Mexican Widows Fed Up by Constant Violence

CIUDAD JUAREZ (March 31) -- Norma Ramos learned from the evening news in August that her ex-husband had been slain in front of his home in this rough, drug-ridden city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. She immediately began to worry about her 18-year-old son. "I told him I didn't want him to claim the body," she said. "But he said, 'It's my father. I'm going.' "

Ramos feared her son wouldn't come back. She knows that in Ciudad Juarez, a focal point of Mexico's sprawling drug war, the shooting often continues even after the supposed target has been hit. The killing goes on in funeral homes, emergency vehicles and even morgues.

About 600 people have been killed so far this year in Juarez, which also suffers under high rates of robbery, rape and extortion. Residents and businesses are fleeing the city as the violence escalates, despite the military troops and federal and local police who patrol Juarez's neighborhoods and industrial parks.

The women left behind in Juarez are haunted, and often targeted. They drive out of their way to avoid stoplights. They run small businesses during the day, but shutter the doors at night. They meet in shade-drawn rooms in a gesture of solidarity, to share methods for getting through another day of household chores and gloom.

Ramos, a collections agent for a U.S. bank, said she believed her ex-husband, who said he worked as a bodyguard, likely worked for one of the cartels battling over Juarez, a lucrative gateway to the U.S. drug market.

She said she was afraid of what her son knew. "He wants to avenge his father," she said. Her ex-husband, whom she won't name for fear of making a target of her son, was among 26 people hit the night of Aug. 17, when the killing in Juarez surpassed its normal feverish pitch to a monthly average of 12 corpses per day.

That month, Ramos reluctantly gathered the family around her ex-husband's casket at a funeral home. "It was only me, my children, my sister and her husband, and one of his cousins," she said. She didn't want to publicize the funeral, worried someone with an unsettled score might appear uninvited.

"They're cutting down women like palmettos," said Patricia Moreno Martinez, the widow of a municipal police officer. The mayor's office confirms that the number of women crime victims has risen, particularly when they are in the front seat of the target's car. Moreno Martinez, like many in the city, said the bulked-up military and police presence has done little for the city. "I am seeing that nothing has changed. Everything is the same," she said.

The statuesque widow joined other women rendered widows by Juarez's violence in founding an association in 1998 called Unidos por Dolor, or United by Pain. The group fought and won the right for the widows of slain officers to receive their pensions. The association's slogan: "We have life because we can do good."

Laura Segura, 39, is among 15 regular members of the association. She still cries when she talks about her husband, Juan Miguel, a 35-year-old police officer killed on duty in Juarez five years ago. He and his partner were shot at by four fugitive brothers from the Mexican state of Durango, Segura said, only one of whom was captured and thrown in jail. The other three were killed the next day, presumably by rival drug traffickers. Her husband's partner survived that attack, but was gunned down last November.

Segura wants to date but vows never to remarry. "We have seen it all -- too much," she said. "I'm living through the same things as all the women in Ciudad Juarez."

United by Pain is a faint note of hope, or at least of solidarity, in an otherwise bleak setting. The association makes consolation house calls for the newly widowed, and tries to help the dispossessed and the elderly. At a recent meeting, Moreno Martinez proposed using the group's dues to help buy a coffin for a 13-year-old boy who was killed last week in Juarez. The father of the slain boy didn't have the money to bury his son.

"I think this would be a very nice project for the association," Moreno Martinez said. But stopping the violence is beyond the group's scope, and apparently everyone else's.