Ciudad Juarez, Mexico: A landscape of dead women, a legacy of disappearing ones

A lot of criminal research expertise has gone into the study of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a thriving ‘culture of death’ on the border of USA/Mexico. They study the ‘femicides,’ with forensics, anthropology, and psychological profiling. Hundreds of women have been found in ghastly condition after gruelling and often gruesome sexual torture. The femicide victims have been all ages, ten and up.

Ciudad Juarez is a Mexican border city in the state of Chihuahua, opposite the city of El Paso, Texas. The two are separated by a ‘highway’ that acts as national border, and it is a boundary lined by layers of fence. The fences are supposed to be barriers to cross-border transit, but who knows what happens in the world of the criminally powerful because perhaps this border is meaningless to them.

Regardless, the city is home to an extraordinary amount of killing and the world hears the reports of endless gunplay and countless massacres in the drug-gang warfare that has been raging for the past few years in northern Mexico. Well, this city is one of the free-fire zones. Hundreds of people a year are murdered in Ciudad Juarez, even, “women and young girls have been slain in gangland-style shootings, in acts of domestic violence and in sexual assaults.” [Wikipedia]

A crisis centre in the Mexican city recorded seventeen cases of femicide occurring between January 1, 2008 and May 5, 2008. Victims ranged in age from ten to forty-eight years old. None could be identified. Earlier in the decade a forensic artist from New York City accepted an assignment from a Chihuahua state official to assist in identifying victims, and he decided the state police apparatus contained elements “likely behind numerous rapes and killings.”

Some of the femicide victims are killed in their homes, others are left in fields surrounding the city to be devoured by animals. Femicide victims are found surrounded with brazen evidence of their last minutes – such as a profusion of condoms. Others are thrown from cars, others are found in hotel rooms shot to death with a hundred bullets. Fifteen year old school girls disappear from bus stops after chumming with friends. The remains of countless victims are never identified, and by some speculation, far more often, never found.

There are plenty of reports and backgrounders on the internet, and Amnesty International has taken up the cause on the behalf of so many families searching for the women. The seriousness has grown steadily over the past ten years and shows no sign of abating, but it’s becoming clear these are ritualistic sex crimes. The shocking number of disappearing girls also speaks to the high likelihood of human trafficking in the sex trade.

Relating to genocide in court and in print

The question often gets aired, what prompted genocide to erupt in Rwanda? Especially after the courts hear more of the testimony in trials about this genocide. The usual explanation is that some kind of ‘political’ vacuum was left by departing colonial Belgians. What explains radio broadcasts calling day and night for Hutus to take everything out of the Tutsis, every corpuscle throughout the land?  “Kill Tutsi ‘cockroaches!’” the radio cried, endlessly, ceaselessly, and historians tell us it was a complete reversal of fortune foisted on the privileged Tutsi of society.

It was bloody and relentless tit for tat genocide, ‘legitimized’ by the reality of foisting revenge. We are informed that Tutsis were separate by dint of a mocking privilege found in skin pigmentation. None of the darker-skinned garbage men, Joe-lunch-buckets, unemployed sons and daughters of previous massacres, were going to deny a century of oppression had occurred. It was written on everybody’s face, rich as Belgian chocolate.

Follow the history leading to the large scale event in question, one imagines ever since Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness at the turn of the previous century, in a sense, the definition of a cockroach grew, uh, legs. It grew out of the lighter skinned Tutsis utilizing privilege like a club, for making slaves out of darker skinned brothers and sisters must have become second nature to the Tutsi. They must have enjoyed the privilege of committing atrocities on behalf of Belgians, establishing an apartheid or a different sort, growing Belgian-sized bellies off the fat of the land, until becoming targets in a 100 day massacre of 800,000 (light-skinned, previously privileged) Rwandans.

The light-skinned Tutsis, they say, had been Belgian-favoured who found themselves about to be victims upon the Belgian departure. Oddly, Tutsis were unprepared, or unable to continue in governance over the facile social organization. Something like this occurred in Cambodia, after French Colons were forced out, and Khmer Rouge eventually rose to commit atrocities on the ones educated and presumably favoured by the French. (A genocide trial is getting underway in Cambodia. In 1975 if you wore glasses, carried a book, or wore a tie, the KR marched you out of the city at gun point and killed you. For a segment of society, everything goes further than time standing still. Time ceases to exist.)

In Rwanda the light-skinned and educated, bureaucratic and former, ruling class Tutsis fell under the constant radio cacophony demanding door-to-door hunting for Tutsis. From the pictures, the hunt was in suburbia. People who once enjoyed the advantages conferred upon an elite, these privileged were conveniently easy to spot.

History informs that when Belgians left with all the authority, the privileged were standing around without machetes. These are the ones who fell under machetes and occasional pistol shots to the head to finish the deed.  In film and photos showing the event, and there is a surprising amount of film and footage, bodies are lying outside the entrances to decent-looking housing, prime real estate is filled with bodies. The genocide was not committed in shantytowns.

Meanwhile Hutu ‘leaders’ told Hutu people to kill or be one of the ones they kill, and this became one of the ‘distinctions’ in the selection of victims. Furthermore, besides the job of cleaning up the country of its severe cockroach infestation, some or all of the Hutu perpetrators of the genocide admit they were tempted into the action by offers of land ownership, banana trees, and so forth, post-genocide. Such promises may well be unfulfilled, according to reports, but such promises were incentive to kill those who controlled the business of land deeds (if only how to file them). By personal accounts, pictures, films, and an increasing historical record of books, the world is aware a genocide of some kind occurred. A few Tutsis are putting pen to ink. A few Hutus are pleading in courts around the world.

This much is sure: the Rwanda School of Radio Broadcasting Genocide 300 intensive 6 day program (bring your own coffee cup) makes them the most dangerous institution on earth. They churn out broadcasters to deliver convincing messages about killing formerly privileged people for being cockroaches. Now it is the publishing houses making the rounds with books. 

These stories are for hard to resist, and indeed these are important stories to expose to the reading public. More importantly, in Canada, they are listening to testimony in the trial of Desire Munyanesa, facing seven counts of crimes against humanity and on trial in Montreal. Before the trial broke for the summer they heard about a man in Rwanda, unnamed, who resides on what (must be a truly mystical place in Rwanda called) Death Row.

Rwanda has people stepping out of the woods and alleys and up from the creek beds to make reports. One landed on CBC news television at the end of May, ’07, in which appeared a woman named Eugenia, nicknamed ‘The woman with a crooked walk.’ Hers’ was a story of permanently disabling injuries and survival in the middle of genocide. She lives with a story of machete wounds, and continues to live around perpetrators of the murderous assaults.

Therein lies the crux of the story. It appears on some level the crimes against humanity are misdemeanors in Rwanda. One assumes from this posture that Tutsis must have been accustomed to the reign of death in Rwanda and probably bore a century of guilt for atrocities on Hutus. Only recently have reports emerged of people being convicted and sentenced to death for genocide in Rwanda. Indeed the Canadian court paid a visit to Rwanda to take the man’s testimony on death row. No reports are made of executions having occurred, but how surprising would it be? Usually the story is astonishing for the amount of forgiveness being displayed. Forgiveness is not always there, but that it is there at all, this is astonishing.

This level of acceptance is surreal to most sensibilities, yet, as the report on Eugenia showed, people pick up their lives in Rwanda and often go forward in lock step with the perpetrators of atrocities. This Eugenia woman had spent 13 years since the 800,000 killings of a short few months undergoing little healing and no forgetting. The reporter noted, Rwanda has many people making peace with the conflict, but Eugenia spent days mainly in recollection of a brazen massacre of her children with machetes, her children calling to the Hutus they would “stop being Tutsis.”

In this case it was a life sentence in court  for the perpetrator, however, killers after sentencing these Hutus have since been freed and they return home. This level of madness, nevertheless, calls upon the prevailing authority to permutate into an organization to deliver redress in society. Once a week, the CBC reported, across Rwanda, the “‘Gachatcha’ reconciliation program” takes over the country and citizens fall into gatherings to tell stories and give descriptions of the suffering. The reporter suggested Eugenia had been a frightened survivor and today the fear continues, because she is struggling to deal with serial Killer Eric Kasamarandi living nearby.

His explanation, after all the apologies for callously hacking her children to death on her lap, “We were driven to kill by Invisible enemies that invaded our souls.” Returning to proceedings against Desire Munyaneza, a Quebec Superior Court opened the first-ever War Crimes trial in Canada, Mar 31 07.

Identities will remain concealed from public in Canada and the world because people in Rwanda, SURPRISE, still live with the threat of unexpected death. Witnesses in the Canadian court are ID’d in court by alphanumeric designation to protect them upon their return to Rwanda) and bear horrifying testimony that is practically too much for civilized ears. Many of the testimonies are of things never heard in Canadian courts. Witness C15 said she and others took refuge at their local government office, “hoping for a quicker death by bullets, rather than being hacked to death by machetes.”

Munyaneza, 40, is faced with seven counts of ‘crimes against humanity’ (under new Canadian law) including rape, murder, and pillaging. Munyaneza arrived in Canada from Africa in 1997 and RCMP began investigating him in 1999. He was arrested in Etobicoke, Ontario, in 2005 (CanWest News Service, Mar 30 07)  The trial resumes in Sep ’07. [Rwanda: When using machetes it takes 100 days to kill 800 thousand people — an important calculation made by somebody close to the machete procurement office. Genocide trials are what the CIA, chief apologist for the Military Industrial Complex, calls BLOWBACK.

The Trial of Willy Pickton was Surreal

Testimonies are missing important details and therefore open to reasonable doubt, and some prosecution witnesses testify on behalf of the defendant!  Bystanders after listening are wont to ask, "Do prosecutors have the actual person who committed the murders?" Willy Pickton has been cloying in admitting to knowing of body parts on the premises but pleading he killed no one. He faces terrified witnesses who seem resigned to small comprehension of events. One prosecution witness expressed warm feelings for Willy Pickton.

The testimony became meaningless babble to outsiders during a parade of drug-addled recollections. Some of the variations induced by the defense were making Willy Pickton burst into laughter at the witnesses from inside the glass-encased prisoner’s box during cross examinations. (And this avuncular chap faces 26 murder charges!)  The defense implicated one of the witnesses in sex-trade homicides around Edmonton until Mr. Justice James Williams slammed the door on it.

If they want to wrap this up fast the work of the prosecution becomes difficult for despite initial suggestions by the defense it appears Willy Pickton is far from a clinical idiot. The defendant realizes unless the IOC makes serial killing an Olympic event for 2010, the Crown, and indeed the society in general, prefers an end to dredging up details leaving major parts of the story to historians.

Perhaps the future holds either a long stay in proceedings of this trial, or a mistrial, because Willy Pickton would be smart to prolong the defense into the next decade and probably will, as Pickton appears comfortable in the milieu of the court and custody and so forth.

The Downtown Eastside of Vancouver remains a mysterious neighbourhood to most Canadians (and entirely understood by the amalgam of people in it). Most DES residents are raised in poverty, many on Indian Reserves and transplant ‘poverty’ along with ‘an Indian reserve’ to the city.

It is North America’s worst slum, over a dozen square blocks reserved for an overwhelmingly victimized hoard, of whom dozens (possibly hundreds) of women were led to grisly deaths, some dying at the hands of an indubitable madman and allegedly the madman is Willy Pickton.

Justice Williams decided to split the case in two parts, proceeding on six charges for the murders of Georgina Papin, Serena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, and Marnie Frey.

 So much DNA was everywhere it became confounding to the peaked capped authorities assigned to stopping this macabre conduct who upon entering the premises immediately found body parts including skulls, hands, and feet, stuffed in slop buckets. The farm went on lock down and other bones were found and Willy Pickton had nothing to say, except, “I didn’t do it,” which he's been telling the court.

On the other hand, in video-taped evidence, showing him during the opening hours of Jan 22 07, the Crown said, Willy Pickton confessed to forty-nine murders and rolled the tape of a policeman ‘planted’ in the cell. The conversation centred on why they were in lock-up. Willy proved cagey with the cop but he slyly suggested he was going to be to 'stopping' at 50. Then, suddenly, Willy Pickton was famous, face splashed across newspapers the world over.

 Then he was in police interrogation, and he replied, "You're making me more of a mass murderer than I am," mocking interrogators having difficulty distinguishing DNA in the quagmire of his farm sheds and dwelling. Once he muttered, "I was gonna stop at five-0.” They showed him newspapers and Willy Pickton parried, "That don't mean I did it.”

 He may have admitted something but added to his confession that others were doing some of the killing, namely, "Dinah did some of it." Regarding victims, Willy Pickton refused to admit feeding the pigs their remains. Others said he fed the pigs and disposed of other parts through a Pickton family garbage collection company (supplying truck driving jobs).

Crown Counsel Derrill Prevett presented a chain of evidence linked to Pickton's property, including skulls cut in half with hands and feet stuffed in them. Crown Counsel John Ahern described six women living troubled lives.  The defense have agreed wholeheartedly, noting each victim had literally dozens of ‘encounters’ with police, social workers, hospitals, clinics, outreach centres, and detox units. These women seemed to making frantic rounds in the social services dragnet. Pickton’s defense touched lightly on the subject but the dates for each disappearance can be recounted precisely by the Crown. Many victims were known for trying to leave the mean streets to return to motherhood or families.

Six victims known to be missing from particular dates are joined by many others who circulated through the over-crowded DES out to the over-crowded Piggy Palace and back to the DES. Regular contact with victims stopped abruptly (only in rare instances reports of a disappearance arrived a long time later).

These victims disappeared from ‘96 to ‘01 and police implicate Willy Pickton in missing persons related to the Lower Mainland sex trade as far back to ‘83, implying he started at age 33. On the other hand, police candidly admit Willy Pickton is joined by other suspects,. To conceive of a mob of serial killers working as a team is strange indeed, for what is the motivation?

Willy Pickton and Dinah Taylor were both heard ranting about drug debts. History informs that street level situations of mayhem often involve drugs by and large.  Scott Chubb, key prosecution witness, gave hearsay testimony to gross indignity to human remains and alluded to cannibalism, in relation to Willy Pickton selling meat over the fence. This takes the killer’s motive into the realm of strange psychosis.

 Chubb refrained from eating at the farm, noteworthy for a starving man at the end of a drug binge, but once informed of the horrors in his midst he apparently balked at the pig farmer’s generosity. It was he who initially reported in ’02 the property patrolled by an aggressive 600 lb. Boar, that it was terrifying.

 Police say Chubb broke the case after working as Willy Pickton’s employee on a garbage truck with extended periods at the wheel. Chubb’s solid work history was matched by zealous use of drugs, but he testified to seeing Willy Pickton visit a shopping mall with Georgina Papin.

 As time wore on between the two in the late 90’s Willy Pickton offered Chubb a moonlighting job, suggesting, 'Kill them with a syringe filled with windshield washer fluid,' because drug addicts never get autopsied."

 Chubb fled when upon learning about the inhuman conduct. He added penetrating testimony about a serial killing machinery facing exposure by David Francis Pickton, Willy Pickton's brother. Chubb reported the brother’s threat against a conspiracy of killers if Willy Pickton was convicted of murder.

 Next came Gina Houston discussing a conversation with Willy Pickton, in Feb. 20 02, after it was established he was the primary suspect. Willy Pickton might have been entering the denial phase of an alleged killing spree (if such a phase exists), and prosecution witness Houston agreed with defense lawyer Marilyn Sandford, stating, “Pickton said, ‘I did not kill Mona,’” or anyone else.

Instead, said defense attorney Sandford, he too pointed the finger at Dinah Taylor, a pig farm roommate of 18 months who was once investigated but never charged.  Houston said Willy Pickton said Dinah Taylor shot some of the girls, and Houston testified Willy Pickton was unable to stop events occurring down on the pig farm. The killing swirling around the place was beyond Willy Pickton's control.

She described a telephone conversation with a mellow Willy Pickton interrupted by a screaming woman followed by another screaming woman, then a screaming man, and a plea from Willy Pickton, “Don’t do it here,” and finally, possibly, a life-emitting gasp.

The prosecution’s problem lies in credibility of these witnesses. The defense keeps asking if they are lying and about the accuracy of memories. Piggy Palace Good Time Society facilities hosted recurring drug-drenched orgies, entree into which does not permit those of a clear head. Some nights this Pickton property held over 2,000 drug-crazed denizens. Police forced Piggy's Palace to scale back in ’98 after a rape victim escaped, partially shackled, but police never stopped it completely.

Gina Houston returned to testify about continued affection for Willy Pickton.  She said it was his close friend Dinah Taylor killing women on his property. Dinah Taylor is from a central Canadian First Nation presently living without police protection who vehemently, categorically, and dismissively denies involvement in murder. She lived on the pig farm for 18 months at the height of disappearances and knew several victims from shared experiences in the DES. 

It was the testimony of Lynn Ellingsen placing Willy Pickton “standing covered in blood next to a dead woman who was hanging from a chain." Defense lawyer Richard Brooks wanted Ellingsen to admit to suffering psychotic episodes of drug-induced hallucination instead of seeing Willy Pickton in the barn with a dead Georgina Papin. Questions fell upon Ellingsen in two separate times on the witness stand to explain dates, which she finds impossible to remember.

Demonstrating a classic case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Ellingsen wept through much of her testimony. She was bad at remembering dates and testified Willy Pickton took her on a ride in his magic bus to the DES in Vancouver. They picked up Georgina Papin and together the crack cocaine use rose to a fever pitch, and Ellingsen was the first to say Willy Pickton directly influenced her drug use.

From all of these sketchy descriptions taken together Willy Pickton emerges as a pretty generous guy,  perhaps an enabler of drug use doling out portions to maintain control over situations and people. Most witnesses are in a state of denial about his role in the drug frenzy but Ellingsen testified Willy Pickton managed the drug program down on the pig farm and at the registered charitable Piggy Palace.

Here was a world disguised by 'philanthropy' with needy addicts the potential volunteers. Ellingsen testified she had fallen for this philanthropy and one night Georgina Papin, too, fell to a different level. First they shared a crack pipe in Willy’s company at Willy Pickton’s behest. Ellingsen said Georgina was alive and wiped on crack cocaine in the evening but dead and mutilated before the crack of dawn.

Ellingsen alone has spoken to these monstrous details. "I saw this body. It was hanging. Willy pulled me inside behind the door. Walked me over to the table. Made me look. Told me if I was to say anything, I'd be right beside her." The defense implied Ellingsen was coached to say what police want because she has long been a dependent of theirs and will say whatever they need.

Before the two week break, 37 year old Andrew Bellwood was prosecution witness 97 and the last long-time crack-cocaine addict to testify. He was down and out meeting Willy Pickton in Jan ‘99 at the Pickton farm, then hanging around the property from Feb ‘99 to mid-Mar ‘99, and, on a couple of occasions, staying over in Willy Pickton's trailer.

  The guy-talk was over the top with Pickton telling Bellwood about prostitutes, “sometimes hesitant about leaving the DES,” so he offered incentives like a choice of drugs, heroin or cocaine, or more money.  It was Bellwood who testified how Willy Pickton demonstrated a modus operandi for sex and murder, and Willy finished with Bellwood by saying he gutted the bodies and fed the remains to the pigs.

  The trial adjourned for a two-week break after Bellwood’s testimony concluded. Still nobody has testified about why the rampant killing spree might have occurred.