The Murdered Women of Juarez, Mexico
(Carlos Osorio:Toronto Star Photo)
Eight crosses stand at Campo Algodonero in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. In this field the bodies of eight murdered women were found.
Along the Mexican border, where free-trade factories hum with the sounds of cheap labour, nearly 400 women and girls as young as six have been fund murdered in the past decade. Some point to the work of a serial killer, while others fear the slayings are the results of a sadistic new sport. About one-fifth, maybe more, were maquila workers.
Maguilas are the foreign-owned assembly plants in the city's free-trade zone, numbering about 300. They rushed in to Mexico's border free-trade zones, taking advantage of the cheap labour, minimal taxes and easy market to the U.S. and Canada when their legitimacy was enshrined in treaty by free trade in 1994. Among them are such global heavy-weights as: Honeywell, DuPont, General Electric, Kenwood, Delphi, Philips and Electrolux, all in Juarez. In an increasingly integrated world, auto parts - for example - are assembled by companies with plants in Canada, U.S. and Mexico, including Lear Corporation, Johnson Controls, TRW Inc., Cooper, Siemens, Cummins Diesel. (None of the big automakers release data on the origin of parts per vehicle. It is hard enough to track a tomato from Mexico, let alone a car component.)
"...Canadians should be concerned about how things they consume are being made and under what conditions...." said Bill Murnighan, national representative of research for the Canadian Autoworkers Union. He urges car-buyers to ask questions about outsourcing and to demand that auto giants improve living and working conditions for Mexican employees, who make $4.50 a day and subsist in shantytowns with inadequate hydro, water and sanitation.
How many more deaths of these 'women of Juarez' will it take to declare a national emergency?
Read this article from today's edition (Sun. Feb.19.2006) of The Star here
posted by Annamarie at
7:57 PM
0 comment(s):
Post a comment
<< Home