LAS

Disposables
Ciudad Juárez
March 13, 2015


Femicide and Structural Violence against Women in

By: Craig Serpa

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Introduction
Much research has been produced attempting to describe and subvert femicide in Ciudad Juárez, but perhaps the most accurate description of the gendered violence can be found in an American political cartoon. A maquiladora, or Mexican border assembly/ processing plant, stands alone among rolling hills littered with gravestones in the shape of the symbol of Venus. The graves extend to the horizon line in all directions, seemingly endless. From the viewer’s position in the lower right corner of the cartoon they can discern details on the nearest grave: the top arch of the hand mirror reads “femicide”; it’s handle, “over 370 killed and counting”; a small altar of flowers, bread, and a prayer candle rest at its base. Caricatures of a police officer, politician, Uncle Sam, and cartel boss shift nervously in front of a mugshot height chart. They look at the viewer and the sky but never at the graves, symbolically refusing to acknowledge their role in the women’s murders. The intricate detail given to the usual suspects and graves overshadows the women themselves. The factory workers are only suggested by a female skeleton, her gender marked with long curly hair, hangs out of the window of a bus driving to the factory. She glances over her shoulder and makes uncomfortable eye contact with the viewer, her gaze asking how even in cartoons las disposables remain faceless, nameless, forgotten. This cartoon depicts las disposables, the disposable women, of Ciudad Juárez. The cartoonist’s depiction mirrors real life in many ways. Like the cartoon, in real life female factory workers are invisible in life and anonymous in death. They are often bussed to work

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to and from the factories in the rural countryside. Hundreds of women have been murdered in Juárez at the hands of Mexican public officials, cartels, and American economic policy. In fact, the cartoon only strays from reality by suggesting that the “usual suspects” have been brought to justice. This paper will examine how the convergence of neoliberal economic policy and workplace gender norms has led to the disappearance and murder of an unprecedented number of women in Ciudad Juárez between 1990 and 2010. This paper will first explain and analyze the economic changes leading up to and following NAFTA, unpacking the economic reforms that have created structural violence. Lack of government support by way of inconclusive reporting procedures means that researchers do not have the viable data necessary to implement lawful action to protect the women of the bordering cities. We will then explain how the hiring of nearly all-female workforces in Maquilas conflicted with

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traditional gender roles. The final portion of the paper will show how these two bigger structural issues manifested themselves in direct violence against working women. The emergence of neoliberal economic policies and dysfunction within the Mexican judicial system has led to structural and direct violence against working women in Juarez. For purposes of this research, we are defining structural violence as the violence that occurs when basic needs are denied by some social structure or social institution. We will demonstrate how disparate institutions and systems contribute to structural violence against a population and in turn lead to the development of a society in which women’s lives are not valued. The combination of neoliberal economic reform with existing gender hierarchies exacerbated existing structural violence and led to the continued disregard for the value of women’s lives in the form of direct gender-based violence. During the period examined in this research women were targeted, mutilated, and unaccounted for in death. Our analysis illustrates our argument that structural forces like the economic shifts produced the social conditions in which women’s bodies were, and still are not, not valued. Because their lives were not valued, the women employed by maquiladoras, las disposables, fell victim to exploitation, abuse, and violence at the hands of international corporations, their managers, and others. This paper brings together the fields of economics, gender studies, and anthropology to demonstrate two main ideas: first, that the myriad of ways structural and direct violence are entangled in every aspect of daily life, and second, that in

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the particular situation of Ciudad Juárez, structural violence that resulted from NAFTA’s economic restructuring manifested itself direct violence committed on the female body.

NAFTA and the Maquiladoras In 1964 the Bracero Program came to an end. Laws providing seasonal work authorization for Mexican laborers in the U.S. agricultural industry were allowed to expire. Less than a year after the decision was made to shut down the Bracero Program, the Mexican Government faced unprecedented unemployment spikes along the bordering towns between the two countries. By 1965 the Border Industrialization Program (BIP), more commonly known as The Maquiladora Program, had been developed by the Mexican government. While the Mexican government struggled with an economic devaluation in peso value, the US seized favorable shifts in customs laws and a new availability of cheap labor. Within the first twenty years of maquiladora industry, the laboring women of the program had taken over tourism as the Mexican government's largest source of foreign exchange. Ten years following, the maquiladoras rose to the second largest industry in their country, only slightly edged off by the petroleum market. With employment growth on the rise at staggering rates in its first three decades, the BIP had yet to see its heaviest expansion. What followed was a politically structured trade agreement between two governments, which provided a layout for an epidemic of violence waged against the working women of the bordering cities.

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The “North American Free Trade Agreement” (NAFTA: 8401) went into effect in 1994 and created one of the largest free trade zones in the world. The creation of a trilateral rulesbased trade bloc paved a foundation for promising economic growth within North America. When the program began the United States had already absorbed a vast amount of the available workforce within its own population and held the more favorable geographic location to undergo greater avenues of foreign direct investments. With its [U.S.] favorable geographic presence, the U.S. was able to cut cost for trade completion of goods by taking advantage of containerization through road freight. Something that is only possible between bordering countries. For the same goods to be manufactured elsewhere, and transported through other avenues such as oceanic shipping, air, or rail, non-bordering countries are subject to millions, if not billions of transport cost. After twenty years of NAFTA, Mexican agriculture and local business has become far more polarized. Only the largest producers are able to obtain government subsidies that would normally been able to allow the lower level farmers and medium-sized producers to produce and manufacture a far better product. Now, only the wealthiest of Mexican business owners capture the available funds. The only other option for the less fortunate producers in Mexico to compete was to apply for funds through commercial banking systems. This too was not possible due to the fear of loan default, therefore allowing the infiltration of the Cartel groups to move in and become a final financier. Cartels would force families out of their property who’ve gone bankrupt, and use the establishments to launder money and

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“expand their own infrastructure” (Panther: 2007). Families would have no choice but to sell, and move on to other sources of incomes. Those that didn’t would more than likely become victims of the structure previously set in motion from NAFTA’s trade liberalization. As the Cartel’s moved in, they began to establish control of numerous territories in and around rural zoned areas of the border. With the financial support lacking from the government, they also took control of local political figures, began occupying public security posts, and placed quota fees to enter different areas around the controlled territory. If they could not complete a bride to obtain territory, they would begin using terror tactics by performing public executions, mutilations, kidnappings and arson. Anyone who opposed their plan to control was dealt with violently, especially against state governed protection agencies groups such as community police. This allowed them to operate within police forces, and even the armed forces (army & navy), without fear of prosecution. In the following graph, it seems that the first stages of NAFTA led to the highest unemployment rates in the available reporting period. This visual representation is correct, however, the reason for such a spike may not be so clear. The drastic change was caused by the first stages of construction from US companies on Mexican soil. The opposite effect holds true for employment levels amongst men, which spiked to adhere to the labor demand. At the same time, women were forced to leave their current jobs, and care for the home while men received temporary benefits from higher wages in the realm of construction. Total Unemployment, female (% of National Estimate)

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Source: El Diario de Juarez as reported by the Chihuahua Fiscalia

Structural gender-based violence is “largely ignored by most researchers and policymakers because it’s assumed that that’s just the way the society is… It’s only when you look at the figures that you are shocked that there has been so much culturally sanctioned rape, for example” (Omenya 2014). As you can see from the previous graph, reporting of accurate employment levels were ignored prior to 1988. The lack of government involvement from Mexican officials has not provided the necessary data for researchers to create a correlation between female employment, unemployment, and death. By eliminating these figures from the public eye, it can be suggested that policy and lawmakers were not able to accurately develop an argument to adhere to the epidemic. Yearly Homicide Rate: Total female
Source: El Diario de Juarez as reported by the Chihuahua Fiscalia

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By comparing the two previous graphs, one can see that there is an inverse relationship between statistical data for female homicide and unemployment. In the following data set, homicide rates seem to have skyrocketed between the periods ending in 2007, and continued through 2014. Yearly Homicide rate: Total female
Source: El Diario de Juarez as reported by the Chihuahua Fiscalia

Without question, and taken from available resources, it can be seen where the number of violent crimes against females within the bordering regions of Mexico and the US spiked. From over two decades of data suggesting anywhere from less than a hundred to around four-hundred acts of reported violence against women, to an immediate jump into the thousands in one years time doesn’t seem possible. Although it is difficult to determine when the increased violence against women began, here we were able to make a definite determination to when a “new level of transparency became available, which in turn allows for an increase in problem awareness” (Rosales-TTU: 2013).

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Now, we can have an idea of how drastic transformations of the public agricultural system, through the incorporation of NAFTA has generated conditions for increased violence against women in the workforce. Once the structure and terms of trade were set, the inability to compete with the most powerful agricultural economy in the world [U.S.] forced local farming communities to sell their land and look for work elsewhere. With the new and abundant labor force willing to work for little to no money, large manufactures seized the opportunity to begin construction, and produce goods at a never seen before profit margin. In Ciudad Juarez, the murders and violence are a manifestation in part to the social, political, and economic structures placed on the region through NAFTA’s trade liberalization. Although difficult to isolate its [NAFTA] direct effects, it directly extends provisions that were never adjusted from the BIP mentioned earlier. Some have argued that there is positives for the maquila by developing for them a newly found level of independence. Even though this case is true for some instances involving gender equality, the fact of the matter is that with their independence, they are forced to experience a new dynamic of exploitation.

Gender norms in the workplace When the number of these factories skyrocketed, companies had a significant demand for workers. Unlike previous labor programs in North Mexico and the Southwest United States, maquiladoras overwhelmingly hired young women, most of which were recent arrivals from the countryside. Women were explicitly recruited based on gendered conceptions of women’s work ethic, dexterity, and obedience (Livingston 2004).

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Although these representations of gender norms within the workplace, specifically in the maquiladoras for young Mexican women, are certainly forms of social problems that produce gendered violence, they are also deeply rooted in structural problems produced by the economy itself. Many of these migrant workers are being affected by the overall restructuring of the economy of the United States in a transition from “a factory-based economy that was rapidly being replaced by service industries” (Bourgois 2004: 114). This conversion completely changed the dynamics of the workplace for the women working in the maquiladoras and most importantly the men, in the city of Jùarez and the areas near the border. According to economists and sociologists alike, the repercussions from this shift in economic dynamics have led to, “unemployment, income reduction, weaker unions, and dramatic erosions in worker’s benefits at the entry level” (Bourgois 2004: 114). These outcomes translate into unlivable conditions that prevent the migrant workers from surviving on a day-to-day basis. Mexican men have lost their jobs due to this vast change in structure and from this we see an increase in their hostility and resentment towards the women who took over their jobs in the workplace because they were deemed more efficient. This relationship leads to an increase in gender based violence which targets the women who become extremely vulnerable by the deteriorating unions, income and the overall loss of employment especially in males. Ultimately, this economic transition allows the assertion of male dominance over women from a domestic perspective in addition to the workplace.

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The workplace (maquiladoras) itself becomes a platform for the economic racialization of Mexican women as well as for the gendered violence that occurs inside and out on a daily basis. When the economy changed from factory-based workforce to service based industries, it initiated a perpetual vicious cycle in which its laborers “began the treadmill of rotating from one poorly paid job to the next” (Bourgois 2004: 137). This exemplifies the careless American corporations who exploit the migrant Mexican women for cheap labor, which in turn reduces the need for men in the workplace that then translates into resentment and violence against the women by the men. These men and women also held, “little education or social skills to allow them mobility outside of the marginal factory enclaves that trapped their entire social network” (Bourgois 2004: 137). This social immobilization of these people really limits their ability to find work elsewhere. Lacking the aptitude to obtain an education, these men and women are essentially stuck within a system that does not benefit them whatsoever yet at the same time it works extremely well for the corporations that contained factories within Ciudad Juárez. The negligent and selfish nature of the globalized economy, which has changed drastically within the United States and the areas near Juárez, leads directly to the violence against women. Women are targeted by these corporations on a physical level, and are then given capital, which they need to survive while also oppressing them. This oppressive system then opens the door for violence against women who are targeted by men who had their jobs “stolen”.

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This resentment then leads to the murders and disappearances of women in which the only outcome is gender based violence against these poor women. These women are targeted by Maquilas who deliberately choose feminine workers due to their ability to labor long hours at a very cheap price. These factories assist this globalized economy that benefits the United States as well as its ability to provide a platform for various actions of violence against Mexican women. By working in these Maquilas, Mexican women gain social and fiscal capital, which in turn negates the need for men in these particular workplaces. This relationship between the hiring of Mexican women instead of Mexican men may initiate hateful sentiments and in fact, drive the murders and gender based violence we see in Juárez Mexico today. By looking at these instances of violence from both a structural and gender-based lens, we can attain great insight into the origins of this violence, the reasons why it happens and possibly the solutions that can solve them. The basis of the ongoing violence that occurs within Ciudad Juárez relates directly to the fact that the majority of these women are migrant workers. In addition to their migratory need to find work and capital, they are chosen based on their ethnic characteristics, “The majority of victims have been young, slim, with dark or tan skin, long brown hair, and mostly migrants from southern Mexico who migrated north in search of employment” (Weissman 2005: 7). This fundamental need to survive by acquiring capital, forces these women to migrate to Juárez where they are used for cheap labor and are targeted in actions of violence because of their vulnerability.

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Direct violence against women The direct gender-based violence in Juárez often took two forms, overt sexualization in the workplace and abduction, rape, and murder outside of the workplace. As outlined above, the Maquilas were gendered spaces: the workforce was almost always made up of recently arrived poor women from southern Mexico (Gaspar de Alba 2003), a workforce recruited specifically for their perceived docility. The managers in the factories were exclusively Mexican men, usually from northern Mexico who capitalized on existing hierarchies (geographic differences, gender differences, bureaucratic division of labor) through sexual harassment. In the workplace, Maquilas’ disciplined sexuality and relied on sexual harassment to monitor and discipline workers. In almost all maquiladoras “sexualization is part and parcel of effective management” on the factory floor (Salzinger 2000). One-way maquiladora managers disciplined female bodies was by monitoring their employees’ menstruation and family planning. It was not uncommon for maquiladoras administered pregnancy tests before female employees as a part of a job application; after women were hired, birth control pills were available for (if not forced upon) employees, and pregnancy tests were randomly and routinely carried out. While other women’s health services were scarce, some supervisors went as far as inspecting employees’ sanitary napkins to ensure they weren’t pregnant (Livingston 2004).

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The focus on menstruation in the workplace highlights how “violence performed on and from the body cannot escape the meaning of sexual difference” (Aretxaga 1995: 144). The regulation of sexuality in plants demonstrates the symbolic value of gendered violence. As Begoña Aretxaga demonstrates in an ethnography of female prisoner’s protests in Northern Ireland, it is specifically the “exposure of menstrual blood” that “[transforms] the asexual bodies of “girls” into the sexualized bodies of women” (1995: 139). On a pragmatic level, managers kept track of women’s menstrual cycles because Mexican law requires employer support of pregnant employees through the third trimester and pregnant workers were often terminated from their positions to avoid this. However beyond fiscal practicality, the regulation of female sexuality implied the widely held unspoken perception of working women: by virtue of holding a job outside the home, women were perceived as being more sexually active. In forcing women to show their soiled sanitary pads, factory managers exposed sexual differences between male and female bodies, highlighted women’s social vulnerability, and invoked feelings of shame and disgust towards femininity. The use of sexual harassment to discipline workers seems paradoxical alongside the intense scrutiny women’s bodies faced, but even as the factories regulated and discouraged pregnancies among workers, the same workers were sexualized as they worked. Drawing from eighteen months of fieldwork at a Mexican electronics export-processing plant, Leslie Salzinger describes a Maquilas shop floor: Any glance at the Panoptimex shopfloor [sic] encounters a sea of stockinged legs and high heels, rows of meticulously curled bangs and brightly manicured

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hands, women painting their lips on every line. It is difficult to be a woman on the Panotimex shop floor without self-consciousness… To enter the place as a woman is to be immersed in objectification – to be seen, to watch, and so to watch and see yourself. (Salzinger 2000). Women working on assembly lines often wore mini-skirts and makeup to the plants, encouraged by managers and other employees to “fix herself up.” Salzinger articulates that while no one explicitly required women to don revealing outfits every morning, their desirability was necessary to protect their employment. The standards set by the factory supervisors and managers were internalized by female workers, who then set the standards for later workers. Beauty norms invited sexualized surveillance but because women were striving to be pretty, this harassment was normalized as part of the factory routine. The manager’s gaze enacted symbolic violence, and workplace harassment (both overt and subvert) was embedded in the material and managerial infrastructure of the maquila industry. As NAFTA policies were implemented and the maquiladora industry grew, it became clear that women who moved freely through the city, whether walking to work or to the bar, were being abducted, taken to remote areas, raped, beaten, and murdered. Julia Monárrez Fragoso demonstrates the violence against women in Ciudad Juárez is an example of serial sexual Femicide. Femicide can be understood as “a progression of violent acts that range from emotional, psychological, and verbal abuse through battery, torture, rape, prostitution, sexual assault… domestic violence, [and] all policies that lead to the deaths of women, tolerated by the state” (Fragoso 2003). The extent of sexual regulation and harassment

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endured in the factories themselves led to and legitimized heightened gendered violence women’s outside the workplace. In other words, structural forces like NAFTA and other border economic growth programs facilitated the emergence of gendered workspaces, which in turn facilitated further violence against women in general. The apathetic response of Mexican law enforcement authorities meant that the perpetrators, who were never caught, could do little to hide their crimes and even left the mutilated women’s bodies in public and semi-public locations, serving as a threat to other young women and their families. The lack of comprehensive criminal investigations has prevented a clear understanding of the true extent of violence against women, though patterns emerged as bodies were discovered. Juarez’s murdered women were mostly young slim women, nearly all worked in the factories. They left home, made it to work but never returned. Weeks or months later their nude bodies would be discovered in drainage canals, in shallow graves, in mass graves, often not far from their workplaces or homes. Autopsies would reveal that women were almost all victims of torture and rape. Women’s bodies were discovered in such a state that that the degree of violence described seems exceptional and leaning towards hyperbole. Drawing from the work of Liisa Malkki, we can understand the Juárez murders as symbolic schemes of violence. In her discussion of ethnic conflict and racialized violence in Burundi, Malkki argues that the symbolic schemes of cruelty map out hierarchies of domination and submission through extreme violence. In Ciudad Juárez, women who stepped out of the traditional gender roles

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reserved for women were disciplined, both at work and by unnamed attackers in a specific manner that closely resembled domestic violence. Femicide completed a symbolic circle from domestic sphere to workplace and back again, dominating women through sexualized violence. Men asserting dominance through non-consensual penetrative sex was the most efficacious ways to do so because it is among the last exclusively masculine forms of power and domination. Women working in maquiladoras gained the freedom to assert themselves in public through the fiscal and social capital and could now be workers, breadwinners, drink beer, and leave behind their feminine care-giving role, but they couldn’t rape. By disciplining working women through beatings and rape, their male attackers literally and symbolically beat them back into their traditional place in the home. Conclusion American corporations are partly at fault for these atrocities that are committed: “Observers have described them principally as maquila workers who worked for multinational corporations, including General Electric, Alcoa, Dupont, RCA. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler” (Weissman 2005: 7-8). It is astounding that these corporations are greedy enough to use these women as a commodity of cheap labor to help perpetuate successful business and add to this globalized economy in the Western world. However, as obvious and deliberate as these murders are, they remain as almost a mystery on a national and international level. Many of these international organizations as well as local government

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and law enforcement have simply turned a blind eye to the murders that have been occurring over the last two decades. In order for wide scale change to cease these actions, the international community must act swiftly to prevent further violence. Many theories have circulated and attempted to deal with the gender violence in Ciudad Juárez but none are more important than Deborah Weismann’s. She links the murders with many logical and explanatory reasons such as gendered backlash, state impunity and the overall conditions that exist in the city itself. “Theories have linked murders to deviancy for profit, that is, murder of women to obtain their organs to sell on the black market to wealthy individuals” (Weissman 2005: 12). Here she gives an example of the ways in which men also serve and economical purpose in which they murder women in an effort to gain capital from wealthy, white business and corporation owners. This directly correlates to the globalized economy of women and men within not only Mexico but specifically in Ciudad Juárez. These people function to survive on cheap labor and illegal activity to obtain social and fiscal prestige. All the while, these actions perpetuate the gendered violence stemming from multinational corporations, maquilas, ethnicities, characteristics (what is a traditional Mexican woman) and a constant vicious cycle of the rich taking from the poor which in turn leads to the systematic murders of Mexican women in Ciudad Juárez. The ongoing gender based violence against women in Ciudad Juárez is indicative of overarching structural violence. This stems from the idea that certain institutions like NAFTA

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deprive women of their basic needs and rights as human beings. Economic globalization has placed an unfair and unwarranted burden on the women in Juárez and it has certainly aided in the murders that have been and are still being committed against them. Overall, we see many inequalities between genders that in turn create subversive power hierarchies as described by researchers like Philippe Bourgois. This flip-flopping of gender roles within the workplace as well as domestically within the household opposing traditional notions of what men and women were supposed to do, we see systemic examples of gender-based violence. The underlying question and concern amidst all of the horrible actions of violence against women in Juárez are the ways in which they can be eliminated. Many commissions are currently in place to track criminals and prevent these crimes from happening but most are unsuccessful due to negligence and a lack of concern for the victims. The CNDH or Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (National Human Rights Commission), is an entity derived from the Mexican national government, tasked to “investigate the murders in Ciudad Juárez” but after years of investigations by various men, “there had been very little institutional follow up to the report” (Simmons 2006: 495-496). This example shows the little concern there is for female victims in Juárez and how the Mexican national government is essentially sweeping these crimes under the table. Additionally, the environment in which these women worked were appalling and little was done about their circumstances. Many people have attempted to have these conditions seen on an international level with countries like the United States with legislation like, “the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA)”

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regarding “the abysmal working conditions in the maquiladoras” (Simmons 2006: 496). Even legislation could not eradicate or even bring the conditions in Juárez and the workplace to the forefront of government officials. It seems that the only way to completely rid Mexico of these actions of violence, we must look to human rights. It is every human’s right to experience freedom and live a life in which they can attain social mobility, fiscal capital and be free of gender marginalization and oppression from wealthy business owners in a globalized economy.

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Works Cited
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Rosales, Oscar. 2013. “The Effect of the NAFTA on Crime.” M.A. Dissertation, Department of Forensic Science, Texas Tech University. Print. Salzinger, Leslie. 2003. “Re-forming the ‘Traditional Mexican Woman’: Making Subjects in a Border Factory.” Ethnography at the Border. Ed. Pablo Vila. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Print. Simmons, William P. 2006. "Remedies For Women of Ciudad Juárez through the Inter-American Court of Human Rights." Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights 4(3): 493-517. Web. 5 Feb. 2015. Volk, Steven S. and Marian E. Schlotterbeck. 2007. “Gender, Order, and Femicide: Reading the Popular Culture of Murder in Cuidad Juárez.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 32(1): 53-86. Print. Weissman, Deborah M. "The Political Economy of Violence: Toward an Understanding of the Gender-Based Murders of Ciudad Juarez." North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation 30: 795-997. Web. 5 Feb. 2015. Wright, Melissa W. 2006. “Public Women, Profit, and Femicide in Northern Mexico.” South Atlantic Quarterly 105(4): 681-698. Print.

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