
	:: UCLA TODAY Home
	:: Contact Us

	:: UCLA HOME
	©2004 The Regents of the University of California

VOL. 24. NO.2 SEPTEMBER 23, 2003

The price of free trade is dead women

BY alicia gaspar de alba

The North American Free Trade Agreement has created an epidemic of murdered women on the U.S.-Mexico border. Since May 1993, around the time that NAFTA was being signed and implemented, the first six bodies of what would become a heinous crime wave of kidnapped, tortured, raped, mutilated and murdered women were found on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from my hometown, El Paso, Texas.

Ten years later, the body count has now exceeded 320; indeed, Amnesty International’s most recent report on the Juárez murders concludes that 370 is a more accurate count of the dead. Many of the victims were young, poor, brown women, between the ages of 14-18, lured or recruited to the border with the promise of a job at a maquiladora, an American- or foreign-owned factory.

In Juárez alone, approximately 300 maquiladoras — more than 70% owned by Americans — employ about 220,000 workers, more than 50% of them women. And hundreds more arrive daily from remote areas, not prepared for the dangers of border life or the tragic exploitation that awaits them at work: 10- to 12-hour work shifts for $3 to $5 a day. Working conditions that include noise pollution, toxic fumes, sexual harassment by management, manic production schedules and the constant threat of dismissal for not meeting quotas, for being late, for getting pregnant. Demeaning beauty pageants disguised as work incentives and morale boosters. Pregnancy testing at the time of hiring, enforced birth control and the strict monitoring of their reproductive cycles through menstruation checks.

To leave from or return to the desert shantytowns where they live in cardboard and plywood shacks, the women must walk in the early morning or late night through the pitch-black desert to reach paved roads and buses. Safety is a commodity they can’t afford.

Nor, it seems, can their employers, despite the huge profits they make on products assembled with cheap “mano de obra” (labor). They can’t afford to screen bus drivers to make sure they’re not drug addicts or sex offenders. They can’t provide monies to the city to incorporate the squatter colonies so workers can have the most basic of services, such as running water and electricity. Employers can’t even afford to provide some measure of economic assistance to the orphans of victims who were their own employees.

To bring these critical issues to the attention of UC researchers, especially those who study NAFTA, immigration, border politics and economic development, I am organizing a major international conference hosted by the Chicano Studies Research Center and cosponsored by Amnesty International. The conference will investigate but also go beyond the question of “Who is killing the women of Juárez?,” to explore in greater depth the larger issues of why this particular demographic of workers at American-owned factories is being targeted and killed in such brutal and dehumanizing ways.

Gaspar de Alba is associate director of the Chicano Studies Research Center and associate professor of Chicana/o studies and English. For information about the conference: www.sscnet.ucla.edu/chavez/maqui_murders.