dec 2009
ESTHER CHAVEZ, 73
Esther Chavez | Activist shed light on women's killings
BY OLIVIA TORRES
Associated Press
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Esther Chávez, a women's rights activist who first drew attention to the brutal slayings of women in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, has died, her nephew said Saturday. She was 73.
Hector Chávez Arbizu said his aunt died of cancer on Friday and would be buried in Ciudad Juárez, where more than 100 women were strangled and their bodies dumped in the desert or vacant lots in a string of killings that began in the 1990s.
Esther Chávez founded Casa Amiga, a shelter for female victims of violence in this city of 1.5 million across the border from El Paso, Texas.
She worked tirelessly to denounce the decade-long string of killings and to demand that the deaths be properly investigated. Most victims were young, and many worked at border assembly factories known as maquiladoras.
Authorities in Chihuahua state initially downplayed the problem, and many of the crimes remain unsolved.
EXPOSED PROBLEMS
To the end of her life, Chávez remained highly critical of police efforts and said the total death toll from the wave of violence against women in the city was in the hundreds.
``The death of activist Esther Chávez represents a loss for the fight for human rights and the rule of law in this country,'' the Mexican newspaper La Jornada wrote in an editorial Saturday. ``She made the problems in Chihuahua visible on the international stage.''
In 2008, Chávez won Mexico's National Human Rights Award. And a month before she died, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a ruling criticizing Mexico for a lack of diligence in investigating the slayings of three of the victims.
The court said it found irregularities in the probes, including the mishandling of evidence and the coercing of innocent people to confess.
The court said Mexico should pay a total of $800,000 in compensation to the victims' families, solve the killings and correct its procedures for investigating the slayings. Mexico has agreed to be bound by the court.
JUSTICE IN DOUBT
In 2005, the then-special prosecutor for the Ciudad Juárez killings, Claudia Velarde, said prosecutors had solved 80 percent of the killings, but many relatives doubt the real culprits have been caught.
While so-called ``profile'' killings involving young women strangled and left in desert dumping grounds tapered off around mid-decade, Ciudad Juárez is now in the grip of a wave of drug-cartel violence that has cost about 2,000 lives in 2009.
Chávez is survived by her nephew and her brother.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/obit...y/1400236.html