| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | December 2008 
Women's Activist Wins Mexico National Rights Award
 Associated Press
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Mexico City – A women's rights activist who first drew attention to the slayings of young women in the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez was named the winner of Mexico's National Human Rights Award on Thursday.
Activist Esther Chavez has been working with battered and mistreated women in Ciudad Juarez since the 1990s, when she launched a campaign to make the world pay attention to the deaths of mostly poor murder victims.
"Her brave work in denouncing the crimes was key to awakening society, authorities, public opinion and the entire world to the cases of violence against women in Ciudad Juarez," President Felipe Calderon said as he presented the award.
More than 100 mostly young women were strangled and their bodies dumped in the desert or vacant lots in Ciudad Juarez starting in 1993. The killings appeared to taper off by early 2005, but many of the victims' relatives say they doubt the real culprits have been caught.
In 2005, the then-special prosecutor for the Ciudad Juarez killings, Claudia Velarde, said prosecutors had solved 80 percent of the killings.
Chavez says women continue to be murdered in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, and the city is now also in the grip of a wave of killings linked to the drug trade.
"Events of extreme brutality define the daily life of my city," Chavez said. "Law enforcement, even with the necessary police investigations and punishment for crimes, will never solve the root problem, which is social inequality, poverty (and) a lack of educational opportunities." |
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