June 19, 2020 • 67 mins
Juarez, located just over the US-Mexico border, has an ongoing crisis that hasn't made the news: hundreds of women have gone missing, and many of the ones who disappear are later found dead, their wrists often bound, with strange symbols carved on their bodies. Journalists Monica Ortiz Uribe and Oz Woloshyn dive deep into this tragic mystery in their podcast Forgotten: Women of Juarez, searching for answers to the femicides that were all too often ignored by law enforcement. What did they find? Join the guys as they interview Oz Woloshyn about the ongoing investigation.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Brading. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
My name is Matt, my name is all they called
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission Control decads. Most importantly, you are you,
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Today, we are diving into a
(00:46):
story that may be cursorily familiar to many of our
fellow listeners. You may have heard in the past. The
headlines of this story you may have you may have had,
you know, a couple of let's say, what do you think,
a couple of sentences length of an idea of what's happening.
(01:09):
Of course, in these chaotic times, we have so many headlines, right,
We have so many things that we all we all
keep track of, and many things unfortunately get lost in
the shuffle. For decades and siodad Warez in Mexico, women
(01:30):
have been going missing. This is something that some of
our fellow listeners wrote to us about in our earlier
episode on the Lost Highway in Canada where multiple members
of First Nations in the region were being victimized murdered,
(01:53):
often without any acknowledgement or assistance from law enforcement. Also
or two as the Highway of Tears, I believe, right,
isn't that? Yeah? That's yeah, that's correct now and we
are not diving into this case, this songgoing tragedy alone
(02:13):
today Today we are joined by the Emmy and Peabody
Award winning producer and writer and executive producer of one
of our newest PUER podcast, Forgotten Women of War, as
we'd like to welcome to the show, ozwal Ocean. Oz,
thank you so much for coming on the air today.
(02:36):
Thank you so much for having me. It's an honest
to be having this conversation with you. Guys. We're very
much glad that you're here to talk about this, and
we're also glad that you're making this show that you're making.
All all three of us have been listening to the
show again Forgotten Women of War as you can find
it right now. UM, I think we've all been personally
(02:57):
very affected by the stories that you're telling and um
that you're giving voice not only two uh, you know,
the families and the people who have been affected by this,
but the reporters who have been working on this for
so long. You know, before we jump into all of that,
could you just tell us who you are and why
(03:17):
you wanted to talk about this story. Yeah, my name
is oz and Um I've been I've been living in
the States for ten years on various different immigrant visas
and now a green card, and and so you know,
despite being a white man and having all the privilege
that comes with that, I've had this unusual experience of
(03:41):
kind of immigration difficulties. And there's something called secondary screening
where you know, when you arrive in the United States,
you get taken into this kind of prison esque area
in the airport and often have to wait for a
couple of hours well various you know, checks are performed,
and so you know, despite fitting in and feeling very
(04:03):
comfortable always in the United States, I've always also had
this consciousness of what does it mean to be an
immigrant in the US, what does it mean to live
in the US without being from the US. And that's
also something which is part of my family background. My
grandfather was a refugee from Ukraine to Britain and after
the Second World War. So I've always been very interested
in stories about migration and stories about how we define
(04:26):
us and them, stories about you know, who gets to
be part of the club and who gets excluded from
the club. The price of being excluded from the club,
which you know, goes from lack of economic opportunity unfortunately
to murder. And so I was just very fascinated by
this El Paso Juarez border area because you have these
(04:48):
two big cities, El Paso six hundred thousand huires a
million in two different countries, separated by a river which
is now dry and a steel vents. And El Paso, Texas,
up until the terrible shooting at Walmart, was frequently considered
one of America's safest cities of its size. And Huirez,
(05:10):
as people know from movies like Cicario and you know,
other narcos, the Marcus, Mexico, is one of the world's
most dangerous and bloody and violent and frightening cities. So
I was just curious that how does that happen? What? What?
Why is that? And I first went down to the
border to El Paso after I read a series of
(05:31):
stories in The New Yorker called Faces from the Border,
and one of the articles was was profiling Hispanic border
patrol agents. And I had never really considered that border
patrol agents were a majority Hispanic, in fact Hispanic, and so,
you know, sixteen and there was all of this rhetoric
coming out of the White House about Mexican bad hombres
(05:54):
and rapists and and an increasing militarization of the border.
What I found fascinating was the put on the front
lines of enforcing it were themselves, usually Hispanic, often with
family in Huarez, often with cousins or even brothers and
sisters who didn't speak to them anymore, or turn them
away from church or whatever it may be because of
what they were doing. And yet it was a federal
(06:16):
job and came with perks in an area with you know,
not as many employment opportunities, say as New York or
Los Angeles or Atlanta. So I was kind of fascinated
by this paradox. And I went down there to work
on a documentary series about that, which hasn't hasn't yet
been released. But but but while I was there, one
of the producers on the documentary series started telling me
(06:37):
about this, this this story of the murders of the
women in Huarez, and I didn't know about it. I mean,
it was something I couldn't believe he was telling me.
They were not tens, but hundreds of women who have
been murdered seemingly in a characteristic way, you know, left
in strange positions, with strange symbols in some cases left
(06:57):
on their bodies, that have been going on for decade.
Aids that various investigations that looked into it, but that
no one knew for sure what was happening. And I thought,
what a what a what a germain topic for podcast
given people people's interested in the true crime genre, but
also what an interesting way to tell it, to tell
what is effectively a tale of two cities. Yeah, I
(07:18):
I massively appreciate the way you phrase it a tale
of two cities and your reference to the August twenty
nineteen mass shooting there in El Paso. I believe that's
when it occurred. One thing that I think will baffle
a lot of people. I want to make sure we
don't bury the lead here, Oz, is what you just
(07:38):
said about the nature of these murders, because you know,
we we know that in various various countries in Central
and South America, there is an ongoing crisis of femicide
and violence against women. UH. This was true even when
(08:01):
I was living in Guatemala in the mid two thousand's.
But what's different here. One of the things that's different
here is that there appears to be some sort of
methodical system or application to to these homicides. And you know,
(08:24):
it's something that I personally was I was not aware
of the extent of this. I knew that many women
were being murdered and then later found UH, and I
knew that there were allegations that the police or law
enforcement were somewhere on the spectrum between UH incompetent to
(08:49):
willfully UH negligent. With that in mind, how did you
and your co host UH first start exploring the the
intersection of law enforcement here, or I should say law
enforcements role. Were was the US side of law enforcement
(09:12):
interested or involved with any cases here? So that's a
that's a very interesting question. And my co host who's
not with us today is Monica Ortiz or Rebey, who
has been a reporter in El Paso for fifteen years,
reports the NPR for the BBC, contributes to New York Times,
(09:34):
and she's been covering the femicides for fifteen years, with
a very strong focus on the experience of the families,
on the economic realities that make these women vulnerable in
the first place, and with less of a procedural focus
on law and order, on law enforcement, on on the who,
(09:58):
more on the y and the what so Funny enough,
U S law enforcement have been very interested in what's
happening to the women in Huirez. I mentioned that that
quote about the President talking about murderers, rapists, and bad
hombres coming from Mexico and Central America into the US.
In fact, the FBI in the nineties were very concerned
(10:20):
that an American serial killer might be traveling south into
Mexico to take advantage of a vulnerable, vulnerable population and
a less strictly enforced laws to basically prey on vulnerable women.
In Huirez and in fact, Quires has long been a
(10:40):
place where things that America wants to have access to,
not have responsibility for, happen. So in the twenties, during Prohibition,
there was a bourbon distillery in Kentucky that was disassembled
part by part art and sent by rail to Huirez,
(11:03):
where it was promptly reassembled started making Kentucky Bourbon again
and smuggling straight into the United States. And so the
most famous bar in Huires is called the Kentucky Club
for that reason. Um so so. And then in the
sixties and after this a long way to answer your question,
but in the Second World War there was a lot
(11:24):
of male labor was in Europe fighting, and so there
was a shortage of farm labor and industrial labor in
the United States. And the United States started this thing
called the Bressero program where they would allow Mexican laborers
to come into the United States easily work cross back
and forth. And in the sixties there was this political
(11:45):
pressure to say, you know, these people are taking our jobs,
let's send them back. So millions of Mexicans were you know,
basically sent home, and many of them found themselves in Juarez.
And so there was both a concern of thinking, well, gosh,
there are all these people on the border, you know,
who are who don't come from there, but who kind
(12:06):
of may want to come back to the United States.
How can we make things slightly more appealing for them
to stay there? And so basically this duty free zone
begins in Huirez, where it's much you know, you can
assemble goods and re export them to the US and
only pay duty on the value added. And so Huire
has becomes this manufacturing hub competing with Singapore and Taiwan
(12:28):
at the time to create cheek consumer goods, which is
still the engine of the economy. There on behalf of
American corporations, but using cheap Mexican labor with no labor protections. Um.
So fast forward to the nineties and you have Robert Wrestler,
who was the man who invented the Psychological Profiling Department
of the FBI, on and on whom the show mind
(12:50):
Hunter is based. And he is one of the people
credited with coining the term serial killer. And one of
the things which he pioneered was data driven serial killer apprehensions,
so looking for commonalities of crime scenes and using those
commonalities to try and apprehend killers. And what he quickly
(13:11):
it was called the vis CAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.
And what he quickly realized was that if you didn't
include southern Canada and northern Mexico in vi CAP, you
could be missing a great deal of what was happening.
So Wrestler was basically convinced that there were American serial
at least one American serial killer acting in Juarez, and
so he went down there to try and learn more
(13:32):
about the patterns behind the crimes, to see if they
connected to other crimes in the US. Will return and
dive deeper into the story of the women of war
as after a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
(13:53):
So this this timeline here, I think you've done a
fantastic job of filling in the context, because so often
in mainstream news reports, someone will, you know, with the
best of intentions, read about something and not understand that
(14:15):
there are decades of intervening forces and institutions leading to
that news story that we read. This leads us to
one of the other important pieces of context that I
think we need to establish here, Oz, which is that
(14:35):
when you and Monica and your team are when you
were investigating this, when you are when you were chasing
this story, you were going to areas of Mexico and
areas of the world that are um well, there's no
way to say, there's no other way to say it,
(14:55):
they are dangerous. Did you did you ever feel that
you or your cohort were um were in danger in
the course of creating this. I mean it's it's in short, yes,
I mean in Huires is a dangerous city which has,
(15:17):
you know, thousands of homicides a year, most of which
go unpunished. Mexico is the world's most dangerous country for journalists.
I think they've been almost thirty journalists murdered in the
last ten years. They're more dangerous than Syria for journalists.
And so there's one particular area in downtown Juarez where
(15:40):
many of the women were last seen, called Mina Street,
which is the central bus exchange in the city. So
factory employees basically go from their houses in the outskirts
changed downtown take another bus to work. And that happens
to be a part of town which is controlled closely
by a gang called the Badio Azteca, and so journalists
(16:04):
are really not welcome there. But it's also how Monica
describes it as ground zero for missing women. And if
you walk around that area, you'll see missing posters on
almost every lamp post, and you'll see these black crosses
painted on pink squares, also on lamp posts, which is
where the logo of our show Forgotten took its inspiration
from um And so we're walking around it, and Monica
(16:26):
said on the way, look, we need a cover story
because people don't want us to be asking questions about
what happens to the women here. So we said, oh,
we we're reporting on the migrant caravan. And people did
come up and ask us, and at a certain point
someone sort of made this gun gesture and shouted back
like that at us. And you know, in most cities,
(16:47):
you know, that might happen and it's a bit disconcerting,
or maybe somebody's having a bit of a joke, But
in a place where you know that most crimes go
unpunished and the price of life is is very low,
it is more scary. And we went after that to
meet Sandra Rodriguez Nieto, who's the editor of one of
the editors at the local newspaper, and she said, yeah,
that place where you guys were, I don't let my
(17:08):
reporters go there. It's too dangerous. And her colleague. The
desk outside her office was empty and had been for
ten years since her colleague, Armando Rodriguez was assassinated while
he was taking his daughter to school. So I don't
want to overplay the to date danger that we felt
ourselves in person, and I think Monica living in the
area takes more risk than I did. Who can return
(17:29):
to New York City, but certainly being on the ground
in Juarez is not a comfortable experience. If you're asking
these kinds of questions, well, well, um, you know, I
I think we just have a at least right here
in the rooms, the people who you're speaking to you
(17:52):
right now, I have a great respect for you, and
especially I think for Monica and for Diana, Um, Diana Washington.
Well does so I want to give our listeners the
way you do in your show, a specific example of
what the experience living and working in Ouarez at one
of these factories was like, and maybe the vulnerability that existed,
(18:17):
uh for within the lives of a lot of these women,
simply because of transportation needs um, which you know does
speak to a larger economic issue. So in in the show,
in episode one, you talk about Cigarrio, can you tell
us a little bit about her life, what it was
like and what um she was doing when she went missing? Yes,
(18:41):
by all means, so, Ben, you mentioned historical context. The
factory started in Huires in the in the sixties, but
it was in the mid nineties after NAFTA was signed,
that they really boomed and you had just this tremendous
demand for labor, and a bit like during the Grapes
of Time. There were recruiters going into the interior and saying,
(19:03):
come to Huire, is going to be fantastic. There are
even reports of empty seven four seven's flying to rural
and mining states in Mexico and coming back full of workers.
So there was this sense that Juarez was a place
of opportunity, a place particularly for women to work outside
of the home, which wasn't always the case in some
(19:24):
other parts of Mexico. And so this one family, the
Flores family, they decided to move from El salto in Durango,
where Jesus, the father was a lumberjack, and he went
ahead with their son and he wrote a letter home
(19:44):
to Paula, his wife, and their six daughters, and said,
you guys that would come. We found work, We found
what we're looking for is going to be fantastic. And
Paula replied, well, I've heard they kill women there and
we have six daughters. Are you sure? And he just
said yes, is there's no there's no bad people here.
Everyone's starting out come and join us. So they did
(20:07):
so they moved there. That the mother and the six daughters,
including Sagario, joined and they moved to this squatter community
on the outskirts of Juarez where they have to build
their own house above their heads, no running water, no electricity,
and to build their house they forage scrap from an
American dump on the other side of the border. And
(20:29):
just his image of these, you know, people who moved
from elsewhere crossing over under where a kind of wink
and a nod from border patrol to go and get
our trash to go back and build their houses. You know,
it is very haunting. There's one story about Sagarrio being
there at the dump with her mother and an American
man coming to throw some stuff away and seeing that
she's cold and offering him his coat, and Sagario said, no,
(20:52):
I can't take it. I'm embarrassed in her mother says
to take the coat, so she does. So. Anyway, they
find what they're looking for. That they find work, and
they're all working together in Immaculadora making I think refrigerator
parts in one of these factories. But Cigarrio is under
eighteen and the factory find out and they say, you
can't work the night shift with the rest of your family.
(21:13):
We need used to the day shift. So she has
to start traveling to work alone all of a sudden,
and her mother begs her. She says, look, we can
survive without the money you bring in. Please don't do this,
and Sigario says, look, how we're living. I need to help.
And within two months of her shift changing, she's disappeared
and is found dead in the desert two weeks later.
(21:36):
With all of the characteristics of the abduction and broad daylight,
the disappearance and certain types of trauma that are characteristic
of of tens, if not hundreds of other young women
who meet the same fate. I want to bring up
just the idea of a border town and wires in particular.
(21:57):
Um the cartel, the drug cartels and Oarez had been
particularly powerful in the nineties, and I think there may
be a little less so now, but a lot of
the stories we would hear about Warez we're cartel war murders.
And can you speak a little bit about that kind
of proximity to the United States and the relationship between
(22:21):
the drug trade and your story, if if any exists
and just kind of you know what you took away
from that, Yeah, by all means, so, I mean, the
same reasons why the factories want to be in Huirez
is why the drug traffickers want to be in the Inhuires.
It's it's very close to the US. You have millions
of people crossing the border north, millions of vehicles, tons
(22:44):
of freight, and so it's it's one of the most
lucrative drug smuggling corridors in the world. And so what
happened was in the in the nineties. Up until the nineties,
there was obviously organized crime in Mexico, but the cartel
was a relatively stable organization, a bit like the mafia,
(23:07):
and so although there was organized crime, there wasn't a
huge amount of violence against members of the community. Like
once you were under the protection of the cartel, you're
basically safe. But what happened was the cartel started splintering,
actually under pressure from the U S who were doing
various um, you know, raids and arrests and putting pressure
(23:28):
on the Mexican government. And when the cartel splintered, basically
a cartel civil war starter. And this was slightly later
than the nineties. This was the early two thousands, UM.
And what happened is l Chapos lower cartel were coming
in from the west because they wanted to take over
the Howire smuggling corridor from the local from the local cartel,
and so this began this That's why you see these
(23:50):
terrible images of huires of you know, men hanging from
bridges and with slogans written on their dead bodies and
wearing pig masks. I mean, it was really the most
disgusting and symbolic violence playing out in Juarez in a
battle for control, which actually I think probably you can
draw a line forward from that to Isis and how
(24:12):
they weaponize the imagery of violence to be part of
their very effective social media campaign. And so this this
issue of the women being murdered and the cartel in Juarez, UM,
it's it's one of the questions of the podcast, and
it's another reason why the FBI tried to get involved
to find out what the answers are. But in the
(24:33):
early nineties or the mid nineties and the early two thousands,
in a sense, it's not clear at that stage just
how entrenched the cartel is. So everyone's on the hunt
for a serial killer. And then as the podcast goes
on and as history moves forward, it becomes clear that
it's harder and harder to separate the murders of women
from the cancer of cartel violence spreading. M hmm. Yeah,
(24:58):
and that's something that has I think historically bedeviled uh,
multiple cities in Mexico as well as other countries in
South America. And you know, a couple of times, a
couple of times here as already we've used the phrase
(25:22):
serial killer. And you know, for everyone everyone familiar with that.
There are some nuts and bolts technicalities, but long story short,
serial killer is defined by having a type of victim,
(25:42):
having a method of murder, and having a pattern in
terms of you know, their timeline, their chronology. One thing
that one thing that I think stood out to us
here that that differentiates these these specific comicides from so
(26:04):
many other tragic comicides in the in the area is
that there did seem to be there does seem to
be a a fairly consistent method applied here. Right, there
are people who are perhaps uh being shot due to
(26:24):
crime or due to you know, or or being stabbed
in a fight. But these these are different. Um. One
thing that stood out to me is early on in
the story, UM You're you explore how one of the
victims seemed to have been kept alive for some time
(26:45):
after being abducted. I believe, I believe investigators were able
to verify that this victim appeared to have been fed,
so they were around long enough to be fed. And
then explore a little bit about you explore the method
of UM possibly finding or or you know, UM determining
(27:06):
these victims and choosing them. It seems like I think
one of the most disturbing things is how premeditated. Dare
I say, how organized it seems? Could could you tell
us a little bit about what appears to be this
this method of determination. Yeah, I think you picked up
(27:28):
on something which which was important for us to communicate
in the podcast. The reporter who has done the most
work on this story is called Diana Washington Valdez, and
she wrote a book called The Killing Field Harvest of Women,
and her big point was these are not random victims.
These are not victims of random violence in a violent place.
(27:52):
These are women who have been specifically selected for certain characteristics.
Young Paul from immigrant families, often migrant families who disappear,
usually during the day to and from work, and who
when they're discovered later either their body left alone or
(28:13):
in four cases in huire As, there have been mass
graves of women discovered bare, characteristic types of trauma, often
a broken neck, often hands bound by shoelaces. And in
this particular case of Lila Lejandre, you mentioned an autopsy
that revealed she'd been kept alive and fed for several
days between disappearing and being murdered. And so this is
(28:36):
this is there's clearly something going on here. This is
not random violence, and that's why there were so many
people like Wrestler from the FBI theorizing and there must
be a serial killer because as a type, there's a
method of selection, and one of the most chilling methods
of selection was this. According to Diana's reporting, computer school
(29:00):
in downtown huires called Echo, And again this is the
early two thousand's. These are women who have come with
their families in search opportunity to a new city and
there's a computer school which apparently offers the type of
skills that needed to participate in the new economy and
perhaps get a better job than a factory job. And
(29:21):
in Diana's reporting, I think at least ten victims were
registered at the computer school before they were taken and murdered.
And the suspicion is that this computer school was basically
a catalog of victims in Diana's phrase, for somebody on
the other end who wanted to know, Okay, I want
(29:41):
a picture of the woman, I want to know where
they live, I want to know who their family are,
and then using that to select the most vulnerable because
these crimes were also sexually motivated for murder. Wow. And
in episode two of the show, and we don't want
to you know, obviously give away too much. We want
(30:03):
to talk about this, but we don't want we want
you to go to listen to the show. Um. In
in episode two, there are witnesses who have seen things.
In a lot of these cases, it appears that there
are witnesses to seeing something because like we said, this
is broad daylight. You're in a you know, a large
(30:25):
metropolitan area where these condempings are occurring, or even if
it's on the edges of them. Um, it seems like
there would be more people talking. But it also seems
like there is a very real danger for these witnesses
because and correct me if I'm wrong here, But I
(30:47):
believe it was known that someone or some group we're
posing as agents from the FBI and seeking answers from
witnesses or getting intel from witnesses, could you tell us
about that? Yeah, you're right, so so so the women
(31:07):
often disappear at these moments of maximum vulnerability. So in
Sagriio Flores case, it was right after she she changed
shift and was traveling alone to and from work. There's
another young woman called Claudia Gonzalez who rise for work late,
and so she isn't allowed into the factory, and that
very day she disappears and is later found dead. So
(31:27):
there's this sense that somebody is watching and somebody is
taking note of vulnerability. But the peculiar thing is then
there are never any witnesses. But then in two thousand
and one, this case comes along, and there aren't witnesses
to the abduction, but witnesses see Lily Alejandra is struggling
in a car with a man a few days after
(31:48):
she's taken, and so this is also a break because
they identify the car. It's a Ford Thunderbird. It's a
radically common makeup car. But it's the beginning of the
kind of lead that might normally, you know, resolve these
types of cases. M the witnesses, Dina Washington Valdez goes
(32:09):
to interview them, and they say, oh gosh, how funny.
You're not the first person who's been here to ask
us questions. The FBI we're here as well, and Diana
says what it says, Yeah, the FBI. The FBI came
and that they came to ask us what we've seen
and what we knew, and so we gave them all
the information. Dina calls her sources in the in the
FBI and El Paso, and they never did that. So
(32:31):
somebody has come to lead their own parallel investigation, either
to find out what these witnesses no or to intimidate
them and to make sure that the information they have
doesn't make it into the right channels. So that that's
one of the big challenges of this story and why
so many people have approached it and struggled to get
to answers, because unlike a normal crime in the US,
(32:54):
people are often scared but for good reason to come
forward and share what they And I bring this up,
Oz because you you spoke with at least one FBI
agent that I've heard on the podcast, Hardrick Crawford Jr.
Who who was I believe the FBI special agent in
charge of El Paso in around that two thousand one
(33:17):
time and a little bit after. And you know, he
he says some some things in the show that at
least that I've heard thus for that are really disturbing,
specifically talking about how easy it is to kill someone
and bury them and hide a body in war as
in the surrounding areas. But you know, just listening to
(33:38):
him talk about these murders and what's happening and knowing
that the FBI is involved and does does breach across
the border there for a lot of different cases, but
in this one in particular, they were at least doing
some work on it. I guess my big question to
(33:59):
you is how much of a hand did the FBI
have in investigations here if it? I mean, we know
they had some, but how large of a role the
FBI play. Well, they're actually three attempts the FBI made
to involve themselves in solving these crimes. The first time
(34:20):
was in the mid nineties when Robert Wrestler, the serial
killer expert came down, and he came motivated in large
part by wanting to get more data for his vight
CAP Violent Criminal Apprehension program. He came because he wanted
to do a better job of solving crimes in the US.
Then you had Frank Evans, who ran an operation called
(34:43):
Operation Plaza Sweep in the late nineties that was a
full on FBI operation in Mexico to exhume bodies male
bodies from the desert surrounding Huirez believed to be American
citizens in order to secure an indict meant against the
cartel leader Career Fuentes, in order to get an extradition request,
(35:05):
which they were successful in doing. Evans said at that point,
we offer the local Hui as police assistance with solving
the murders of women. But he was very explicit in
saying that the FBI made that offer because they wanted
to test out how trustworthy the local police were, and
it turned out they weren't. Then you have Hardrick Crawford,
(35:26):
who comes along in the early two thousand's and, unlike
Wrestler and Evans, who had a clear United States interest
motivated reason to engage themselves in this case, Hardrick says,
I had a mission from God, I had a higher
calling in the US Constitution. I have my own daughters.
(35:48):
It was my moral duty to find out what was
happening to these women. And his story is one of
the most interesting plotlines in the podcast. We we come
to it later on UM, but safe to say when
Laurence Fullspen officials start to follow something that they've views
being higher than the Constitution, chaos sometimes ensues. Okay, we're
(36:13):
gonna talk more with oz but first a quick word
from our sponsor. All right, and we're back with Ozwald
Lotion of Forgotten Women of Warez back to a specific
point about the story, and this is all none of
(36:34):
this is spoiler territory. It's all covered pretty quickly and
the first episode. But I think it's fascinating how little
was known at the time about the cartels kind of
oh gosh, trademark, I guess, or signature for a lot
of this violence that we may be now take for granted,
but some of the methods of the killings and some
(36:58):
of the kind of calling cards really did have almost
occulted kind of you know, feel about them or some
sort of ritualistic um you know qualities. Can you speak
to that a little bit about and about how that
in particular maybe muddy the waters and and made it,
you know, be a big part of that search for
a serial killer as opposed to realizing perhaps that this
(37:20):
might be something else. Yeah, it's a it's a great question.
I mean, bear in mind, you know, these crimes in
the nineties, this is not long after the Satanic panic
in the US, and so, you know, I think there's
a tendency in any case to read on to unsolved
murders and horrific murders some kind of satanic or ritual element.
(37:47):
But in fact, in the case of these murders, um,
it does seem like they were ritualized. There was strange
marks left on the bodies of the victims. There was
this use of shoe laces to bind the risks, and
the way in which the women's bodies were left was
(38:07):
not random. They were arranged in certain dehumanizing ways. And
so one of the early hypotheses was indeed that there
was some kind of satanic or ritual cult killing these women.
And one of the phenomena in in Mexico has been
the rise of this interest in Santa the Holy Death,
(38:31):
which is a sort of religion esque which sort of
worships death, and people were wondering, you know, is it
possible these are human sacrifices um that most of our
sources dismissed fairly quickly. But the idea of ritual killings,
ritual killings for the purposes of hazing or bonding, or
(38:53):
creating loyalty or creating codes of silence, that was considered
to be a much more really stick avenue of investigation.
And in fact, when Wrestler was there from the FBI,
he was there with another forensic criminal criminologists called Candascropic,
and they came on one of these crime scenes with
this woman left in an utterly deshumanizing way, and she
(39:15):
turned to restaurant and said, have you ever seen anything
like this in your career? And he said no. And
what they started to speculate was that was that these
women were being sacrificed by some kind of group in
order to achieve purposes, which at the time weren't clear
because there there were things like markings, triangles, and various
symbols carved into the bodies that have this, you know,
(39:37):
feel of some sort of ritual or some sort of
blood sacrifice or or or what have you. And again
don't want to get into spoiler territories about the story,
but when did it become clear that it was something different,
or at least when you know, in your coverage of
the story, in your following these folks that have lived this,
uh literally on the ground and in research and reporting
(39:58):
for years, when did it be clear to you that
what was really going on or or that maybe that
was barking up the wrong tree a little bit. Well, so,
I think it's the mass graves that really clarify for
people what's going on, because you know, young women are
going missing apparently following a pattern being found in the
desert on the outskirts of Wuirez with characteristic trauma. But
(40:23):
two thousand and one and two thousand and twelve, these
mass graves of women who have been killed in the
same way are discovered, and at that point it becomes
impossible for anybody to argue that these crimes are connected.
These are not victims of random violence. And each of
these times there's been a great hope that okay, the
authorities have to acknowledge there's something going on here which
(40:46):
is connected, and a belief in the community that although
this is terrible, we must have hit rock bottom after this,
no more, this can't continue. We will find the real cults.
And indeed, after each of the mass graves were discovered,
somebody took the fall in. It was an Egyptian chemist
(41:08):
called Abdul Latif Sharif. Sharif who had self deported from
the United States under threat of being actually deported to Egypt,
and it decided to go and live in Huarez where
he could continue working for his US employer but not
be subject to the U S law. And so he
was a big partier in downtown Huirez, and he had
these rape charges against him in the US. When the
(41:29):
first mass grave of women is discovered, he's taken in
and declared as the serial killer. There's one problem in
another mass grave of women is discovered, so as briefly
a bit of a concern for the authority, well, how
do we explain this? And what they come up with
is that a gang called the Rebels is being paid
(41:50):
by Sharif to murder women on his behalf in order
to attest his innocence, and that he's demanding their underwear
as evidence from his jail e'll sell. This sounds pretty
preposterous and lurid, but I mean this was the official line.
Two thousand and one comes along, another mass grave is discovered.
A journalist asked the Attorney General at a press conference,
(42:12):
is it possible Sharif is behind these crimes as well?
And the Attorney General says, is something we're looking into.
That's not the line they end up going with. In fact,
two bus drivers take the full this time. It turns
out they've been tortured with cattle prods, suffocation, beatings into
confessing to the crimes. And it's actually this scapegoating, this
(42:34):
third scapegoating that sets off this process where a lawyer
takes on their case and through his investigation we start
to get some answers about what's really happening. But it
leaves another trail of death in its wake, and not
just a women of men as well. And while we
(42:56):
are on the subject of math graves, one very important
and I think profoundly disturbing thing here is if we
do not ultimately know the group or the people responsible
for these murders, and we do not ultimately know their motive,
(43:19):
that it means that we also do not ultimately know
how many victims exist, and the pattern that you're describing
of finding mass graves and then you know this rush
to find some I hesitate to say necessarily scapegoat because
(43:42):
Abdul Latif Sharif was a horrible person, clearly a horrible person. Um,
but there's there's this pattern on law enforcements. Part of Okay,
we found a grave, let's let's find a way to
explain it. Oh, we found another grave. Let's find a
way to explain it. And what I think is, you know,
(44:02):
most troubling here and something that I feel obligated to
ask you about, is is it possible that there are
more mass grave sites out there that have yet to
be discovered? I mean, is that is that like within
the realm of probability? Is it within the realm of plausibility?
Or where where does this leave us? I mean to
(44:25):
the early part of your question about culpability. Actually, we
there is a witness to these murders who tells an
American journalist called Alfredo Corricillo what he's seen, why these
women are being killed, and so we do get to
that reveal in the podcast, and that kind of sets
(44:45):
off the second half of the podcast. So so there
are some answers, but they're not answers which the officials
ever take seriously in whuareas. And so your question is
a very good one. Are there more mass graves in
the desert? Very likely? Yes, certainly, many many more bodies
that were never found. And one of the most interesting
(45:06):
things with for me about this reporting slightly adjacent to
them to the story in two thousand and one, after
the mass grave is discovered, the authorities fail to identify
the victims before they declare the case is closed, and
so the families never have closure. They never really believe, Okay,
(45:28):
was this my daughter? Was this not my daughter? So
Grio Flores, who we mentioned, she gets exhumed three times
because there's no clarity ever for the family on whether
it's her. Once the grave next to her is incorrectly
exhumed and a man's body is brought in for analysis.
I mean, this is a level of either incompetence or
(45:52):
corruption which is quite quite staggering. So a team called
the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team came in two thousand and
one at the request of various activists. They have experienced
and identifying bodies from the end of the regime and
Argentina when there were many mass graves and many families
looking for answers, and this woman, Mercedes Doretti, who's a
(46:15):
McArthur Genius grant holder, basically founded this team of anthropologists
to identify bodies. They go to Huires in two thousand
and one to try and finally, using DNA techniques, answer
who these eight women definitively in this grave are, and
as part of their work they start analyzing other bodies.
And what Mercedes Diretti told me was this is the
(46:37):
first time in her career that she would analyze bodies
and there would be no matches from the local area
of people who had missing persons in their family, so
she had to in the end often that the missing
person would be found in Huire as the body would
be found in Quires, but the family would be eight
(46:58):
hundred miles away because the person was a migrant. And
of course in the early two thousands and Wires this
was this was the first time she'd ever seen that
in her career, and now it's common their bodies all
along the US Mexico border from Central America belonging to
people from Central America, other places in the world. Whose
whose family, maybe thousands of miles away. But this that
(47:20):
the technique of identifying bodies and matching them to people
a long way away began in Wuires because there was
so much migrant labor into the factory jobs. And so
that really has foreshadowed was happening now on the border
with all of these tragic deaths and families who don't
get closure, who may live thousands of miles away. You know,
(47:41):
we're talking about the lives of these women. A lot
of it is gruesome end that their lives met. But
this show, I think is pretty firmly set on the
life lived by these women and what they were going
to to survive for themselves and their families. And in
(48:02):
in an early episode in the show, there's a moment
where I believe it's Cigarria's mother is talking about when
her daughter came home excited to tell her mom that
the company has taken out life insurance on her and
if anything happens to her, the family, you, mom will
will get money. The family will get a lot of
(48:24):
money if something happens to me. And uh, you know,
she's she and her father and her other siblings are
all working in this factory and they're living in this
small town where their home was, you know, originally built
by the trash, like you said, from across the border. Um,
(48:46):
and I believe it is five family members working in
in this factory at that point. Just imagining that five
of your family members could be working a factory and
you can still barely afford to live while you're making
goods that are going to be shipped across the border.
It's a tough thing for me personally too to understand.
(49:10):
Because of my privileged life that I live here in
the United States, and because of who I am and
what I look like. I wonder if these families have
you know, they obviously haven't been able to find full
closure because of everything you just talked about, Oz, but
I wonder if they're being taken care of in any
(49:31):
way by these companies that you know, maybe a lot
of these victims were UM a part of or by
some other groups. Like what are were there? What are
their lives like now? The families who have had such
loss in their lives. I'm sorry to say that they're difficult.
They're very difficult. Often that that often the mothers become
(49:54):
tireless advocates for for justice as an amazing energy and
passion in the protest movement in whuires led by mothers
and and and indeed, you know those demands for justice,
although they haven't always answered individual questions, there is some
sense of the power of collective action and and and
(50:17):
conditions in in the factories and in those communities have
improved under pressure from the mother's and Paula Flora's Sagaria's
mother founded a kindergarten in their neighborhood so that the
local children could get more of an education. Is called
the Cigari of Flora's Kindergarten. And so she told us,
it makes me happy that every child in the neighborhood
(50:39):
graduates with my daughter's name on their diploma. And it's
tempting to find a lot of solace in you know,
the individuals struggle against their circumstances. But the reality is
the conditions are very poor. They're still um These factories,
which manufactured goods that we will use, continue to pay
(50:59):
people less than ten dollars a day, when a similar
job on the two miles away on the other side
of the border would bring in eight ten dollars an hour,
and that in itself creates the conditions of vulnerability and violence,
and in fact, during the COVID crisis, the American ambassador
put great pressure on Mexico not to close the factories
(51:20):
the Mecula Doras because they're creating things like blood, blood
pressure cuffs and medical gloves and supplies. We needed to
keep our citizens safe during COVID. And of course they
were outbreaks and deaths which ravaged these factories, but the
workers were being told they have to keep coming to work.
And so people often say, other murders still going And
(51:42):
the answer is, well, you know, the last mass grave
of women was discovered in twelve, which is eight years ago.
But that the people who work in these factories remain
very vulnerable and the conditions haven't improved very much, and
in fact that there's a second generation of women who
were born in quires and who are perhaps more politely
(52:03):
conscious than their parents were. There's one protest group called
the Daughters of the Makila Workers. And one of the
young women who was part of that protest group and
a local artist called Isabel cabaniest della Torre. She was
cycling through downtown Huirez in January and she was shot
in the head and her murder is unsolved. And so
(52:25):
this place of vulnerability and gender violence and you know,
a locust really a rapacious consumption. I mean refrigerator parts,
steering wheels, you know, medical gloves, their manufacturing, huires, and
of course it's where cocaine and other drugs come through.
So unfortunately our consumption habits have a price, and often
(52:48):
it's thousands of miles away. But what what makes wires
so arresting as a place is that you can see
it from the United States. You can see the consequences
of certain choices we ache playing out within sight of
where you stand. And that's really coming back to the
beginning of your question about why I got interested in
this story. I think it's a place where you can
(53:09):
understand the consequences of of institutions and choices and borders
in a very very, very very immediate way. No, it's
it's a really really good point because people think about, oh,
if I choose to do cocaine, that's a personal choice.
If I choose to contribute to capitalism, that's a personal choice,
(53:29):
and that's not affecting anybody but me. It's it's something
that I'm doing. But no, it shows there are ripple
effects to the choices that we make, and this is
part of that. And I think you do a fantastic
job of I mean, it's not like a very it's
not a political show, but it is a show about
experience and about the lives of the folks that are
caught up in these systems. And I think that's what
makes it all the more powerful. Yeah, definitely, But but
(53:52):
I also I mean as as a big you know,
ethical consumerism movement in the US, and I think that's
very valuable and important, But really these are like systems
and policy problems, not individual choice problems. I mean, of
course we can all be more ethical in our actions,
but but a lot of responsibility for you know, cartel violence,
(54:12):
that drug problems in in in in Latin America, working
conditions in wuires that they come from very conscious policy decisions,
and one of them interesting and we we had a
very interesting interview with a historian called Oscar Martinez who said,
in the sixties, and you know, these there were factories
in Singapore and Taiwan doing the same thing which happens
in Huarez. But the wage increases in those places has
(54:36):
been multiples in huire as they say say the same
why is that was because Mexico is close to the
United States, so the United States can enforce intellectual property
and patent infringement is much more effectively. And so the
wealth creation of you know, basically what we always get
angry for China of doing is basically manufacturing and then
copying the I p that never happened in Mexico. So
(54:58):
this is kind of poverty trapped comes with proximity, which
is very interesting as well. Yeah, and this is I mean,
at this point we're also talking about um, the power
of systems, right, the power of institutions, UM, which which
affects us profoundly UM on. One thing that I don't
(55:21):
want to lose in our conversation here is the the
concept of the news cycle. To Matt, I believe earlier
you would asked the question, UM, at some point about
what happens to these to the survivors, right, the people
(55:42):
left behind after these unspeakable tragedies, which I don't think
it's hyperbolic to call them that. After these tragedies, what
happens to the people who are still living their lives?
You know, after the news through and the and the
cameras cuts and the van drives away to the next story.
(56:06):
That's That's something that I think is um is profound
and is tremendously important us because we're talking a lot
about things that have developed in the nineteen nineties, in
the early two thousands. UM right now as as um as.
(56:30):
I'm sure you're aware, many of our listeners may not
be aware. Uh, war as murders and war az just
overall are up forty two percent in March over May.
Uh without you know, I know we're interviewing you in
the in the midst of forgotten women of war as
(56:53):
coming out and coming to the public eye. But could
or the public ear I should say, I guess, but
could you tell a little bit about the the current
state of war as as as applied to homicides, as
applied to this case. I mean, what what happened after
(57:14):
all of the investigations over the nineties and the two thousand's. Well,
so when Monica began reporting in Juarez, she grew up
in El Paso, but she began reporting in Juarez on
the drug war in two thousand and eight. Uh, and
this was that period when the Sinaloa cartel were trying
to move in on Huirez and there was basically a
(57:35):
civil war and people were being butchered and left in
the most disgusting ways. Um And it was in that
context that Monica cut her teeth as a reporter in Huirez,
and the reporter introduced me to Monica is called Angela Cochega,
and she told me very casually, she would drive out
over the border to do a day of reporting, come
(57:55):
back to the US, arrive at Starbucks, take off her
shoes and abandon them because they were so soaked in blood.
And this idea of a war zone in your backyard
is just very, very hard to get your head around.
So two thousand and eight, two thousand and eleven, the
drug violence was at absolute height, and homicides were you know,
in the three and a half thousand a year, you
(58:16):
know area. After two thousand and eleven, things got a
bit quieter. In two thousand and sixteen, there was the
Choires Tourist Board. We're trying to sort of encourage travel
to Wires again because it was historically a place where Americans,
much like Havanna and Cuba, went to go and have fun,
to go and drink and bring when they're underage, and
(58:38):
you know, gamble and maybe you know all the things
which are worse than that as well, if the sex
trade um. But but Recquires was kind of rebuilding its
reputation and and and and and and it's tourism industry
in Unfortunately, the homicide rate is starting to approach, you know,
(59:00):
the three thousand number again based on monthly averages of
two and fifty people being murdered now. And that's really
really frightening because it basically indicates that it's happening again.
Why it's happening is not clear, but but generally when
they're when their power shifts in the cartels, for example,
(59:21):
or twenty seventeen, L Chapo gets extradited to the US
and is now in a d X Florence Supermax in Colorado.
He was the most powerful cartel leader in Mexico and
now he's gone. And similar to what happened after the
Iraq War with the formation of ISIS or when you
when you disturb the leadership of these organizations, it comes
(59:43):
with splinter groups, and splinter groups bring violence. And I
think right now there is a there is a civil
war Inquirers, which it doesn't have the same spectacular violence
as the two thousand and eight two eleven period, but
the numbers are are approaching the same height and and
that's bad news for all vulnerable people. Monica said that
the last mass grave was discovered in twelve and she
(01:00:07):
wouldn't be surprised if if another one was discovered soon.
And this is the again, as you said, Odds, this
is the modern day. We are recording this episode for
Peeple and the Curtain here, folks. We're recording this episode
on June twelve OZ. At this point, I believe that
(01:00:32):
the best way for our listeners to understand more of
this story, to learn more about it, is too honestly,
to stop our podcasts right now and to head over
to whatever their podcast platform of choice is and check
out Forgotten Women of Warez, which is available now. We
(01:00:54):
want to thank you profoundly for being so generous with
your time on our show here, but more importantly, much
more importantly for the time that you and Monica have
dedicated to bringing to shedding light on this Because it's
um I am attempting not to be emotional about this,
(01:01:17):
but it is it is reprehensible that these that this is,
this is occurring. As you said, you know, at the
very beginning, you said a tale of two cities. It's
it's offensive that this sort of mass homicide continued, that
(01:01:38):
it continues today, that it seems like the systems that
were created two vouchsafe people are broken, have failed. And
on my end, I'm wondering what would you if you
would recommend next steps? If you if you would um
(01:02:02):
if you, for instance, were able to dictate to law
enforcement in the community, what they should be doing about this,
about this ongoing horrific activity, what what would you say? Well, first,
thanks for your kind words about our time, and I
(01:02:22):
would like to emphasize my role in Forgotten was to
come in as the naive outsider and ask, you know,
framing questions and frankly obvious questions. You know, why is
this happening? What's going on? And Monico is the person
who's devoted years of her life and her career and
(01:02:43):
taken risks that I haven't, as our other sources did,
in particular Dina Washington Valdez. And so what makes me
proudest about this project is to have used it as
a as a frame for their stories and they're reporting
to to reach a wide audience. And so that that's been. That,
(01:03:03):
that's been, you know, something I'm personally proud of. But
to your second question about what what can we do?
I mean, there's an American journalists who enter Huires in
the nineties called Chuck Bowden, who called Huires a laboratory
of our future and basically taking the women's murders as
starting points. So, well, what happens when you basically create
(01:03:25):
a permanent under class. What happens when law enforcement aren't
trusted by the community, What happens when there's state sponsored
violence against people who seek the truth? What happens when
journalists gets murdered? What happens when the imperatives of profit
are put above the imperatives of human life. And that's
(01:03:46):
not a conversation which is unique to Huaras anymore. That's
a conversation we're having right now at the United States.
And and Sandra Rodriguez Nieto, one of the editors that Ldarihuires, said,
Huire wasn't always like this, Like it's always been a
tough city. It's always been a gritty border city. But
thousands of unsolved murders every year, you know, institutions a
(01:04:08):
fragile and and and and be careful in the US,
be careful, don't fall asleep, because it can happen faster
than you think. And so you know, I don't want
to over emphasize the connection of this podcast to what's
happening with the protest movement in the United States right now.
But when you have injustice ongoing injustice, when you have
(01:04:32):
lack of trust between law enforcement and citizens, and when
you have a tax on independent judiciary and the media,
you can find yourself in a pretty hellish situation pretty quickly.
Thank you for that, and then you thank you for
making the show with these amazing women who have been
working on this story for so long. Um, just prepare
(01:04:53):
yourself when you're listening to the show, because because they
are tragic stories, but they are very important to UH
to hear. Agreed on. This concludes today's episode, But this
does not conclude our show, and it does not conclude
the story of the podcast Forgotten Women of War. As
(01:05:17):
we want to hear from you, We want your perspective.
As we often say, you are the most important part
of this show. Specifically, you so right to us. You
can find us on Facebook, you can find us on
Twitter and find us on Instagram were frankly like many
people in too many places on the internet nowadays. Uh
(01:05:41):
but before you do any of that, check out this podcast.
It's available now wherever you find your favorite shows. As
we say, it's free to listen to. And this is
an important story that is has not and is not
(01:06:01):
UM receiving the attention and the analysis it deserves. And
while you were listening to that, if you have any thoughts,
if you have feedback, you want to talk to us,
but you hate social media. We have all people get it.
You can you can contact us a number of other ways.
(01:06:23):
We have a phone number. Yes, you can give us
a call at one eight three three st d w
y t K, where you can leave messages for us
in audio form in three minute increments. I know it's
not ideal, but hey, if you need more time than that,
you just call back and then we'll stitch them together
for when we inevitably do another listener male episode where
(01:06:45):
we field questions from you. UM also might be one
of the lucky ones that gets a true callback from
Matt Frederick himself. I also would like to start being
a little more conscientious about participating that too. But man
that talk about the golden ticket of of conspiracy. Listener
mails that when you get that call from Matt, I
(01:07:07):
really wish you all the best of luck because he
will definitely do it. If you don't want to do
any of that stuff, we still have one of those
old fashioned emails. You can email us. We are conspiracy
at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want
(01:07:38):
you to know is a production of I heart Radio.
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(00:26):
My name is Matt, my name is all they called
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission Control decads. Most importantly, you are you,
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Today, we are diving into a
(00:46):
story that may be cursorily familiar to many of our
fellow listeners. You may have heard in the past. The
headlines of this story you may have you may have had,
you know, a couple of let's say, what do you think,
a couple of sentences length of an idea of what's happening.
(01:09):
Of course, in these chaotic times, we have so many headlines, right,
We have so many things that we all we all
keep track of, and many things unfortunately get lost in
the shuffle. For decades and siodad Warez in Mexico, women
(01:30):
have been going missing. This is something that some of
our fellow listeners wrote to us about in our earlier
episode on the Lost Highway in Canada where multiple members
of First Nations in the region were being victimized murdered,
(01:53):
often without any acknowledgement or assistance from law enforcement. Also
or two as the Highway of Tears, I believe, right,
isn't that? Yeah? That's yeah, that's correct now and we
are not diving into this case, this songgoing tragedy alone
(02:13):
today Today we are joined by the Emmy and Peabody
Award winning producer and writer and executive producer of one
of our newest PUER podcast, Forgotten Women of War, as
we'd like to welcome to the show, ozwal Ocean. Oz,
thank you so much for coming on the air today.
(02:36):
Thank you so much for having me. It's an honest
to be having this conversation with you. Guys. We're very
much glad that you're here to talk about this, and
we're also glad that you're making this show that you're making.
All all three of us have been listening to the
show again Forgotten Women of War as you can find
it right now. UM, I think we've all been personally
(02:57):
very affected by the stories that you're telling and um
that you're giving voice not only two uh, you know,
the families and the people who have been affected by this,
but the reporters who have been working on this for
so long. You know, before we jump into all of that,
could you just tell us who you are and why
(03:17):
you wanted to talk about this story. Yeah, my name
is oz and Um I've been I've been living in
the States for ten years on various different immigrant visas
and now a green card, and and so you know,
despite being a white man and having all the privilege
that comes with that, I've had this unusual experience of
(03:41):
kind of immigration difficulties. And there's something called secondary screening
where you know, when you arrive in the United States,
you get taken into this kind of prison esque area
in the airport and often have to wait for a
couple of hours well various you know, checks are performed,
and so you know, despite fitting in and feeling very
(04:03):
comfortable always in the United States, I've always also had
this consciousness of what does it mean to be an
immigrant in the US, what does it mean to live
in the US without being from the US. And that's
also something which is part of my family background. My
grandfather was a refugee from Ukraine to Britain and after
the Second World War. So I've always been very interested
in stories about migration and stories about how we define
(04:26):
us and them, stories about you know, who gets to
be part of the club and who gets excluded from
the club. The price of being excluded from the club,
which you know, goes from lack of economic opportunity unfortunately
to murder. And so I was just very fascinated by
this El Paso Juarez border area because you have these
(04:48):
two big cities, El Paso six hundred thousand huires a
million in two different countries, separated by a river which
is now dry and a steel vents. And El Paso, Texas,
up until the terrible shooting at Walmart, was frequently considered
one of America's safest cities of its size. And Huirez,
(05:10):
as people know from movies like Cicario and you know,
other narcos, the Marcus, Mexico, is one of the world's
most dangerous and bloody and violent and frightening cities. So
I was just curious that how does that happen? What? What?
Why is that? And I first went down to the
border to El Paso after I read a series of
(05:31):
stories in The New Yorker called Faces from the Border,
and one of the articles was was profiling Hispanic border
patrol agents. And I had never really considered that border
patrol agents were a majority Hispanic, in fact Hispanic, and so,
you know, sixteen and there was all of this rhetoric
coming out of the White House about Mexican bad hombres
(05:54):
and rapists and and an increasing militarization of the border.
What I found fascinating was the put on the front
lines of enforcing it were themselves, usually Hispanic, often with
family in Huarez, often with cousins or even brothers and
sisters who didn't speak to them anymore, or turn them
away from church or whatever it may be because of
what they were doing. And yet it was a federal
(06:16):
job and came with perks in an area with you know,
not as many employment opportunities, say as New York or
Los Angeles or Atlanta. So I was kind of fascinated
by this paradox. And I went down there to work
on a documentary series about that, which hasn't hasn't yet
been released. But but but while I was there, one
of the producers on the documentary series started telling me
(06:37):
about this, this this story of the murders of the
women in Huarez, and I didn't know about it. I mean,
it was something I couldn't believe he was telling me.
They were not tens, but hundreds of women who have
been murdered seemingly in a characteristic way, you know, left
in strange positions, with strange symbols in some cases left
(06:57):
on their bodies, that have been going on for decade.
Aids that various investigations that looked into it, but that
no one knew for sure what was happening. And I thought,
what a what a what a germain topic for podcast
given people people's interested in the true crime genre, but
also what an interesting way to tell it, to tell
what is effectively a tale of two cities. Yeah, I
(07:18):
I massively appreciate the way you phrase it a tale
of two cities and your reference to the August twenty
nineteen mass shooting there in El Paso. I believe that's
when it occurred. One thing that I think will baffle
a lot of people. I want to make sure we
don't bury the lead here, Oz, is what you just
(07:38):
said about the nature of these murders, because you know,
we we know that in various various countries in Central
and South America, there is an ongoing crisis of femicide
and violence against women. UH. This was true even when
(08:01):
I was living in Guatemala in the mid two thousand's.
But what's different here. One of the things that's different
here is that there appears to be some sort of
methodical system or application to to these homicides. And you know,
(08:24):
it's something that I personally was I was not aware
of the extent of this. I knew that many women
were being murdered and then later found UH, and I
knew that there were allegations that the police or law
enforcement were somewhere on the spectrum between UH incompetent to
(08:49):
willfully UH negligent. With that in mind, how did you
and your co host UH first start exploring the the
intersection of law enforcement here, or I should say law
enforcements role. Were was the US side of law enforcement
(09:12):
interested or involved with any cases here? So that's a
that's a very interesting question. And my co host who's
not with us today is Monica Ortiz or Rebey, who
has been a reporter in El Paso for fifteen years,
reports the NPR for the BBC, contributes to New York Times,
(09:34):
and she's been covering the femicides for fifteen years, with
a very strong focus on the experience of the families,
on the economic realities that make these women vulnerable in
the first place, and with less of a procedural focus
on law and order, on law enforcement, on on the who,
(09:58):
more on the y and the what so Funny enough,
U S law enforcement have been very interested in what's
happening to the women in Huirez. I mentioned that that
quote about the President talking about murderers, rapists, and bad
hombres coming from Mexico and Central America into the US.
In fact, the FBI in the nineties were very concerned
(10:20):
that an American serial killer might be traveling south into
Mexico to take advantage of a vulnerable, vulnerable population and
a less strictly enforced laws to basically prey on vulnerable women.
In Huirez and in fact, Quires has long been a
(10:40):
place where things that America wants to have access to,
not have responsibility for, happen. So in the twenties, during Prohibition,
there was a bourbon distillery in Kentucky that was disassembled
part by part art and sent by rail to Huirez,
(11:03):
where it was promptly reassembled started making Kentucky Bourbon again
and smuggling straight into the United States. And so the
most famous bar in Huires is called the Kentucky Club
for that reason. Um so so. And then in the
sixties and after this a long way to answer your question,
but in the Second World War there was a lot
(11:24):
of male labor was in Europe fighting, and so there
was a shortage of farm labor and industrial labor in
the United States. And the United States started this thing
called the Bressero program where they would allow Mexican laborers
to come into the United States easily work cross back
and forth. And in the sixties there was this political
(11:45):
pressure to say, you know, these people are taking our jobs,
let's send them back. So millions of Mexicans were you know,
basically sent home, and many of them found themselves in Juarez.
And so there was both a concern of thinking, well, gosh,
there are all these people on the border, you know,
who are who don't come from there, but who kind
(12:06):
of may want to come back to the United States.
How can we make things slightly more appealing for them
to stay there? And so basically this duty free zone
begins in Huirez, where it's much you know, you can
assemble goods and re export them to the US and
only pay duty on the value added. And so Huire
has becomes this manufacturing hub competing with Singapore and Taiwan
(12:28):
at the time to create cheek consumer goods, which is
still the engine of the economy. There on behalf of
American corporations, but using cheap Mexican labor with no labor protections. Um.
So fast forward to the nineties and you have Robert Wrestler,
who was the man who invented the Psychological Profiling Department
of the FBI, on and on whom the show mind
(12:50):
Hunter is based. And he is one of the people
credited with coining the term serial killer. And one of
the things which he pioneered was data driven serial killer apprehensions,
so looking for commonalities of crime scenes and using those
commonalities to try and apprehend killers. And what he quickly
(13:11):
it was called the vis CAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.
And what he quickly realized was that if you didn't
include southern Canada and northern Mexico in vi CAP, you
could be missing a great deal of what was happening.
So Wrestler was basically convinced that there were American serial
at least one American serial killer acting in Juarez, and
so he went down there to try and learn more
(13:32):
about the patterns behind the crimes, to see if they
connected to other crimes in the US. Will return and
dive deeper into the story of the women of war
as after a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
(13:53):
So this this timeline here, I think you've done a
fantastic job of filling in the context, because so often
in mainstream news reports, someone will, you know, with the
best of intentions, read about something and not understand that
(14:15):
there are decades of intervening forces and institutions leading to
that news story that we read. This leads us to
one of the other important pieces of context that I
think we need to establish here, Oz, which is that
(14:35):
when you and Monica and your team are when you
were investigating this, when you are when you were chasing
this story, you were going to areas of Mexico and
areas of the world that are um well, there's no
way to say, there's no other way to say it,
(14:55):
they are dangerous. Did you did you ever feel that
you or your cohort were um were in danger in
the course of creating this. I mean it's it's in short, yes,
I mean in Huires is a dangerous city which has,
(15:17):
you know, thousands of homicides a year, most of which
go unpunished. Mexico is the world's most dangerous country for journalists.
I think they've been almost thirty journalists murdered in the
last ten years. They're more dangerous than Syria for journalists.
And so there's one particular area in downtown Juarez where
(15:40):
many of the women were last seen, called Mina Street,
which is the central bus exchange in the city. So
factory employees basically go from their houses in the outskirts
changed downtown take another bus to work. And that happens
to be a part of town which is controlled closely
by a gang called the Badio Azteca, and so journalists
(16:04):
are really not welcome there. But it's also how Monica
describes it as ground zero for missing women. And if
you walk around that area, you'll see missing posters on
almost every lamp post, and you'll see these black crosses
painted on pink squares, also on lamp posts, which is
where the logo of our show Forgotten took its inspiration
from um And so we're walking around it, and Monica
(16:26):
said on the way, look, we need a cover story
because people don't want us to be asking questions about
what happens to the women here. So we said, oh,
we we're reporting on the migrant caravan. And people did
come up and ask us, and at a certain point
someone sort of made this gun gesture and shouted back
like that at us. And you know, in most cities,
(16:47):
you know, that might happen and it's a bit disconcerting,
or maybe somebody's having a bit of a joke, But
in a place where you know that most crimes go
unpunished and the price of life is is very low,
it is more scary. And we went after that to
meet Sandra Rodriguez Nieto, who's the editor of one of
the editors at the local newspaper, and she said, yeah,
that place where you guys were, I don't let my
(17:08):
reporters go there. It's too dangerous. And her colleague. The
desk outside her office was empty and had been for
ten years since her colleague, Armando Rodriguez was assassinated while
he was taking his daughter to school. So I don't
want to overplay the to date danger that we felt
ourselves in person, and I think Monica living in the
area takes more risk than I did. Who can return
(17:29):
to New York City, but certainly being on the ground
in Juarez is not a comfortable experience. If you're asking
these kinds of questions, well, well, um, you know, I
I think we just have a at least right here
in the rooms, the people who you're speaking to you
(17:52):
right now, I have a great respect for you, and
especially I think for Monica and for Diana, Um, Diana Washington.
Well does so I want to give our listeners the
way you do in your show, a specific example of
what the experience living and working in Ouarez at one
of these factories was like, and maybe the vulnerability that existed,
(18:17):
uh for within the lives of a lot of these women,
simply because of transportation needs um, which you know does
speak to a larger economic issue. So in in the show,
in episode one, you talk about Cigarrio, can you tell
us a little bit about her life, what it was
like and what um she was doing when she went missing? Yes,
(18:41):
by all means, so, Ben, you mentioned historical context. The
factory started in Huires in the in the sixties, but
it was in the mid nineties after NAFTA was signed,
that they really boomed and you had just this tremendous
demand for labor, and a bit like during the Grapes
of Time. There were recruiters going into the interior and saying,
(19:03):
come to Huire, is going to be fantastic. There are
even reports of empty seven four seven's flying to rural
and mining states in Mexico and coming back full of workers.
So there was this sense that Juarez was a place
of opportunity, a place particularly for women to work outside
of the home, which wasn't always the case in some
(19:24):
other parts of Mexico. And so this one family, the
Flores family, they decided to move from El salto in Durango,
where Jesus, the father was a lumberjack, and he went
ahead with their son and he wrote a letter home
(19:44):
to Paula, his wife, and their six daughters, and said,
you guys that would come. We found work, We found
what we're looking for is going to be fantastic. And
Paula replied, well, I've heard they kill women there and
we have six daughters. Are you sure? And he just
said yes, is there's no there's no bad people here.
Everyone's starting out come and join us. So they did
(20:07):
so they moved there. That the mother and the six daughters,
including Sagario, joined and they moved to this squatter community
on the outskirts of Juarez where they have to build
their own house above their heads, no running water, no electricity,
and to build their house they forage scrap from an
American dump on the other side of the border. And
(20:29):
just his image of these, you know, people who moved
from elsewhere crossing over under where a kind of wink
and a nod from border patrol to go and get
our trash to go back and build their houses. You know,
it is very haunting. There's one story about Sagarrio being
there at the dump with her mother and an American
man coming to throw some stuff away and seeing that
she's cold and offering him his coat, and Sagario said, no,
(20:52):
I can't take it. I'm embarrassed in her mother says
to take the coat, so she does. So. Anyway, they
find what they're looking for. That they find work, and
they're all working together in Immaculadora making I think refrigerator
parts in one of these factories. But Cigarrio is under
eighteen and the factory find out and they say, you
can't work the night shift with the rest of your family.
(21:13):
We need used to the day shift. So she has
to start traveling to work alone all of a sudden,
and her mother begs her. She says, look, we can
survive without the money you bring in. Please don't do this,
and Sigario says, look, how we're living. I need to help.
And within two months of her shift changing, she's disappeared
and is found dead in the desert two weeks later.
(21:36):
With all of the characteristics of the abduction and broad daylight,
the disappearance and certain types of trauma that are characteristic
of of tens, if not hundreds of other young women
who meet the same fate. I want to bring up
just the idea of a border town and wires in particular.
(21:57):
Um the cartel, the drug cartels and Oarez had been
particularly powerful in the nineties, and I think there may
be a little less so now, but a lot of
the stories we would hear about Warez we're cartel war murders.
And can you speak a little bit about that kind
of proximity to the United States and the relationship between
(22:21):
the drug trade and your story, if if any exists
and just kind of you know what you took away
from that, Yeah, by all means, so, I mean, the
same reasons why the factories want to be in Huirez
is why the drug traffickers want to be in the Inhuires.
It's it's very close to the US. You have millions
of people crossing the border north, millions of vehicles, tons
(22:44):
of freight, and so it's it's one of the most
lucrative drug smuggling corridors in the world. And so what
happened was in the in the nineties. Up until the nineties,
there was obviously organized crime in Mexico, but the cartel
was a relatively stable organization, a bit like the mafia,
(23:07):
and so although there was organized crime, there wasn't a
huge amount of violence against members of the community. Like
once you were under the protection of the cartel, you're
basically safe. But what happened was the cartel started splintering,
actually under pressure from the U S who were doing
various um, you know, raids and arrests and putting pressure
(23:28):
on the Mexican government. And when the cartel splintered, basically
a cartel civil war starter. And this was slightly later
than the nineties. This was the early two thousands, UM.
And what happened is l Chapos lower cartel were coming
in from the west because they wanted to take over
the Howire smuggling corridor from the local from the local cartel,
and so this began this That's why you see these
(23:50):
terrible images of huires of you know, men hanging from
bridges and with slogans written on their dead bodies and
wearing pig masks. I mean, it was really the most
disgusting and symbolic violence playing out in Juarez in a
battle for control, which actually I think probably you can
draw a line forward from that to Isis and how
(24:12):
they weaponize the imagery of violence to be part of
their very effective social media campaign. And so this this
issue of the women being murdered and the cartel in Juarez, UM,
it's it's one of the questions of the podcast, and
it's another reason why the FBI tried to get involved
to find out what the answers are. But in the
(24:33):
early nineties or the mid nineties and the early two thousands,
in a sense, it's not clear at that stage just
how entrenched the cartel is. So everyone's on the hunt
for a serial killer. And then as the podcast goes
on and as history moves forward, it becomes clear that
it's harder and harder to separate the murders of women
from the cancer of cartel violence spreading. M hmm. Yeah,
(24:58):
and that's something that has I think historically bedeviled uh,
multiple cities in Mexico as well as other countries in
South America. And you know, a couple of times, a
couple of times here as already we've used the phrase
(25:22):
serial killer. And you know, for everyone everyone familiar with that.
There are some nuts and bolts technicalities, but long story short,
serial killer is defined by having a type of victim,
(25:42):
having a method of murder, and having a pattern in
terms of you know, their timeline, their chronology. One thing
that one thing that I think stood out to us
here that that differentiates these these specific comicides from so
(26:04):
many other tragic comicides in the in the area is
that there did seem to be there does seem to
be a a fairly consistent method applied here. Right, there
are people who are perhaps uh being shot due to
(26:24):
crime or due to you know, or or being stabbed
in a fight. But these these are different. Um. One
thing that stood out to me is early on in
the story, UM You're you explore how one of the
victims seemed to have been kept alive for some time
(26:45):
after being abducted. I believe, I believe investigators were able
to verify that this victim appeared to have been fed,
so they were around long enough to be fed. And
then explore a little bit about you explore the method
of UM possibly finding or or you know, UM determining
(27:06):
these victims and choosing them. It seems like I think
one of the most disturbing things is how premeditated. Dare
I say, how organized it seems? Could could you tell
us a little bit about what appears to be this
this method of determination. Yeah, I think you picked up
(27:28):
on something which which was important for us to communicate
in the podcast. The reporter who has done the most
work on this story is called Diana Washington Valdez, and
she wrote a book called The Killing Field Harvest of Women,
and her big point was these are not random victims.
These are not victims of random violence in a violent place.
(27:52):
These are women who have been specifically selected for certain characteristics.
Young Paul from immigrant families, often migrant families who disappear,
usually during the day to and from work, and who
when they're discovered later either their body left alone or
(28:13):
in four cases in huire As, there have been mass
graves of women discovered bare, characteristic types of trauma, often
a broken neck, often hands bound by shoelaces. And in
this particular case of Lila Lejandre, you mentioned an autopsy
that revealed she'd been kept alive and fed for several
days between disappearing and being murdered. And so this is
(28:36):
this is there's clearly something going on here. This is
not random violence, and that's why there were so many
people like Wrestler from the FBI theorizing and there must
be a serial killer because as a type, there's a
method of selection, and one of the most chilling methods
of selection was this. According to Diana's reporting, computer school
(29:00):
in downtown huires called Echo, And again this is the
early two thousand's. These are women who have come with
their families in search opportunity to a new city and
there's a computer school which apparently offers the type of
skills that needed to participate in the new economy and
perhaps get a better job than a factory job. And
(29:21):
in Diana's reporting, I think at least ten victims were
registered at the computer school before they were taken and murdered.
And the suspicion is that this computer school was basically
a catalog of victims in Diana's phrase, for somebody on
the other end who wanted to know, Okay, I want
(29:41):
a picture of the woman, I want to know where
they live, I want to know who their family are,
and then using that to select the most vulnerable because
these crimes were also sexually motivated for murder. Wow. And
in episode two of the show, and we don't want
to you know, obviously give away too much. We want
(30:03):
to talk about this, but we don't want we want
you to go to listen to the show. Um. In
in episode two, there are witnesses who have seen things.
In a lot of these cases, it appears that there
are witnesses to seeing something because like we said, this
is broad daylight. You're in a you know, a large
(30:25):
metropolitan area where these condempings are occurring, or even if
it's on the edges of them. Um, it seems like
there would be more people talking. But it also seems
like there is a very real danger for these witnesses
because and correct me if I'm wrong here, But I
(30:47):
believe it was known that someone or some group we're
posing as agents from the FBI and seeking answers from
witnesses or getting intel from witnesses, could you tell us
about that? Yeah, you're right, so so so the women
(31:07):
often disappear at these moments of maximum vulnerability. So in
Sagriio Flores case, it was right after she she changed
shift and was traveling alone to and from work. There's
another young woman called Claudia Gonzalez who rise for work late,
and so she isn't allowed into the factory, and that
very day she disappears and is later found dead. So
(31:27):
there's this sense that somebody is watching and somebody is
taking note of vulnerability. But the peculiar thing is then
there are never any witnesses. But then in two thousand
and one, this case comes along, and there aren't witnesses
to the abduction, but witnesses see Lily Alejandra is struggling
in a car with a man a few days after
(31:48):
she's taken, and so this is also a break because
they identify the car. It's a Ford Thunderbird. It's a
radically common makeup car. But it's the beginning of the
kind of lead that might normally, you know, resolve these
types of cases. M the witnesses, Dina Washington Valdez goes
(32:09):
to interview them, and they say, oh gosh, how funny.
You're not the first person who's been here to ask
us questions. The FBI we're here as well, and Diana
says what it says, Yeah, the FBI. The FBI came
and that they came to ask us what we've seen
and what we knew, and so we gave them all
the information. Dina calls her sources in the in the
FBI and El Paso, and they never did that. So
(32:31):
somebody has come to lead their own parallel investigation, either
to find out what these witnesses no or to intimidate
them and to make sure that the information they have
doesn't make it into the right channels. So that that's
one of the big challenges of this story and why
so many people have approached it and struggled to get
to answers, because unlike a normal crime in the US,
(32:54):
people are often scared but for good reason to come
forward and share what they And I bring this up,
Oz because you you spoke with at least one FBI
agent that I've heard on the podcast, Hardrick Crawford Jr.
Who who was I believe the FBI special agent in
charge of El Paso in around that two thousand one
(33:17):
time and a little bit after. And you know, he
he says some some things in the show that at
least that I've heard thus for that are really disturbing,
specifically talking about how easy it is to kill someone
and bury them and hide a body in war as
in the surrounding areas. But you know, just listening to
(33:38):
him talk about these murders and what's happening and knowing
that the FBI is involved and does does breach across
the border there for a lot of different cases, but
in this one in particular, they were at least doing
some work on it. I guess my big question to
(33:59):
you is how much of a hand did the FBI
have in investigations here if it? I mean, we know
they had some, but how large of a role the
FBI play. Well, they're actually three attempts the FBI made
to involve themselves in solving these crimes. The first time
(34:20):
was in the mid nineties when Robert Wrestler, the serial
killer expert came down, and he came motivated in large
part by wanting to get more data for his vight
CAP Violent Criminal Apprehension program. He came because he wanted
to do a better job of solving crimes in the US.
Then you had Frank Evans, who ran an operation called
(34:43):
Operation Plaza Sweep in the late nineties that was a
full on FBI operation in Mexico to exhume bodies male
bodies from the desert surrounding Huirez believed to be American
citizens in order to secure an indict meant against the
cartel leader Career Fuentes, in order to get an extradition request,
(35:05):
which they were successful in doing. Evans said at that point,
we offer the local Hui as police assistance with solving
the murders of women. But he was very explicit in
saying that the FBI made that offer because they wanted
to test out how trustworthy the local police were, and
it turned out they weren't. Then you have Hardrick Crawford,
(35:26):
who comes along in the early two thousand's and, unlike
Wrestler and Evans, who had a clear United States interest
motivated reason to engage themselves in this case, Hardrick says,
I had a mission from God, I had a higher
calling in the US Constitution. I have my own daughters.
(35:48):
It was my moral duty to find out what was
happening to these women. And his story is one of
the most interesting plotlines in the podcast. We we come
to it later on UM, but safe to say when
Laurence Fullspen officials start to follow something that they've views
being higher than the Constitution, chaos sometimes ensues. Okay, we're
(36:13):
gonna talk more with oz but first a quick word
from our sponsor. All right, and we're back with Ozwald
Lotion of Forgotten Women of Warez back to a specific
point about the story, and this is all none of
(36:34):
this is spoiler territory. It's all covered pretty quickly and
the first episode. But I think it's fascinating how little
was known at the time about the cartels kind of
oh gosh, trademark, I guess, or signature for a lot
of this violence that we may be now take for granted,
but some of the methods of the killings and some
(36:58):
of the kind of calling cards really did have almost
occulted kind of you know, feel about them or some
sort of ritualistic um you know qualities. Can you speak
to that a little bit about and about how that
in particular maybe muddy the waters and and made it,
you know, be a big part of that search for
a serial killer as opposed to realizing perhaps that this
(37:20):
might be something else. Yeah, it's a it's a great question.
I mean, bear in mind, you know, these crimes in
the nineties, this is not long after the Satanic panic
in the US, and so, you know, I think there's
a tendency in any case to read on to unsolved
murders and horrific murders some kind of satanic or ritual element.
(37:47):
But in fact, in the case of these murders, um,
it does seem like they were ritualized. There was strange
marks left on the bodies of the victims. There was
this use of shoe laces to bind the risks, and
the way in which the women's bodies were left was
(38:07):
not random. They were arranged in certain dehumanizing ways. And
so one of the early hypotheses was indeed that there
was some kind of satanic or ritual cult killing these women.
And one of the phenomena in in Mexico has been
the rise of this interest in Santa the Holy Death,
(38:31):
which is a sort of religion esque which sort of
worships death, and people were wondering, you know, is it
possible these are human sacrifices um that most of our
sources dismissed fairly quickly. But the idea of ritual killings,
ritual killings for the purposes of hazing or bonding, or
(38:53):
creating loyalty or creating codes of silence, that was considered
to be a much more really stick avenue of investigation.
And in fact, when Wrestler was there from the FBI,
he was there with another forensic criminal criminologists called Candascropic,
and they came on one of these crime scenes with
this woman left in an utterly deshumanizing way, and she
(39:15):
turned to restaurant and said, have you ever seen anything
like this in your career? And he said no. And
what they started to speculate was that was that these
women were being sacrificed by some kind of group in
order to achieve purposes, which at the time weren't clear
because there there were things like markings, triangles, and various
symbols carved into the bodies that have this, you know,
(39:37):
feel of some sort of ritual or some sort of
blood sacrifice or or or what have you. And again
don't want to get into spoiler territories about the story,
but when did it become clear that it was something different,
or at least when you know, in your coverage of
the story, in your following these folks that have lived this,
uh literally on the ground and in research and reporting
(39:58):
for years, when did it be clear to you that
what was really going on or or that maybe that
was barking up the wrong tree a little bit. Well, so,
I think it's the mass graves that really clarify for
people what's going on, because you know, young women are
going missing apparently following a pattern being found in the
desert on the outskirts of Wuirez with characteristic trauma. But
(40:23):
two thousand and one and two thousand and twelve, these
mass graves of women who have been killed in the
same way are discovered, and at that point it becomes
impossible for anybody to argue that these crimes are connected.
These are not victims of random violence. And each of
these times there's been a great hope that okay, the
authorities have to acknowledge there's something going on here which
(40:46):
is connected, and a belief in the community that although
this is terrible, we must have hit rock bottom after this,
no more, this can't continue. We will find the real cults.
And indeed, after each of the mass graves were discovered,
somebody took the fall in. It was an Egyptian chemist
(41:08):
called Abdul Latif Sharif. Sharif who had self deported from
the United States under threat of being actually deported to Egypt,
and it decided to go and live in Huarez where
he could continue working for his US employer but not
be subject to the U S law. And so he
was a big partier in downtown Huirez, and he had
these rape charges against him in the US. When the
(41:29):
first mass grave of women is discovered, he's taken in
and declared as the serial killer. There's one problem in
another mass grave of women is discovered, so as briefly
a bit of a concern for the authority, well, how
do we explain this? And what they come up with
is that a gang called the Rebels is being paid
(41:50):
by Sharif to murder women on his behalf in order
to attest his innocence, and that he's demanding their underwear
as evidence from his jail e'll sell. This sounds pretty
preposterous and lurid, but I mean this was the official line.
Two thousand and one comes along, another mass grave is discovered.
A journalist asked the Attorney General at a press conference,
(42:12):
is it possible Sharif is behind these crimes as well?
And the Attorney General says, is something we're looking into.
That's not the line they end up going with. In fact,
two bus drivers take the full this time. It turns
out they've been tortured with cattle prods, suffocation, beatings into
confessing to the crimes. And it's actually this scapegoating, this
(42:34):
third scapegoating that sets off this process where a lawyer
takes on their case and through his investigation we start
to get some answers about what's really happening. But it
leaves another trail of death in its wake, and not
just a women of men as well. And while we
(42:56):
are on the subject of math graves, one very important
and I think profoundly disturbing thing here is if we
do not ultimately know the group or the people responsible
for these murders, and we do not ultimately know their motive,
(43:19):
that it means that we also do not ultimately know
how many victims exist, and the pattern that you're describing
of finding mass graves and then you know this rush
to find some I hesitate to say necessarily scapegoat because
(43:42):
Abdul Latif Sharif was a horrible person, clearly a horrible person. Um,
but there's there's this pattern on law enforcements. Part of Okay,
we found a grave, let's let's find a way to
explain it. Oh, we found another grave. Let's find a
way to explain it. And what I think is, you know,
(44:02):
most troubling here and something that I feel obligated to
ask you about, is is it possible that there are
more mass grave sites out there that have yet to
be discovered? I mean, is that is that like within
the realm of probability? Is it within the realm of plausibility?
Or where where does this leave us? I mean to
(44:25):
the early part of your question about culpability. Actually, we
there is a witness to these murders who tells an
American journalist called Alfredo Corricillo what he's seen, why these
women are being killed, and so we do get to
that reveal in the podcast, and that kind of sets
(44:45):
off the second half of the podcast. So so there
are some answers, but they're not answers which the officials
ever take seriously in whuareas. And so your question is
a very good one. Are there more mass graves in
the desert? Very likely? Yes, certainly, many many more bodies
that were never found. And one of the most interesting
(45:06):
things with for me about this reporting slightly adjacent to
them to the story in two thousand and one, after
the mass grave is discovered, the authorities fail to identify
the victims before they declare the case is closed, and
so the families never have closure. They never really believe, Okay,
(45:28):
was this my daughter? Was this not my daughter? So
Grio Flores, who we mentioned, she gets exhumed three times
because there's no clarity ever for the family on whether
it's her. Once the grave next to her is incorrectly
exhumed and a man's body is brought in for analysis.
I mean, this is a level of either incompetence or
(45:52):
corruption which is quite quite staggering. So a team called
the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team came in two thousand and
one at the request of various activists. They have experienced
and identifying bodies from the end of the regime and
Argentina when there were many mass graves and many families
looking for answers, and this woman, Mercedes Doretti, who's a
(46:15):
McArthur Genius grant holder, basically founded this team of anthropologists
to identify bodies. They go to Huires in two thousand
and one to try and finally, using DNA techniques, answer
who these eight women definitively in this grave are, and
as part of their work they start analyzing other bodies.
And what Mercedes Diretti told me was this is the
(46:37):
first time in her career that she would analyze bodies
and there would be no matches from the local area
of people who had missing persons in their family, so
she had to in the end often that the missing
person would be found in Huire as the body would
be found in Quires, but the family would be eight
(46:58):
hundred miles away because the person was a migrant. And
of course in the early two thousands and Wires this
was this was the first time she'd ever seen that
in her career, and now it's common their bodies all
along the US Mexico border from Central America belonging to
people from Central America, other places in the world. Whose
whose family, maybe thousands of miles away. But this that
(47:20):
the technique of identifying bodies and matching them to people
a long way away began in Wuires because there was
so much migrant labor into the factory jobs. And so
that really has foreshadowed was happening now on the border
with all of these tragic deaths and families who don't
get closure, who may live thousands of miles away. You know,
(47:41):
we're talking about the lives of these women. A lot
of it is gruesome end that their lives met. But
this show, I think is pretty firmly set on the
life lived by these women and what they were going
to to survive for themselves and their families. And in
(48:02):
in an early episode in the show, there's a moment
where I believe it's Cigarria's mother is talking about when
her daughter came home excited to tell her mom that
the company has taken out life insurance on her and
if anything happens to her, the family, you, mom will
will get money. The family will get a lot of
(48:24):
money if something happens to me. And uh, you know,
she's she and her father and her other siblings are
all working in this factory and they're living in this
small town where their home was, you know, originally built
by the trash, like you said, from across the border. Um,
(48:46):
and I believe it is five family members working in
in this factory at that point. Just imagining that five
of your family members could be working a factory and
you can still barely afford to live while you're making
goods that are going to be shipped across the border.
It's a tough thing for me personally too to understand.
(49:10):
Because of my privileged life that I live here in
the United States, and because of who I am and
what I look like. I wonder if these families have
you know, they obviously haven't been able to find full
closure because of everything you just talked about, Oz, but
I wonder if they're being taken care of in any
(49:31):
way by these companies that you know, maybe a lot
of these victims were UM a part of or by
some other groups. Like what are were there? What are
their lives like now? The families who have had such
loss in their lives. I'm sorry to say that they're difficult.
They're very difficult. Often that that often the mothers become
(49:54):
tireless advocates for for justice as an amazing energy and
passion in the protest movement in whuires led by mothers
and and and indeed, you know those demands for justice,
although they haven't always answered individual questions, there is some
sense of the power of collective action and and and
(50:17):
conditions in in the factories and in those communities have
improved under pressure from the mother's and Paula Flora's Sagaria's
mother founded a kindergarten in their neighborhood so that the
local children could get more of an education. Is called
the Cigari of Flora's Kindergarten. And so she told us,
it makes me happy that every child in the neighborhood
(50:39):
graduates with my daughter's name on their diploma. And it's
tempting to find a lot of solace in you know,
the individuals struggle against their circumstances. But the reality is
the conditions are very poor. They're still um These factories,
which manufactured goods that we will use, continue to pay
(50:59):
people less than ten dollars a day, when a similar
job on the two miles away on the other side
of the border would bring in eight ten dollars an hour,
and that in itself creates the conditions of vulnerability and violence,
and in fact, during the COVID crisis, the American ambassador
put great pressure on Mexico not to close the factories
(51:20):
the Mecula Doras because they're creating things like blood, blood
pressure cuffs and medical gloves and supplies. We needed to
keep our citizens safe during COVID. And of course they
were outbreaks and deaths which ravaged these factories, but the
workers were being told they have to keep coming to work.
And so people often say, other murders still going And
(51:42):
the answer is, well, you know, the last mass grave
of women was discovered in twelve, which is eight years ago.
But that the people who work in these factories remain
very vulnerable and the conditions haven't improved very much, and
in fact that there's a second generation of women who
were born in quires and who are perhaps more politely
(52:03):
conscious than their parents were. There's one protest group called
the Daughters of the Makila Workers. And one of the
young women who was part of that protest group and
a local artist called Isabel cabaniest della Torre. She was
cycling through downtown Huirez in January and she was shot
in the head and her murder is unsolved. And so
(52:25):
this place of vulnerability and gender violence and you know,
a locust really a rapacious consumption. I mean refrigerator parts,
steering wheels, you know, medical gloves, their manufacturing, huires, and
of course it's where cocaine and other drugs come through.
So unfortunately our consumption habits have a price, and often
(52:48):
it's thousands of miles away. But what what makes wires
so arresting as a place is that you can see
it from the United States. You can see the consequences
of certain choices we ache playing out within sight of
where you stand. And that's really coming back to the
beginning of your question about why I got interested in
this story. I think it's a place where you can
(53:09):
understand the consequences of of institutions and choices and borders
in a very very, very very immediate way. No, it's
it's a really really good point because people think about, oh,
if I choose to do cocaine, that's a personal choice.
If I choose to contribute to capitalism, that's a personal choice,
(53:29):
and that's not affecting anybody but me. It's it's something
that I'm doing. But no, it shows there are ripple
effects to the choices that we make, and this is
part of that. And I think you do a fantastic
job of I mean, it's not like a very it's
not a political show, but it is a show about
experience and about the lives of the folks that are
caught up in these systems. And I think that's what
makes it all the more powerful. Yeah, definitely, But but
(53:52):
I also I mean as as a big you know,
ethical consumerism movement in the US, and I think that's
very valuable and important, But really these are like systems
and policy problems, not individual choice problems. I mean, of
course we can all be more ethical in our actions,
but but a lot of responsibility for you know, cartel violence,
(54:12):
that drug problems in in in in Latin America, working
conditions in wuires that they come from very conscious policy decisions,
and one of them interesting and we we had a
very interesting interview with a historian called Oscar Martinez who said,
in the sixties, and you know, these there were factories
in Singapore and Taiwan doing the same thing which happens
in Huarez. But the wage increases in those places has
(54:36):
been multiples in huire as they say say the same
why is that was because Mexico is close to the
United States, so the United States can enforce intellectual property
and patent infringement is much more effectively. And so the
wealth creation of you know, basically what we always get
angry for China of doing is basically manufacturing and then
copying the I p that never happened in Mexico. So
(54:58):
this is kind of poverty trapped comes with proximity, which
is very interesting as well. Yeah, and this is I mean,
at this point we're also talking about um, the power
of systems, right, the power of institutions, UM, which which
affects us profoundly UM on. One thing that I don't
(55:21):
want to lose in our conversation here is the the
concept of the news cycle. To Matt, I believe earlier
you would asked the question, UM, at some point about
what happens to these to the survivors, right, the people
(55:42):
left behind after these unspeakable tragedies, which I don't think
it's hyperbolic to call them that. After these tragedies, what
happens to the people who are still living their lives?
You know, after the news through and the and the
cameras cuts and the van drives away to the next story.
(56:06):
That's That's something that I think is um is profound
and is tremendously important us because we're talking a lot
about things that have developed in the nineteen nineties, in
the early two thousands. UM right now as as um as.
(56:30):
I'm sure you're aware, many of our listeners may not
be aware. Uh, war as murders and war az just
overall are up forty two percent in March over May.
Uh without you know, I know we're interviewing you in
the in the midst of forgotten women of war as
(56:53):
coming out and coming to the public eye. But could
or the public ear I should say, I guess, but
could you tell a little bit about the the current
state of war as as as applied to homicides, as
applied to this case. I mean, what what happened after
(57:14):
all of the investigations over the nineties and the two thousand's. Well,
so when Monica began reporting in Juarez, she grew up
in El Paso, but she began reporting in Juarez on
the drug war in two thousand and eight. Uh, and
this was that period when the Sinaloa cartel were trying
to move in on Huirez and there was basically a
(57:35):
civil war and people were being butchered and left in
the most disgusting ways. Um And it was in that
context that Monica cut her teeth as a reporter in Huirez,
and the reporter introduced me to Monica is called Angela Cochega,
and she told me very casually, she would drive out
over the border to do a day of reporting, come
(57:55):
back to the US, arrive at Starbucks, take off her
shoes and abandon them because they were so soaked in blood.
And this idea of a war zone in your backyard
is just very, very hard to get your head around.
So two thousand and eight, two thousand and eleven, the
drug violence was at absolute height, and homicides were you know,
in the three and a half thousand a year, you
(58:16):
know area. After two thousand and eleven, things got a
bit quieter. In two thousand and sixteen, there was the
Choires Tourist Board. We're trying to sort of encourage travel
to Wires again because it was historically a place where Americans,
much like Havanna and Cuba, went to go and have fun,
to go and drink and bring when they're underage, and
(58:38):
you know, gamble and maybe you know all the things
which are worse than that as well, if the sex
trade um. But but Recquires was kind of rebuilding its
reputation and and and and and and it's tourism industry
in Unfortunately, the homicide rate is starting to approach, you know,
(59:00):
the three thousand number again based on monthly averages of
two and fifty people being murdered now. And that's really
really frightening because it basically indicates that it's happening again.
Why it's happening is not clear, but but generally when
they're when their power shifts in the cartels, for example,
(59:21):
or twenty seventeen, L Chapo gets extradited to the US
and is now in a d X Florence Supermax in Colorado.
He was the most powerful cartel leader in Mexico and
now he's gone. And similar to what happened after the
Iraq War with the formation of ISIS or when you
when you disturb the leadership of these organizations, it comes
(59:43):
with splinter groups, and splinter groups bring violence. And I
think right now there is a there is a civil
war Inquirers, which it doesn't have the same spectacular violence
as the two thousand and eight two eleven period, but
the numbers are are approaching the same height and and
that's bad news for all vulnerable people. Monica said that
the last mass grave was discovered in twelve and she
(01:00:07):
wouldn't be surprised if if another one was discovered soon.
And this is the again, as you said, Odds, this
is the modern day. We are recording this episode for
Peeple and the Curtain here, folks. We're recording this episode
on June twelve OZ. At this point, I believe that
(01:00:32):
the best way for our listeners to understand more of
this story, to learn more about it, is too honestly,
to stop our podcasts right now and to head over
to whatever their podcast platform of choice is and check
out Forgotten Women of Warez, which is available now. We
(01:00:54):
want to thank you profoundly for being so generous with
your time on our show here, but more importantly, much
more importantly for the time that you and Monica have
dedicated to bringing to shedding light on this Because it's
um I am attempting not to be emotional about this,
(01:01:17):
but it is it is reprehensible that these that this is,
this is occurring. As you said, you know, at the
very beginning, you said a tale of two cities. It's
it's offensive that this sort of mass homicide continued, that
(01:01:38):
it continues today, that it seems like the systems that
were created two vouchsafe people are broken, have failed. And
on my end, I'm wondering what would you if you
would recommend next steps? If you if you would um
(01:02:02):
if you, for instance, were able to dictate to law
enforcement in the community, what they should be doing about this,
about this ongoing horrific activity, what what would you say? Well, first,
thanks for your kind words about our time, and I
(01:02:22):
would like to emphasize my role in Forgotten was to
come in as the naive outsider and ask, you know,
framing questions and frankly obvious questions. You know, why is
this happening? What's going on? And Monico is the person
who's devoted years of her life and her career and
(01:02:43):
taken risks that I haven't, as our other sources did,
in particular Dina Washington Valdez. And so what makes me
proudest about this project is to have used it as
a as a frame for their stories and they're reporting
to to reach a wide audience. And so that that's been. That,
(01:03:03):
that's been, you know, something I'm personally proud of. But
to your second question about what what can we do?
I mean, there's an American journalists who enter Huires in
the nineties called Chuck Bowden, who called Huires a laboratory
of our future and basically taking the women's murders as
starting points. So, well, what happens when you basically create
(01:03:25):
a permanent under class. What happens when law enforcement aren't
trusted by the community, What happens when there's state sponsored
violence against people who seek the truth? What happens when
journalists gets murdered? What happens when the imperatives of profit
are put above the imperatives of human life. And that's
(01:03:46):
not a conversation which is unique to Huaras anymore. That's
a conversation we're having right now at the United States.
And and Sandra Rodriguez Nieto, one of the editors that Ldarihuires, said,
Huire wasn't always like this, Like it's always been a
tough city. It's always been a gritty border city. But
thousands of unsolved murders every year, you know, institutions a
(01:04:08):
fragile and and and and be careful in the US,
be careful, don't fall asleep, because it can happen faster
than you think. And so you know, I don't want
to over emphasize the connection of this podcast to what's
happening with the protest movement in the United States right now.
But when you have injustice ongoing injustice, when you have
(01:04:32):
lack of trust between law enforcement and citizens, and when
you have a tax on independent judiciary and the media,
you can find yourself in a pretty hellish situation pretty quickly.
Thank you for that, and then you thank you for
making the show with these amazing women who have been
working on this story for so long. Um, just prepare
(01:04:53):
yourself when you're listening to the show, because because they
are tragic stories, but they are very important to UH
to hear. Agreed on. This concludes today's episode, But this
does not conclude our show, and it does not conclude
the story of the podcast Forgotten Women of War. As
(01:05:17):
we want to hear from you, We want your perspective.
As we often say, you are the most important part
of this show. Specifically, you so right to us. You
can find us on Facebook, you can find us on
Twitter and find us on Instagram were frankly like many
people in too many places on the internet nowadays. Uh
(01:05:41):
but before you do any of that, check out this podcast.
It's available now wherever you find your favorite shows. As
we say, it's free to listen to. And this is
an important story that is has not and is not
(01:06:01):
UM receiving the attention and the analysis it deserves. And
while you were listening to that, if you have any thoughts,
if you have feedback, you want to talk to us,
but you hate social media. We have all people get it.
You can you can contact us a number of other ways.
(01:06:23):
We have a phone number. Yes, you can give us
a call at one eight three three st d w
y t K, where you can leave messages for us
in audio form in three minute increments. I know it's
not ideal, but hey, if you need more time than that,
you just call back and then we'll stitch them together
for when we inevitably do another listener male episode where
(01:06:45):
we field questions from you. UM also might be one
of the lucky ones that gets a true callback from
Matt Frederick himself. I also would like to start being
a little more conscientious about participating that too. But man
that talk about the golden ticket of of conspiracy. Listener
mails that when you get that call from Matt, I
(01:07:07):
really wish you all the best of luck because he
will definitely do it. If you don't want to do
any of that stuff, we still have one of those
old fashioned emails. You can email us. We are conspiracy
at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want
(01:07:38):
you to know is a production of I heart Radio.
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