Amnesty International: Protect Mexican women of Ciudad Juarez

MEXICO CITY, Aug 11 (AFP) - The deaths of at least 370 women in a decade has grabbed the attention of Amnesty International, which on Monday called on Mexico for better policing along the US border's bustling factories.

Over the last 10 years, young women have been strangled and most of them raped. Many had come from other towns to work in the "maquilas," assembling everything from toys to thermometers for US export, said the report released Monday.

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"The pervasive failure of the authorities to address these cases is tantamount to tolerance of them," said Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International.

"For many of the women who migrate to find work in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, the pervasive pattern of violence against women has turned their dream of finding new opportunities into a nightmare," Khan said.

"Mexico: Intolerable killings, Ten years of abductions and murders in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuaha," finds that authorities' failure to investigate the crimes in the past 10 years has been "blatant."

In Ciudad Juarez, a dusty city of one million residents, around 200,000 people work 24 hours a day assembling manufactured goods for export to the United States.

Rights organizations and local politicians have previously complained that most of the murder victims were raped before their deaths. A rape conviction in Chihuahua state brings a mere three- to nine-year prison term. Cattle rustling is penalized at six to 12 years' jail.

But Amnesty said that while 79 people have been convicted of the murders, in most cases justice has not been done. Poor investigations "cast doubt on the integrity of the criminal proceedings" against many of those arrested.

"It is shameful that in the first few years after the abductions and murders began, the authorities openly discriminated against the women and their families in their public statements," Khan added.

"On more than one occasion the women themselves were blamed for their own abduction or murder because of the way they dressed or because they worked in bars at night."

In its investigation, AI found that around 370 women had been murdered since 1993, of which 137 were sexually assaulted before they died. Some 75 other bodies have not yet been identified.

Khan is due to meet with President Vicente Fox during her visit to Mexico.

The rights group said there was a reform the justice system was badly needed.

In the report, the group said 61 percent of the victims were aged between 13 and 27 years; some 46 percent were aged between 13 and 22; around 60 percent worked either in the maquilas, or were students.

All of the victims were kidnapped and held captive before they were murdered; around 70 percent died of asphyxia after being strangled and beaten; more than 50 percent of the women were raped before they died.

Other non-governmental groups have said that more than 400 women remain missing.

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