Murder in Juarez: Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Global Assembly Line

On July 7, 1995, seventeen-year-old Silvia Morales left for school and disappeared. Her body was found two months later. In February 1999 thirteen-year-old Irma Angelica Rosales was sent home from her factory job for having left her station. Later that day her body was found in a drainage canal. In September2001 nineteen-year-old Luna Guadalupe, a student in business administration, disappeared on the way to a friend's house on a Saturday afternoon. The next month twenty-year-old Claudia González arrived to work four minutes late, and the doors of the maquiladora, or foreign-owned assembly plant, were locked. She never returned home. Both Luna and Claudia were found in November in a shallow grave with six other women—all eight women had been raped and strangled.1