Journey to Juarez

For at least a decade, South Florida-based Emmy Award-winning journalist and TV news anchor Teresa Rodriguez has been gripped by a self-described obsession. This fixation is a true-crime story that is as shockingly horrifying as it is anguish-wrenching head-in-yourhands stupefying.

It involves the horrendously grisly murders since 1993 of hundreds of women and girls in Mexico, just a stone’s throw south of the United States border. And the slain often brutally raped, beaten and killed until almost unrecognizable continueto mount to this day.

Says Rodriguez, the main anchor and correspondentfor the television-news magazine program “Aqui y Ahora” on Univision, the leading Spanish language network in the U.S., “I have wanted to be a voice for all of these victims and their families.”

She has been.

And in no small way, as her clarion call continuesto percolate  among Americans and others around the world who are often ignorant about the unsolved and ongoing femicide in Juarez, a Mexican city just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Tex.

Her arduously researched and chillingly graphic book, “The Daughters of Juarez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border,” published last year by Simon & Schuster’s Atria division, is a blistering human-rights-violation expose that’s widely considered the most authoritative account of violence and injustice in Juarez.

The book, ultimately written with collaborative help from journalist Diane Montane and truecrime author and former New York Times correspondent Lisa Pulitzer, is more horrifying than a Stephen King novel and it’s all true, including heartbreaking stories and gruesome details. The paperback version is due out this month.  “It was a tough journey,” says Rodriguez, who spent years investigating the Juarez murders, speaking to law-enforcement personnel, civilrights leaders, victims’ families, journalists, suspects and more.

Her outrage palpable, she adds, “As a journalist, jyou try to remain somewhat removed from what you cover to remain objective, but I’m also a mother,” says the Coral Gables resident with two sons, 16 and 21. “When you see these mothers and families whose daughters have been murdered or have been missing, it’s so painful. They are poor, they get ignored and they don’t get answers.”

For the past 15 years, more than 400 youngwomen in Juarez have been brutally murdered many raped and mutilated in a manner revealing a pattern. Their bodies have been dumped or buried in vacant lots or the vast dessert that rims the city, which like other Mexican border areas, has a disturbingrate of criminality.

Who is behind these killings, amid a machismo culture of male domination, remains a question mark. Some arrests have been made but that hasn’t plugged the tide, leaving young women in Juarez in a perpetual state of terror.  Theories and testimony point to a variety ofpossible perpetrators, from serial murderers, drug dealers (the drug trade is widespread) and copycat criminals to even members of the Juarez police force, which has been cited as corrupt, inept, indifferent and perhaps collusive.  Some close observers haven’t ruled out possible involvement by American citizens, just a handful of miles away. American business interests, for one, mushroomed in and around Juarez beginning in 1993, the year femicide victims first started to be discovered.

Significant local and international efforts including on the part of human-rights groups, advocacy organizations and United States officials have taken up the cause of the dead and missing Juarez women, and incremental progress in recent years has been made. But despite the outcry and involvement, says Rodriguez, “that we are no closer to an answer has been a question that has gripped me for years You have a situationwhere there’s so much poverty, corruption, negligence, ineptitude and powerful families who have the money to control and call the shots.  Some powerful people must be behind these crimes or they would have been solved by now.”

Rodriguez has covered countless stories throughout her 20-plus-years-career among them, AIDS, immigration, prostitution, heart disease, land mines in Nicaragua and Hurricane Andrew, for which she was part of a news team that garnered a Peabody Award in 1992. She has won not a few, but 11 Emmy Awards eight fornews-oriented specials and three for investigative and feature reporting.