Federal Probe Launched in Juarez Killings

MEXICO CITY —  Bowing to pressure at home and abroad, the Mexican government Friday installed a special prosecutor to investigate the unsolved killings of hundreds of women over the last 11 years in Ciudad Juarez.

The swearing-in of Maria Lopez Uribe, 40, who has served as a federal prosecutor in several Mexican states, ended months of insistence by President Vicente Fox and his aides that the series of homicides in the border city is primarily a matter of state, not federal, jurisdiction.

Human rights groups around the world and families of the slain women have charged that corrupt and incompetent police in Chihuahua state mishandle or destroy evidence in the killings, fail to question witnesses and try to pin the crimes on innocent people.

Federal authorities stepped forcefully into Juarez this week after a confessed hit man for the city’s drug-smuggling cartel implicated state police officials in the slayings of 11 men whose bodies were found buried behind a house. Thirteen state cops are being held for questioning, and four others, including a commander, are being sought.

The decision to appoint a special prosecutor for the women’s deaths was announced this month. The timing of Lopez’s swearing-in underscored the government’s sudden resolve to clean up one of Mexico’s most lawless cities.

Speaking at the ceremony, Atty. Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha said the killings of women in Juarez have “wounded the conscience of the nation.”

Legal niceties over criminal jurisdiction, he declared, “should never again be a pretext for impunity.”

At least 370 young women have been slain since 1993 in Juarez, a city on the Texas border, Amnesty International reported in August. The attorney general’s office recently put the figure at 258. By all accounts, about 100 of the victims had been raped.

Mexican officials speculate that some of the slayings are a result of domestic violence, but others are the work of serial killers, drug gangs or a small group of well-connected local men who murder for sport. Despite more than a dozen arrests, however, just one person has been convicted, and for a single murder.

The new prosecutor said she would begin a case-by-case review in search of legal arguments to declare federal jurisdiction, such as the involvement of organized crime. Lopez also vowed to prosecute officials if she finds “evidence of inefficiency, negligence or tolerance [for the crimes] on the part of public servants.”

Meanwhile, she and other federal officials will push for a constitutional amendment declaring any systematic violation of human rights -- she put the Juarez killings in that category -- a federal crime.

Juarez’s well-organized groups of victims’ relatives reserved judgment on the new prosecutor, who has specialized in car theft and drug-trafficking cases, most recently in neighboring Coahuila state.

Leaders of the groups said they had never heard of her and were not consulted on her appointment. Some doubted she was prominent enough to take on entrenched local interests and win.

“Does she have the stature? The personal qualifications? The political backing? The trust?” asked Mariclaire Acosta, a leading human rights activist and former government official. “Mexico has had special prosecutors before. They come in with big announcements and then get mired in bureaucracy, infighting and threats and end up achieving nothing.”