEN (2004); Deborah M. Weissman, The Political
Economy of Violence, supra n. 28.
xxxvi
Weissman, supra n. 28,.
xxxvii
Id., at 826-835 (placing the murders in the social context of economic liberalization and the production
of crime).
xxxviii
See Part III infra.
In the negotiations surrounding the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (aka NAFTA’s
labor side agreement or “NAALC”) however, the Clinton Administration acceded to the demands of the
Mexican authorities (and the MNCs), by deleting from the initial U.S. draft of the agreement the possibility
of sanctions against a party that "persistently" failed to enforce its own laws and Constitution with respect
to core worker rights of free association, collective bargaining and the right to strike. The NAALC has, in
contrast to the investment chapter of NAFTA which invigorated investors’ rights, been neutered. See,
Karina Bull, The NAALC Boomerang: Another Backfired Attempt to Advance U.S. Migrant Workers’
Human Right of Freedom of Association, 14 INT’L LEGAL PERSP. 6 (2004); Griselda Vega, Maquiladoras’
Lost Women: The Killing Fields of Mexico? Are NAFTA and NAALC Providing the Needed Protection?, 4
J. GENDER RACE & JUST. 137 (2000).
xl
Weissman, supra, n. 28.
xli
Alexandra Spieldoch, Report: Trade in the Americas: Women Central to the Debate (Maria Riley &
Kristin Sampson eds., CENTER FOR CONCERN 2006).
xlii
Debbie Nathan, Missing the Story, THE TEXAS OBSERVER, Aug. 30, 2002,
http://www.womenontheborder.org/Articles/Senorita_Text.pdf.
xliii
See Weissman, supra, n. 28, and Spieldoch, id.
xliv
The Central America-Dominican Republic-United States Free Trade Agreement, Aug. 5, 2004, 43
I.L.M.514.
xxxix