June 1, 2020 • 45 mins
Episode 3 - We travel to downtown Juárez, where many of the victims were last seen alive, and where journalists are unwelcome. Oz and Monica visit the offices of El Diario, Juárez’s local paper, to learn about the risks faced by those who seek the truth. And Diana receives strange threats as she gets closer to exposing who is behind the crimes.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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head into your local store for more great savings. Forgotten
is a production of ihump Media and unusual productions. Before
we start. This podcast contains accounts which some listeners will
find disturbing, but without them, the story can't be fully understood.
Please take care while listening. Previously on Forgotten, I said,
(01:55):
it's just that we're bringing a lot six daughters. I mean,
in this case, tells been how organized is it? Because
she was abducted, she was kept in a place, so
someone was guarding her. The important thing about these computer
scolls is that the young ladies were putting their personal
(02:18):
data into the questionnaires and their pictures were taken. Became
very easy for someone at another end. However, this information
was being forwarded to let this operate as a catalog,
you know, catalog of potential victims. When FBI Special Agent
in charge of El Paso, Padrick Crawford, arrived at the
(02:41):
border and took note of the women's murders in Juarez,
his first thought was at a lone serial killer was
at work there, perhaps even an American. But then this
connection emerged between Lili Alejandra Andrade and multiple other victims
to the Echo Computer School, and it started to seem
(03:03):
like whoever was killing the women wasn't acting alone. They
sent Dina Washington Valdez on a mission to find out
as much as she could about Echo. I learned two
things about the schools. They were used to get background
on potential victims, because you fell out a questionnaire your name,
(03:25):
where you live, your age, the neighborhood. You know, whether
you're a student or you work in the business somewhere.
And it was like impossible to find out who really
owned these schools. In fact, it was the FBI who
had gathered the initial tip off about the computer schools
(03:45):
through their informant network in Juarez, and according to the intelligence,
the computer schools were just the tip of the Iceberg,
there were other businesses in Juarez, whether women were held
after they'd been abducted. But because these crimes were happening
in another country, the Bureau couldn't take any direct action,
(04:05):
And so the FBI sent that information or to the
TWA authorities who had their primary jurisdiction or these crimes.
That information seemed extremely promising, the kind of intelligence that
could lead to arrests, to justice and to the end
of almost a decade of killings. The Mexican authorities did
(04:27):
go into the computer schools and took out a bunch
of documents and software and that sort of thing, and
they see, we're looking at this as possible evidence. So
where did that investigation lead. In this episode, we'll find out,
and we'll visit downtown Juarez, the place where many of
the young women were last seen alive. I'm as Voloshin
(04:51):
and I'm Monica. This is forgotten the women, as c
Star now Knowsquella Felicia Dina Washington Valdez has seen promising
(05:36):
leads evaporate into nothing before the physical evidence from Lilia
Lejandra's autopsy, the witnesses this time, she didn't want to
take any chances so she teamed up with a group
of fellow reporters to lead a parallel investigation into the
businesses named in the FBI intelligence the Echo Computer School,
(05:57):
where Lilia had been due to start class a few
days after she was abducted, but also several other businesses.
We did what we call a media raid for lack
of a better term. Several reporters and I went to
the places that were identified. These are we call them
in Spanish, places of concern. So we went from place
(06:19):
to place, asking why can we interview the owners here?
And this has been alleged. Girls are being screened here,
girls are being grabbed here. With the cameras rolling, the
business owners played along with Dinah's questions. The Echo Computer
School categorically denied involvement in the murders, but after Dinah
had gone, it was made clear to her that she
(06:40):
should never come back. How was that message that your
media attention was unwelcome conveyed to you? As reporters? We
were threatened with arrests. There were rest warrantsho shoot for
three of us. And this came from the police or
yes to all police, And it was because the owners
complained about accused of trespassing, but no, we would ask
(07:01):
for permission. It seemed clear that the Juare's authorities didn't
welcome Diana's assistance in their investigation. And what was striking
was that the businesses named by the informants were not
in some far flung reach of the city. They were
right in the heart of Juarez. Is downtown a place
that young women like Lida Alejandra and Sigario Gonzalez pass through.
(07:24):
Often you're sixteen, seventeen year old. He went downtown to
do narrant for your parents, or to try in some
new shoes, to apply for a job, and push, you know,
or grabbed and lured and you're murdered. To date, I
mean downtown whais continues the very center of the city.
(07:48):
This is where girls disappear without anybody seeing anything or
hearing anything. You know, it continues to be that way. Yes,
to this day, downtown Juarez is an extremely dangerous place
for young women. In January twenty twenty, a women's activist
called Isabel Cabaniers de Latore was shot in the head
(08:09):
there as she cycled home from meeting some friends at
a bar. But Huires hasn't always been this way. Moniqua.
You spent quite a lot of time in Juarez when
you were growing up. When I was a kid, my
memories of Watts are very pleasant and joyful. We would
go there after church with my great grandmother to a
(08:30):
restaurant that's maybe a mile away from the International Bridge
to have a big lunch there, and right before crossing back,
we'd stop at a gas station and pick up a
crate of glass bottled sodas that you couldn't find in
El Paso. But today I prefer to stay away from Watts.
(08:54):
I can't believe I'm saying it, because ten years ago,
as a young reporter, I would kind of scarf at
people who would tell me, Yeah, I don't go to
Huatus anymore, it's too dangerous, and I would get kind
of angry because I would say, there's still life over there,
There's still families, people, we should interact like what is
(09:15):
to me was the other half of my identity. To me,
it was like they were turning their back on our
sister city, and I have a different understanding of it now.
The downtown part of Juarez is close to the mouth
of the Paso del Lotte Bridge that connects the city
to El Paso. Migrants from Central America and elsewhere arrive
(09:39):
here on their journey to seek asylum in the US.
It's also one of the most dangerous parts of Ouarez,
but Monica suggested we visit to get about a picture
of the final moments of the dozens of women who
have disappeared there, seemingly into thin air. In the car
on the way over, we come up with a cover
story in case anyone asks us what we're doing there.
(10:02):
It's just the lookouts are also there. Just if they
get a bad vibe from your presence, Like if we
act casual and tell them, yeah, yeah, we're reporting on
the on the migrant caravan, that kind of um eases then.
But yeah, we're going around looking at the missing posters
of women and we're asking a lot of questions. They
(10:23):
might send someone to scare us off. It turns out
that it's not just police who threatened people who ask
too many questions. It's also the gangs who control downtown Houarres.
Their business interests range from human trafficking to drug dealing
to murder. So we're here in downtown Quattas and yeah,
(10:53):
on this street just behind us was where one of
the Echo Computer stores had an office and this is
this is ground zero for missing women in Hottus, right
down here. Who everyone is. Yes, you think there's a
lot of witnesses around, but also there's just so much
(11:14):
activity going on that you know, if someone gets into
somebody's car, even if it's by force, correct, I can
imagine coming here as a as a young woman from
somewhere else in Mexico arriving. I mean, it's such a maze.
Every weren't with you, We've even completely lost, that's a
(11:35):
good way to describe it. Downtown Hottis is like a maze.
This is where the unknown starts. This is where women
were seen for the last time, and after that the
mystery begins. We're on a street called Mina that's like
(11:56):
the central archery for most bus routes traveling east and
west across the city. This is the spot where Sir
Groo Gonzalez likely made her final transfer twenty years ago.
The sidewalks are a blur of shoppers and vendors selling
cheap jewelry and pirated DVDs. The smell of engine exhaust
mixes with food being cooked on open grills, and it's loud.
(12:21):
There's music coming seeming me from everywhere. But there's also
something else, more sinister, just beneath the surface. A brothel.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a it's a well it
says it's a Thangas nightclub, which is Thong's nightclub. And
I think there's a hotel on the upper floor and
(12:42):
the nightclub is on the lower floor. And it's on
the block right next to the fabric store where one
of the young women was last seen. Many cities have
red light districts Amsterdam, Tokyo, London, but what's striking about
(13:03):
Juarez is that there's no separation between places that sell
sex and the transportation hub and shops selling everyday necessities.
You're just seeing on that lamp post. So it doesn't
take long before we come across these missing posters. The
(13:29):
flyer for a missing woman. She looked maybe between fourteen
and sixteen years old. The black and white fliers bearing
pictures of young women's faces are not the only evidence
of what happened here. Also on lamp posts are pink
squares with black crosses overlaid. Each one has been painted
(13:52):
by a family grieving and lost daughter. Well it used
to be that every time the body of a murdered
woman was discovered in Huadis, the families of previous victims
and activists would come out and paint these crosses as
a reminder to the city that these murders were happening.
(14:18):
While most people in downtown Juarez hustle by on their way,
every so often notice a man standing still. I think
there's a lookout over here. So in a sea of
people moving back and forth, they're not hard to spot.
In Spanish, they're called alcornez hawks, birds of prey. They're
(14:42):
the on the ground intelligence for organized crime, gangs, cartels.
Just because the way the stands. Sometimes it's just a
sense that you get. I get a little bit nervous
about staying in one place for a long time, especially
(15:04):
just because we stick out, and especially when you start
looking at missing flyers. Wow, that's a guy that he's
trying to spook us an, Yeah, should we get out
of anyway? We did get out of there, but young
(15:35):
women like Sigario Gonzalez didn't have that choice. They had
to pass through every day, and it's devastating to think
that that daily commute could make them so vulnerable. It's
also easy to see why they might stop to sign
up for a computer class that promised the kind of
skills that might help them leave this place behind, and
(15:57):
in turn, how that aspiration could lead to to them
being spotted, selected, tracked, and ultimately killed. But I was
also curious about what it was like to be a
journalist in this environment, where you had to have a
cover story and bring discreet equipment just to ask questions
(16:18):
about missing young women whose fate was obvious from the
posters and the hand painted crosses adorning almost every other
lamp post. When we come back, we go to meet
a reporter who knows Huarez from the inside out and
whose colleague paid the ultimate price for asking too many questions.
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dot com. Leaving downtown Juarez one he can I get
back in the car to hear from one of the
(19:18):
city's most celebrated journalists about what it's like to report here.
We're headed to the local daily newspaper here in what
is called in Barrio to speak with Sandra Rodriguez Mieto
in Viario suffered three casualties during the drug war, two
(19:39):
reporters and one photographer. If I remember correctly, Sandra can
tell us about the fee there oh that community se
(20:00):
After a brief registration, we were shown upstairs to Sandra
Rodriguez Nieto's office. Sandra has won multiple international awards, including
the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting in
twenty fourteen. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. On
(20:23):
the walls of her office are some gruesome photographs, including
a dead man strung up by his arms and wearing
a pig mask. He was one of the thousands of
victims of the drug war. When Al Chapo's Sina Loa
cartel was moving in on Juarez in two thousand and eight.
The man's body is displayed as a message don't squeal.
(20:44):
Also on Sandra's wall is a map of the city,
and we pointed out the part of downtown Juarez where
we just come from. When's that street, Mina Mina, That's
where the bass stop and that's where a lot of
the girls were seen for the last time. We were
right there. Yeah, there's a very very very dangerous place
(21:07):
of the Syria. I wouldn't recommend you guys to go back. Yeah. Oh,
that's had certainly a song where they have lookouts. That's
how they control the area through intimidage. In the last decade,
a total of twenty nine journalists have been murdered in Mexico,
(21:27):
more than any other country, including Syria. Mexico's record for
solving those crimes is abysmal. Nearly all go unpunished, and
when journalists try to solve crimes themselves, they often become
the targets. Something Sandra is reminded of daily, actually armandous desk,
(21:47):
is that it's right there, and it's going to be
actually the tenth anniversary this month, ten years. Can you
imagine ten years has been like this? Right outside Sander's
office is the desk of a reporter called Armando Rodriguez,
preserved as he left it. His desktop computer is there
(22:10):
with dust covered keys, and there's also a dry bunch
of yellow marigolds left in memory of him. Armando Rodriguez,
who was our colleague. He was covering the crime bit
for twenty years in whities, so he knew everything and
he got killed in two thousand and eight when he
(22:34):
was taking his starter out to the school. What does
it feel like for you to sit here in your
office looking every day at an empty desk belonging to
one of your colleagues. The point is not living with
an empty list, but living with the idea of impunity.
It drives it crazy not to know who did it
and why. What's it like to work as a Do
(22:59):
you get ted? Do you get just to it? Yes?
What to the danger, to the stress, to the possibility
of getting killed, don't we That's where you and I
differ because my home is on the other side, where
I can go home and not worry about that, whereas
(23:20):
you live here the full day every day. Well, I
will say that you are being very humble because you
know that. I mean, you hear more stories, you hear mortyrror.
You might be more scared, and you keep on coming.
We live here, I know, I think, I know. The
place is dynamic, and I think I know more and
(23:41):
then makes me feel a little bit safer. But that's
how we protect ourselves. I think that's the story that
we tell ourselves. Yeah, we tell ourselves different versions of
the same story. Yeah. Sandro Rodriguez could take any assignment
she wanted, and yet she chooses to work here in Juarez.
(24:05):
She chooses to walk past Armando's empty desk every day.
That was something that was starting to stand out to
me about this story. How, in spite of the enormous
obstacles and dangers, reporters keep on pushing to get towards
the truth. I remember you telling me, Monica, about your
(24:28):
mother who really didn't want you to come to Juarez
to report, and I know you first went there to
report on the drug war. How did you first get
involved with reporting on the women's murders. I got an
email from one of the family organizations, basically a red alert.
There's a young woman who's I don't know, sixteen, seventeen
(24:53):
years old. She's missing and please help us find her.
We'd think something better has happened to her, and so
I I from from there. I reached out to the
girl's mother, Susanna, and met her at her house in
Wattas and told her take me down the route that
your daughter Lupita would take to come home every day.
(25:18):
This was just days after her daughter had gone missing,
and she was armed with her own stack of black
and white flyers announcing her daughter's disappearance. We got off
of the bus. We walked through the same streets in
downtown Wattas where you and I walked, handing out these leaflets,
(25:41):
putting them up on the lamp posts. And she walked
me down that street, Mina, and she said, this is
the street my daughter was last No, Mina Street is
the street you took me to. It's not far from
where Paula Flores and her family and the search for
Cigario back in nineteen ninety eight. Erie is not a
(26:04):
strong enough word for the similarities between Paula talking about
the search the night after Sagrario goes missing and Susanna
describing her family's search. This switch goes off, and nothing
else in the world matters, not their own safety, not
(26:24):
the safety of their living relatives. They have a one
track mission, which is to locate and rescue their daughters.
Back at her house in Lomas de Puleo, Paulaflores remembers
that April day in nineteen ninety eight when Sagario failed
(26:45):
to come home from work, and the desperate search that followed.
Every day, I would stand there at the door, and
that comforted me seeing her getting off the bus and
coming home. That day, like any other day, I was
waiting for her, and I began to despair when she
didn't arrive. We knew that she had worked and that
(27:06):
she had left at the time. Everyone left, but no
one saw anything. And I tell you that very night
we began searching at the Red Cross, in the hospitals,
on the streets, searching for her. You always san much.
That night, I grabbed all the photos I had of
my daughter. I would pass them out at gas station, saying,
I'm looking for my daughter. Can you please help me
(27:27):
find her. There were nights I would step outside and
I would shout her name. I would run around the
house and shout her name with all my strength in
the silence of the night. I felt she could hear me,
so I would call to my daughter. Paula and her
(27:51):
family searched and searched, but they didn't find Sagrario, and
they didn't get much help from the authorities. Either filed
the report, and initially they didn't accept it. They claimed
she had run off with her boyfriend. What they always
say even today. No, I told them, her boyfriend is
with us, helping us look for her. After so much,
(28:15):
insisting the police finally made up a missing report, but
they did nothing. They did nothing to look for her.
The police did nothing. The police did ultimately open the
missing person's report, but that was about as far as
they went. At one point they told Paula they couldn't
search for Sagario because they didn't have any available vehicles.
(28:39):
And it turned out this was a common experience for
families whose daughters had gone missing, so much so that
a protest camp of mothers formed outside the police station.
They weren't looking for her, they weren't doing anything. But
by then we started to get to know the people protesting.
(28:59):
At the sit in outside the police station, we met
this lady. She started asking us about Sagaradio's case while
my daughter was still missing. She was the one who
told us on that occasion that the Attorney General was
right there at the station in a meeting. She said,
you want to see him. I said, yes, I want
to see him and tell him to look for my daughter,
(29:20):
implore him, beg him. She said, we'll have to go
in by force. When we come back. The outcome of
that confrontation and Estechavescano, Ahuara's accountant, who began to create
a ledger of the missing women. What is Circle? First
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dot com so estechavs Kano. Who is she? Monica? Esther
(32:02):
was one of the first people to really notice these
murders and disappearances. She was an accountant who moved to
Sulabhuadis and she joined the editorial board of Eddiadio. Esther
stood no more than five feet tall. She wore her
hair short and with these perfect golden highlights. Sometimes she
(32:26):
liked to wear pearls. And it turns out Esther was
a big fan of good whiskey and good wine. There
is a phrase in Spanish that I think describes Esther perfectly,
and that's which means small but fierce. She was a single,
independent woman who forged a career in post World War
(32:50):
two Mexico. And this was at a time when it
was unheard of for a woman to leave the house
before she was married, but she did it, and she
climbed the corporate ladder, working as an executive level accountant
in these multinational companies. She's just just a badass. I
(33:10):
love the way she lived her life. And she moves
to Wadis right before her fiftieth birthday, and so she's
reading the newspaper on a daily basis and This is
how she comes across these headlines detailing the disappearances and
murders of women all across the city. She's an accountant,
(33:33):
so record keeping comes natural to her, and so what
she does is she starts clipping out these articles from
the newspaper and compiling them into an archive. It's report
after report, narrating a variation on the same theme, where
the victim was found, her age, what she was wearing,
(33:54):
the autopsy findings, and Esther and a group of friends
started visiting the families of the missing and murdered women
that Esther would read about in the paper. They would
call attention to these cases by staging sit ins at
the governor's office. She didn't worry about being polite or
let's wait until tomorrow, or cross our fingers and hope
(34:18):
it turns out okay. No, she was a no nonsense,
no bullshit sort of person who got things done. In Esther,
Paula had found her match and an important ally. Together,
they forced their way into the police station, brushing off
officials and members of staff who tried to stop them,
(34:39):
and finally they got in front of the Attorney General,
Arturo Chaves. Chaves. Once we were in the first thing
I did was kneel down. I just asked him one question.
I asked him if he had any daughters, and he
said yes he did. Said then, I, oh, you can
(35:01):
put yourself on my shoes. My daughter is missing. I
was crying and begged him to look for my daughter.
I told him they were doing nothing to find her.
I remember that my husband tried to lift me by
the arm, telling me not to kneel. I said, no,
from my daughter, I'll kneel before anybody. To everyone's surprise,
(35:25):
Javis Chaves listened to everything Paula had to say, and
after some silence, he promised to help the investigation and
search for Cigaria. There was a moment of hope, but
it soon faded. Offered nothing but words if the authorities
always treated us like that. Powder took the investigation back
(35:48):
into her own hands and even went on to identify
a prime suspect. We'll come back to him for now.
The question is why was the official response so underwhelming?
Why the women like Paula and Esther have to become heroes. Well,
remember that evidence that authorities took out of the computer
(36:09):
school his Diana again. They just you know, when they
got the photo up. They see, we found nothing that
was it. You know. Not only did the authorities threaten
Diana with arrest for trespassing, she claims they didn't lead
a proper investigation into the computer schools themselves. And this
mirrored the way they treated the victims' families. There was
(36:31):
no help for these families. The authorities made fun of them,
defamed the daughters in many cases, calling them prostitutes. They
would say that they were out at hours of a
night when they should be at home, or that they
ran off with a boyfriend, the mythical boyfriend that didn't exist,
and it didn't matter if this was demonstrably untrue. Remember
(36:54):
in Sagario's case, the authorities said she'd probably run off
with her boyfriend, even though Andrews himself helf was actively
involved in the search. This became just a very routine
way for the authorities to explain what was happening. And
yet we know from practically more than ninety percent of
the murders. Most of the victims were out doing errands,
(37:17):
they were going to school, they were on their way
to apply for a job in the daytime. The thing
is victim blaming excuses the police from having to search
for the real culprit. It also reinforces this notion that
people can literally get away with murder, and it further
traumatizes the families. Diana told us about the case of
(37:41):
Irma Perez, whose daughter Olga went missing in downtown Juarez
in nineteen ninety five and who was discovered murdered later
that year. She had all this pain in her over
her daughter's death and the way the authorities treated the
investigation and the way they defamed her. And you know,
she says, you know, her daughter died once she was murdered,
(38:05):
and she died again when the authorities then started to
defame her and blame her and say all sorts of
things about her that were simply not true, in order
for the authorities to, I guess, justify their lack of investigation,
their inefficiency, their corruption. Corruption. It's a heavy charge. Incompetence
(38:34):
is one thing, but outright dishonesty that's something else altogether.
But Diana chooses her words for a reason. Back at
her house in El Paso, she pulls out an old
motor or less cell phone, the kind with buttons, and
to pull out antenna, and she starts to tell us
about a call she received while she was reporting on
(38:57):
the computer schools that haunts UH to this day. The
phoneus ringing. I pick it up. I don't recognize a
telephone number that it's coming from, but it's coming. It
appears from Mexico, and I hear this this noise in
(39:18):
the background, a newscast in English, and then all of
a sudden, there's this electric saw sound coming in. We
know that people get dismembered now over there. The other
(39:38):
thing that made that call scary was here in his
child voice saying mummy, no, mummy, no, lemm no. That
was the same call. Yes, yeah, I went in for
like six minutes, thanks long minutes. The cool was bad enough,
(40:06):
but it was a discovery of where it originated that
was truly terrifying. One of my friends at a federal
law enforcement agency, I would't say which one, because it's
done is a favor to me. They took my phone
to try and see they could trace that call, and
they traced it back to Mexican military intelligence. The authorities
(40:30):
have the responsibility for solving these crimes. They are the
ones that need to name the killers and bring them
to justice. They have not done this and perhaps never
intended to do it. Diana had a virtuous mission. She
was trying to do what the police weren't doing. She
(40:52):
was trying to call out this wrongdoing and for someone
to come in and prevent her from doing that, how
dare you? Why would someone within Mexican military intelligence place
threatening calls to a US journalist trying to find out
who was killing the women in Huarez? And why were
(41:12):
they embarrassed by the international attention? Were they trying to
protect the killer? Could they be involved themselves? Well? In
two thousand and one, something happened that shocked Huarez and
shocked the world, and two men confessed to the crimes.
That's on our next episode. I'm as Voloshin and I'm Monica.
(41:36):
See you next time, Sela Felicia Forgotten The Women of
(42:20):
Juarez is co hosted by me Monica and me oswal Oshin.
Forgotten is executive produced by Me and Mangesh Hattikila. Our
producers are Julian Weller and Katrina Norvelle. Sound editing by
Julian Weller and Jacopo Penzo. Lucas Riley is our story editor.
(42:41):
Caitlin Thompson is our consulting producer. Production support from Emily
Maronoff and Aaron Kaufman. Music by Leonardo Heblum and Hakkabo Libermann.
Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Karla Tassara is the voice
actor for Paula Flores and Now the Best Man. I
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head into your local store for more great savings. Forgotten
is a production of ihump Media and unusual productions. Before
we start. This podcast contains accounts which some listeners will
find disturbing, but without them, the story can't be fully understood.
Please take care while listening. Previously on Forgotten, I said,
(01:55):
it's just that we're bringing a lot six daughters. I mean,
in this case, tells been how organized is it? Because
she was abducted, she was kept in a place, so
someone was guarding her. The important thing about these computer
scolls is that the young ladies were putting their personal
(02:18):
data into the questionnaires and their pictures were taken. Became
very easy for someone at another end. However, this information
was being forwarded to let this operate as a catalog,
you know, catalog of potential victims. When FBI Special Agent
in charge of El Paso, Padrick Crawford, arrived at the
(02:41):
border and took note of the women's murders in Juarez,
his first thought was at a lone serial killer was
at work there, perhaps even an American. But then this
connection emerged between Lili Alejandra Andrade and multiple other victims
to the Echo Computer School, and it started to seem
(03:03):
like whoever was killing the women wasn't acting alone. They
sent Dina Washington Valdez on a mission to find out
as much as she could about Echo. I learned two
things about the schools. They were used to get background
on potential victims, because you fell out a questionnaire your name,
(03:25):
where you live, your age, the neighborhood. You know, whether
you're a student or you work in the business somewhere.
And it was like impossible to find out who really
owned these schools. In fact, it was the FBI who
had gathered the initial tip off about the computer schools
(03:45):
through their informant network in Juarez, and according to the intelligence,
the computer schools were just the tip of the Iceberg,
there were other businesses in Juarez, whether women were held
after they'd been abducted. But because these crimes were happening
in another country, the Bureau couldn't take any direct action,
(04:05):
And so the FBI sent that information or to the
TWA authorities who had their primary jurisdiction or these crimes.
That information seemed extremely promising, the kind of intelligence that
could lead to arrests, to justice and to the end
of almost a decade of killings. The Mexican authorities did
(04:27):
go into the computer schools and took out a bunch
of documents and software and that sort of thing, and
they see, we're looking at this as possible evidence. So
where did that investigation lead. In this episode, we'll find out,
and we'll visit downtown Juarez, the place where many of
the young women were last seen alive. I'm as Voloshin
(04:51):
and I'm Monica. This is forgotten the women, as c
Star now Knowsquella Felicia Dina Washington Valdez has seen promising
(05:36):
leads evaporate into nothing before the physical evidence from Lilia
Lejandra's autopsy, the witnesses this time, she didn't want to
take any chances so she teamed up with a group
of fellow reporters to lead a parallel investigation into the
businesses named in the FBI intelligence the Echo Computer School,
(05:57):
where Lilia had been due to start class a few
days after she was abducted, but also several other businesses.
We did what we call a media raid for lack
of a better term. Several reporters and I went to
the places that were identified. These are we call them
in Spanish, places of concern. So we went from place
(06:19):
to place, asking why can we interview the owners here?
And this has been alleged. Girls are being screened here,
girls are being grabbed here. With the cameras rolling, the
business owners played along with Dinah's questions. The Echo Computer
School categorically denied involvement in the murders, but after Dinah
had gone, it was made clear to her that she
(06:40):
should never come back. How was that message that your
media attention was unwelcome conveyed to you? As reporters? We
were threatened with arrests. There were rest warrantsho shoot for
three of us. And this came from the police or
yes to all police, And it was because the owners
complained about accused of trespassing, but no, we would ask
(07:01):
for permission. It seemed clear that the Juare's authorities didn't
welcome Diana's assistance in their investigation. And what was striking
was that the businesses named by the informants were not
in some far flung reach of the city. They were
right in the heart of Juarez. Is downtown a place
that young women like Lida Alejandra and Sigario Gonzalez pass through.
(07:24):
Often you're sixteen, seventeen year old. He went downtown to
do narrant for your parents, or to try in some
new shoes, to apply for a job, and push, you know,
or grabbed and lured and you're murdered. To date, I
mean downtown whais continues the very center of the city.
(07:48):
This is where girls disappear without anybody seeing anything or
hearing anything. You know, it continues to be that way. Yes,
to this day, downtown Juarez is an extremely dangerous place
for young women. In January twenty twenty, a women's activist
called Isabel Cabaniers de Latore was shot in the head
(08:09):
there as she cycled home from meeting some friends at
a bar. But Huires hasn't always been this way. Moniqua.
You spent quite a lot of time in Juarez when
you were growing up. When I was a kid, my
memories of Watts are very pleasant and joyful. We would
go there after church with my great grandmother to a
(08:30):
restaurant that's maybe a mile away from the International Bridge
to have a big lunch there, and right before crossing back,
we'd stop at a gas station and pick up a
crate of glass bottled sodas that you couldn't find in
El Paso. But today I prefer to stay away from Watts.
(08:54):
I can't believe I'm saying it, because ten years ago,
as a young reporter, I would kind of scarf at
people who would tell me, Yeah, I don't go to
Huatus anymore, it's too dangerous, and I would get kind
of angry because I would say, there's still life over there,
There's still families, people, we should interact like what is
(09:15):
to me was the other half of my identity. To me,
it was like they were turning their back on our
sister city, and I have a different understanding of it now.
The downtown part of Juarez is close to the mouth
of the Paso del Lotte Bridge that connects the city
to El Paso. Migrants from Central America and elsewhere arrive
(09:39):
here on their journey to seek asylum in the US.
It's also one of the most dangerous parts of Ouarez,
but Monica suggested we visit to get about a picture
of the final moments of the dozens of women who
have disappeared there, seemingly into thin air. In the car
on the way over, we come up with a cover
story in case anyone asks us what we're doing there.
(10:02):
It's just the lookouts are also there. Just if they
get a bad vibe from your presence, Like if we
act casual and tell them, yeah, yeah, we're reporting on
the on the migrant caravan, that kind of um eases then.
But yeah, we're going around looking at the missing posters
of women and we're asking a lot of questions. They
(10:23):
might send someone to scare us off. It turns out
that it's not just police who threatened people who ask
too many questions. It's also the gangs who control downtown Houarres.
Their business interests range from human trafficking to drug dealing
to murder. So we're here in downtown Quattas and yeah,
(10:53):
on this street just behind us was where one of
the Echo Computer stores had an office and this is
this is ground zero for missing women in Hottus, right
down here. Who everyone is. Yes, you think there's a
lot of witnesses around, but also there's just so much
(11:14):
activity going on that you know, if someone gets into
somebody's car, even if it's by force, correct, I can
imagine coming here as a as a young woman from
somewhere else in Mexico arriving. I mean, it's such a maze.
Every weren't with you, We've even completely lost, that's a
(11:35):
good way to describe it. Downtown Hottis is like a maze.
This is where the unknown starts. This is where women
were seen for the last time, and after that the
mystery begins. We're on a street called Mina that's like
(11:56):
the central archery for most bus routes traveling east and
west across the city. This is the spot where Sir
Groo Gonzalez likely made her final transfer twenty years ago.
The sidewalks are a blur of shoppers and vendors selling
cheap jewelry and pirated DVDs. The smell of engine exhaust
mixes with food being cooked on open grills, and it's loud.
(12:21):
There's music coming seeming me from everywhere. But there's also
something else, more sinister, just beneath the surface. A brothel.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a it's a well it
says it's a Thangas nightclub, which is Thong's nightclub. And
I think there's a hotel on the upper floor and
(12:42):
the nightclub is on the lower floor. And it's on
the block right next to the fabric store where one
of the young women was last seen. Many cities have
red light districts Amsterdam, Tokyo, London, but what's striking about
(13:03):
Juarez is that there's no separation between places that sell
sex and the transportation hub and shops selling everyday necessities.
You're just seeing on that lamp post. So it doesn't
take long before we come across these missing posters. The
(13:29):
flyer for a missing woman. She looked maybe between fourteen
and sixteen years old. The black and white fliers bearing
pictures of young women's faces are not the only evidence
of what happened here. Also on lamp posts are pink
squares with black crosses overlaid. Each one has been painted
(13:52):
by a family grieving and lost daughter. Well it used
to be that every time the body of a murdered
woman was discovered in Huadis, the families of previous victims
and activists would come out and paint these crosses as
a reminder to the city that these murders were happening.
(14:18):
While most people in downtown Juarez hustle by on their way,
every so often notice a man standing still. I think
there's a lookout over here. So in a sea of
people moving back and forth, they're not hard to spot.
In Spanish, they're called alcornez hawks, birds of prey. They're
(14:42):
the on the ground intelligence for organized crime, gangs, cartels.
Just because the way the stands. Sometimes it's just a
sense that you get. I get a little bit nervous
about staying in one place for a long time, especially
(15:04):
just because we stick out, and especially when you start
looking at missing flyers. Wow, that's a guy that he's
trying to spook us an, Yeah, should we get out
of anyway? We did get out of there, but young
(15:35):
women like Sigario Gonzalez didn't have that choice. They had
to pass through every day, and it's devastating to think
that that daily commute could make them so vulnerable. It's
also easy to see why they might stop to sign
up for a computer class that promised the kind of
skills that might help them leave this place behind, and
(15:57):
in turn, how that aspiration could lead to to them
being spotted, selected, tracked, and ultimately killed. But I was
also curious about what it was like to be a
journalist in this environment, where you had to have a
cover story and bring discreet equipment just to ask questions
(16:18):
about missing young women whose fate was obvious from the
posters and the hand painted crosses adorning almost every other
lamp post. When we come back, we go to meet
a reporter who knows Huarez from the inside out and
whose colleague paid the ultimate price for asking too many questions.
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dot com. Leaving downtown Juarez one he can I get
back in the car to hear from one of the
(19:18):
city's most celebrated journalists about what it's like to report here.
We're headed to the local daily newspaper here in what
is called in Barrio to speak with Sandra Rodriguez Mieto
in Viario suffered three casualties during the drug war, two
(19:39):
reporters and one photographer. If I remember correctly, Sandra can
tell us about the fee there oh that community se
(20:00):
After a brief registration, we were shown upstairs to Sandra
Rodriguez Nieto's office. Sandra has won multiple international awards, including
the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting in
twenty fourteen. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. On
(20:23):
the walls of her office are some gruesome photographs, including
a dead man strung up by his arms and wearing
a pig mask. He was one of the thousands of
victims of the drug war. When Al Chapo's Sina Loa
cartel was moving in on Juarez in two thousand and eight.
The man's body is displayed as a message don't squeal.
(20:44):
Also on Sandra's wall is a map of the city,
and we pointed out the part of downtown Juarez where
we just come from. When's that street, Mina Mina, That's
where the bass stop and that's where a lot of
the girls were seen for the last time. We were
right there. Yeah, there's a very very very dangerous place
(21:07):
of the Syria. I wouldn't recommend you guys to go back. Yeah. Oh,
that's had certainly a song where they have lookouts. That's
how they control the area through intimidage. In the last decade,
a total of twenty nine journalists have been murdered in Mexico,
(21:27):
more than any other country, including Syria. Mexico's record for
solving those crimes is abysmal. Nearly all go unpunished, and
when journalists try to solve crimes themselves, they often become
the targets. Something Sandra is reminded of daily, actually armandous desk,
(21:47):
is that it's right there, and it's going to be
actually the tenth anniversary this month, ten years. Can you
imagine ten years has been like this? Right outside Sander's
office is the desk of a reporter called Armando Rodriguez,
preserved as he left it. His desktop computer is there
(22:10):
with dust covered keys, and there's also a dry bunch
of yellow marigolds left in memory of him. Armando Rodriguez,
who was our colleague. He was covering the crime bit
for twenty years in whities, so he knew everything and
he got killed in two thousand and eight when he
(22:34):
was taking his starter out to the school. What does
it feel like for you to sit here in your
office looking every day at an empty desk belonging to
one of your colleagues. The point is not living with
an empty list, but living with the idea of impunity.
It drives it crazy not to know who did it
and why. What's it like to work as a Do
(22:59):
you get ted? Do you get just to it? Yes?
What to the danger, to the stress, to the possibility
of getting killed, don't we That's where you and I
differ because my home is on the other side, where
I can go home and not worry about that, whereas
(23:20):
you live here the full day every day. Well, I
will say that you are being very humble because you
know that. I mean, you hear more stories, you hear mortyrror.
You might be more scared, and you keep on coming.
We live here, I know, I think, I know. The
place is dynamic, and I think I know more and
(23:41):
then makes me feel a little bit safer. But that's
how we protect ourselves. I think that's the story that
we tell ourselves. Yeah, we tell ourselves different versions of
the same story. Yeah. Sandro Rodriguez could take any assignment
she wanted, and yet she chooses to work here in Juarez.
(24:05):
She chooses to walk past Armando's empty desk every day.
That was something that was starting to stand out to
me about this story. How, in spite of the enormous
obstacles and dangers, reporters keep on pushing to get towards
the truth. I remember you telling me, Monica, about your
(24:28):
mother who really didn't want you to come to Juarez
to report, and I know you first went there to
report on the drug war. How did you first get
involved with reporting on the women's murders. I got an
email from one of the family organizations, basically a red alert.
There's a young woman who's I don't know, sixteen, seventeen
(24:53):
years old. She's missing and please help us find her.
We'd think something better has happened to her, and so
I I from from there. I reached out to the
girl's mother, Susanna, and met her at her house in
Wattas and told her take me down the route that
your daughter Lupita would take to come home every day.
(25:18):
This was just days after her daughter had gone missing,
and she was armed with her own stack of black
and white flyers announcing her daughter's disappearance. We got off
of the bus. We walked through the same streets in
downtown Wattas where you and I walked, handing out these leaflets,
(25:41):
putting them up on the lamp posts. And she walked
me down that street, Mina, and she said, this is
the street my daughter was last No, Mina Street is
the street you took me to. It's not far from
where Paula Flores and her family and the search for
Cigario back in nineteen ninety eight. Erie is not a
(26:04):
strong enough word for the similarities between Paula talking about
the search the night after Sagrario goes missing and Susanna
describing her family's search. This switch goes off, and nothing
else in the world matters, not their own safety, not
(26:24):
the safety of their living relatives. They have a one
track mission, which is to locate and rescue their daughters.
Back at her house in Lomas de Puleo, Paulaflores remembers
that April day in nineteen ninety eight when Sagario failed
(26:45):
to come home from work, and the desperate search that followed.
Every day, I would stand there at the door, and
that comforted me seeing her getting off the bus and
coming home. That day, like any other day, I was
waiting for her, and I began to despair when she
didn't arrive. We knew that she had worked and that
(27:06):
she had left at the time. Everyone left, but no
one saw anything. And I tell you that very night
we began searching at the Red Cross, in the hospitals,
on the streets, searching for her. You always san much.
That night, I grabbed all the photos I had of
my daughter. I would pass them out at gas station, saying,
I'm looking for my daughter. Can you please help me
(27:27):
find her. There were nights I would step outside and
I would shout her name. I would run around the
house and shout her name with all my strength in
the silence of the night. I felt she could hear me,
so I would call to my daughter. Paula and her
(27:51):
family searched and searched, but they didn't find Sagrario, and
they didn't get much help from the authorities. Either filed
the report, and initially they didn't accept it. They claimed
she had run off with her boyfriend. What they always
say even today. No, I told them, her boyfriend is
with us, helping us look for her. After so much,
(28:15):
insisting the police finally made up a missing report, but
they did nothing. They did nothing to look for her.
The police did nothing. The police did ultimately open the
missing person's report, but that was about as far as
they went. At one point they told Paula they couldn't
search for Sagario because they didn't have any available vehicles.
(28:39):
And it turned out this was a common experience for
families whose daughters had gone missing, so much so that
a protest camp of mothers formed outside the police station.
They weren't looking for her, they weren't doing anything. But
by then we started to get to know the people protesting.
(28:59):
At the sit in outside the police station, we met
this lady. She started asking us about Sagaradio's case while
my daughter was still missing. She was the one who
told us on that occasion that the Attorney General was
right there at the station in a meeting. She said,
you want to see him. I said, yes, I want
to see him and tell him to look for my daughter,
(29:20):
implore him, beg him. She said, we'll have to go
in by force. When we come back. The outcome of
that confrontation and Estechavescano, Ahuara's accountant, who began to create
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(32:02):
was one of the first people to really notice these
murders and disappearances. She was an accountant who moved to
Sulabhuadis and she joined the editorial board of Eddiadio. Esther
stood no more than five feet tall. She wore her
hair short and with these perfect golden highlights. Sometimes she
(32:26):
liked to wear pearls. And it turns out Esther was
a big fan of good whiskey and good wine. There
is a phrase in Spanish that I think describes Esther perfectly,
and that's which means small but fierce. She was a single,
independent woman who forged a career in post World War
(32:50):
two Mexico. And this was at a time when it
was unheard of for a woman to leave the house
before she was married, but she did it, and she
climbed the corporate ladder, working as an executive level accountant
in these multinational companies. She's just just a badass. I
(33:10):
love the way she lived her life. And she moves
to Wadis right before her fiftieth birthday, and so she's
reading the newspaper on a daily basis and This is
how she comes across these headlines detailing the disappearances and
murders of women all across the city. She's an accountant,
(33:33):
so record keeping comes natural to her, and so what
she does is she starts clipping out these articles from
the newspaper and compiling them into an archive. It's report
after report, narrating a variation on the same theme, where
the victim was found, her age, what she was wearing,
(33:54):
the autopsy findings, and Esther and a group of friends
started visiting the families of the missing and murdered women
that Esther would read about in the paper. They would
call attention to these cases by staging sit ins at
the governor's office. She didn't worry about being polite or
let's wait until tomorrow, or cross our fingers and hope
(34:18):
it turns out okay. No, she was a no nonsense,
no bullshit sort of person who got things done. In Esther,
Paula had found her match and an important ally. Together,
they forced their way into the police station, brushing off
officials and members of staff who tried to stop them,
(34:39):
and finally they got in front of the Attorney General,
Arturo Chaves. Chaves. Once we were in the first thing
I did was kneel down. I just asked him one question.
I asked him if he had any daughters, and he
said yes he did. Said then, I, oh, you can
(35:01):
put yourself on my shoes. My daughter is missing. I
was crying and begged him to look for my daughter.
I told him they were doing nothing to find her.
I remember that my husband tried to lift me by
the arm, telling me not to kneel. I said, no,
from my daughter, I'll kneel before anybody. To everyone's surprise,
(35:25):
Javis Chaves listened to everything Paula had to say, and
after some silence, he promised to help the investigation and
search for Cigaria. There was a moment of hope, but
it soon faded. Offered nothing but words if the authorities
always treated us like that. Powder took the investigation back
(35:48):
into her own hands and even went on to identify
a prime suspect. We'll come back to him for now.
The question is why was the official response so underwhelming?
Why the women like Paula and Esther have to become heroes. Well,
remember that evidence that authorities took out of the computer
(36:09):
school his Diana again. They just you know, when they
got the photo up. They see, we found nothing that
was it. You know. Not only did the authorities threaten
Diana with arrest for trespassing, she claims they didn't lead
a proper investigation into the computer schools themselves. And this
mirrored the way they treated the victims' families. There was
(36:31):
no help for these families. The authorities made fun of them,
defamed the daughters in many cases, calling them prostitutes. They
would say that they were out at hours of a
night when they should be at home, or that they
ran off with a boyfriend, the mythical boyfriend that didn't exist,
and it didn't matter if this was demonstrably untrue. Remember
(36:54):
in Sagario's case, the authorities said she'd probably run off
with her boyfriend, even though Andrews himself helf was actively
involved in the search. This became just a very routine
way for the authorities to explain what was happening. And
yet we know from practically more than ninety percent of
the murders. Most of the victims were out doing errands,
(37:17):
they were going to school, they were on their way
to apply for a job in the daytime. The thing
is victim blaming excuses the police from having to search
for the real culprit. It also reinforces this notion that
people can literally get away with murder, and it further
traumatizes the families. Diana told us about the case of
(37:41):
Irma Perez, whose daughter Olga went missing in downtown Juarez
in nineteen ninety five and who was discovered murdered later
that year. She had all this pain in her over
her daughter's death and the way the authorities treated the
investigation and the way they defamed her. And you know,
she says, you know, her daughter died once she was murdered,
(38:05):
and she died again when the authorities then started to
defame her and blame her and say all sorts of
things about her that were simply not true, in order
for the authorities to, I guess, justify their lack of investigation,
their inefficiency, their corruption. Corruption. It's a heavy charge. Incompetence
(38:34):
is one thing, but outright dishonesty that's something else altogether.
But Diana chooses her words for a reason. Back at
her house in El Paso, she pulls out an old
motor or less cell phone, the kind with buttons, and
to pull out antenna, and she starts to tell us
about a call she received while she was reporting on
(38:57):
the computer schools that haunts UH to this day. The
phoneus ringing. I pick it up. I don't recognize a
telephone number that it's coming from, but it's coming. It
appears from Mexico, and I hear this this noise in
(39:18):
the background, a newscast in English, and then all of
a sudden, there's this electric saw sound coming in. We
know that people get dismembered now over there. The other
(39:38):
thing that made that call scary was here in his
child voice saying mummy, no, mummy, no, lemm no. That
was the same call. Yes, yeah, I went in for
like six minutes, thanks long minutes. The cool was bad enough,
(40:06):
but it was a discovery of where it originated that
was truly terrifying. One of my friends at a federal
law enforcement agency, I would't say which one, because it's
done is a favor to me. They took my phone
to try and see they could trace that call, and
they traced it back to Mexican military intelligence. The authorities
(40:30):
have the responsibility for solving these crimes. They are the
ones that need to name the killers and bring them
to justice. They have not done this and perhaps never
intended to do it. Diana had a virtuous mission. She
was trying to do what the police weren't doing. She
(40:52):
was trying to call out this wrongdoing and for someone
to come in and prevent her from doing that, how
dare you? Why would someone within Mexican military intelligence place
threatening calls to a US journalist trying to find out
who was killing the women in Huarez? And why were
(41:12):
they embarrassed by the international attention? Were they trying to
protect the killer? Could they be involved themselves? Well? In
two thousand and one, something happened that shocked Huarez and
shocked the world, and two men confessed to the crimes.
That's on our next episode. I'm as Voloshin and I'm Monica.
(41:36):
See you next time, Sela Felicia Forgotten The Women of
(42:20):
Juarez is co hosted by me Monica and me oswal Oshin.
Forgotten is executive produced by Me and Mangesh Hattikila. Our
producers are Julian Weller and Katrina Norvelle. Sound editing by
Julian Weller and Jacopo Penzo. Lucas Riley is our story editor.
(42:41):
Caitlin Thompson is our consulting producer. Production support from Emily
Maronoff and Aaron Kaufman. Music by Leonardo Heblum and Hakkabo Libermann.
Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Karla Tassara is the voice
actor for Paula Flores and Now the Best Man. I
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