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'They have been tortured and – in every case – raped'

Since 1993, up to 400 women have been sexually assaulted and murdered in the Mexican city of Juarez and while the attacks continue to this day, the police are no longer even bothering to investigate them.

Valerie Shanley reports

Campaigner Marisela Ortiz

Norma Andrade holds a picture of her 17-year-old daughter Alejandra who was brutally raped and murdered

Activists on the streets of Galway

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IT was the end of another 12-hour shift at one of the hundreds of maquiladoras (factories) in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez. Teenager Lilia Alejandra Garcia Andrade was exhausted and although it was St Valentine's Day, she just wanted to get home. Like every other night, she set off on the long, deserted walk along unlit wasteground towards the bus stop. But she never made it home.

Norma Andrade became increasingly anxious as dawn broke with no sign of her daughter's arrival. She rang the police and reported Alejandra missing. Four days later, the police received an emergency call. People living near wasteground reported seeing a young woman being raped and beaten by two men in a parked car. But no patrol car was dispatched. A second call was made. An hour later the police arrived, but by that stage the parked car had disappeared.

Alejandra's body was found on the same wasteground two days after the reported attack. The forensic report said she had been held for at least five days before being strangled. Her body showed evidence of sexual and physical assault. She was 17 years old.

Her 2001 murder followed a relentless pattern which began in 1993 and continues to this day in this city in the Chihuahua region, just south of El Paso. That there is no precise figure on the number of murders and kidnappings is put down to the inaction of the authorities. But most campaigners say at least 400 women have been murdered, while thousands more have disappeared. Many of the victims were employed as cheap labour in US-owned assembly plants which are populated around the border shantytowns. "They are poor, young, mainly migrants to the city looking to improve their lives in the factories," campaigner Marisela Ortiz told a reporter at the height of the murders in 2003. "And when they are found, they have been tortured, mutilated, bruised, fractured or strangled and – in every case – violently raped."

Juarez, once revered as the home of the margarita cocktail, is now spoken of in the context of "feminocidio" (femicide). Among the world's murder capitals, it's dubbed "murder city", with relentless killing sprees by rival drug barons. But it was the arrival of so many impoverished young women from all over Mexico in the early 1990s to work long hours in the maquiladoras that highlighted disturbing attitudes and brought a chauvinistic dimension to rising crime figures.

"From the maquilas comes the culture of dispensability that underwrites the murders," says Ortiz, describing the attitude of machismo that prevails. "So what if a woman is murdered, 10 or 100? There are always plenty more." Domestic violence wasn't recognised as a criminal offence until 2002, unless, according to the authorities, "wounds were visible for longer than 15 days".

But it is the behaviour of the authorities in the reporting and investigation into the disappearance and murders of women that means another Spanish phrase is continually heard throughout Juarez – "El Encubrimiento" (the cover-up).

Up until 2006, when the Mexican federal government formally announced it had dropped its investigations into the killings of the women, there had been no shortage of suspects – which included policemen. Over the years, a number of men were charged in what was initially believed to be the work of a sole serial killer. In 1999, 52-year-old Abdel Latif Sharif, an Egyptian-born engineer employed in one of the maquiladoras, was convicted for the 1995 rape and murder of Elizabeth Castro Garcia (17). But the police acknowledged that in the year he was jailed, over 500 people had vanished in the previous 11 months and "an important percentage of them are female adolescents".

The murders continued. In 1996, the police has also arrested members of a gang known as the Rebels, but were unable to link them directly with the killings. Three years later, four bus drivers were arrested, but they alleged they were beaten and tortured by the police and there were no convictions. In 2001, the police claimed two more bus drivers confessed to the murders of eight women, but again, their defence lawyers were able to prove the confessions were coerced as a result of torture.

The FBI was involved in the investigations at one stage, on the invitation of the Chihuahua State Attorney General's Office (PGJE). Serial killer profiler Robert Kessler persuaded his colleague Frank Bender to spend time in Juarez in 2003, in order to identify the rising number of anonymous murder victims. Bender, described as a forensic sculptor and artist, reportedly slept with the skulls of murdered women in a Juarez hotel in the belief it would inspire the reconstruction of their faces.

Imagining the faces of the estimated 3,000 women who have vanished also forms the core of an art exhibition currently running in Shoreditch, London. In many of the works in '400 Women', artists only had the sketchiest of photographs or postcards on which to base their interpretations. Along with Amnesty International and the Esther Chavez Collection, the exhibition is also supported by Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May Our Daughters Return Home). Norma Andrade and Marsiela Ortiz are founding members. Their office and cars have been broken into on several occasions with documents and confidential material stolen – including papers relating to the murder of Andrade's daughter, Alejandra.

The 2010 Amnesty International Annual Report says the abduction and murder of women and girls in Juarez continues. What should the women of Juarez do? One campaigner pushed the authorities for advice, but the official police response was for women not to dress provocatively or walk the streets. "If you are sexually attacked, pretend to vomit. That will be repulsive to the attacker, and he will probably flee." It's advice unlikely to have helped Lilia Alejandra Garcia Andrade and the hundreds of other young women who will never come home.