Suffering and Salvation in Cuidad Juarez

Nancy Pineda-Madrid

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780800698478
• eBook ISBN: 9781451415087
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

1

Suffering—A Social Reality

Suffering brought on by structural evil makes demands of us. It demands that we¹ recognize the ways in which our collective decisions can create an increased likelihood that the most vulnerable among us will suffer and suffer mightily. Yet it likewise asks us to consider how we see the suffering of others.² How we perceive the suffering of others can make an enormous difference in whether we see, or not, its origins in social structures of human making.

When suffering is situated within a social, political ambit, as is done by liberation and political theologians (for example, M. Shawn Copeland, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Ivone Gebara, Johann Baptist Metz, and Jürgen Moltmann), then the public relevance of theology takes on flesh. Liberation and political theologies concern themselves not only with the hopes, pains, and fears of humanity, not only with the intellectual import of age old beliefs, but also with the current state of society and the world, the injustices present therein, and the suffering that results. In these articulations, theology continuously strives to be more self-aware and self-critical about the nature of its larger impact. Needless to say, this impact is understood not merely in terms of personal decisions but, just as importantly, in terms of the infrastructures we create—social, political, and economic—that give shape to our world. Consequently, these theologies judge themselves based on their contribution to the furtherance of the reign of God in our social and political life, in this world as well as the next.

What is more, our souls weigh in the balance in our response to suffering. This statement reflects not only a personal truth, to be sure, but a social truth as well. How our communities respond to suffering matters. Through our collective choices, we can become more or less humane, more or less responsive to God’s grace.

This book asserts that salvation is realized in the world, albeit partially, only when we act in a manner that makes the essential unity of the whole human community more visible. Said another way, community makes possible the realization of salvation. However, the Christian tradition has always affirmed the personal nature of salvation, a claim this book does not attempt to supplant. Nonetheless, an exclusively individual understanding of salvation distorts the meaning of the doctrine of salvation and is, in the end, inadequate. We must affirm both individual and social salvation. Liberation theologians, like Gustavo Gutiérrez and Jon Sobrino, have extended our understanding of sin to include social sin. If sin is both individual and social, then so must be salvation.

This first chapter argues that if we “read” the suffering of the feminicide in a way that invites our critical awareness of how we appropriate unjust suffering, then we “see” more transparently the horrific evil of this collective and personal tragedy. In turn, the urgency of the question of salvation comes to the fore, a topic that I will begin to address in chapter 2.

In order to develop this claim, this chapter begins with a particularly horrific example of suffering, the feminicide in Ciudad Juárez, precipitated by a wide array of social circumstances of complex origin. This first section attempts to understand what this phenomenon is, some of the reasons it came about, and what is at stake in our response. The feminicide must be considered among the most physically violent assaults on the humanity of girls and women and consequently a frontal attack on God’s salvific intention for all human beings, women and men alike. The next section attends to how this kind of suffering might be “read” so as to make clear the ways in which far too often the suffering of the most vulnerable—in this case poor, dark-skinned females—is presented as unavoidable and less affecting. It is too often depicted as an unfortunate, capricious happening, one far removed from social structures that we have a hand in sustaining if not creating. Third, this chapter engages in a “reading” of the suffering brought on by the feminicide, a reading that encourages a more critical awareness of its larger significance. Finally, this chapter concludes with an acknowledgment of the ways in which this reading of the feminicide needs to go further. It must take our social imaginal world into account.

Feminicide in Ciudad Juárez

Gender-based violence against women has a long, tragic history. Social conflict, war, and societal change have been and continue to be waged on many fronts, particularly through violent acts against women’s bodies. Such violence has taken the form of sexual torture, rape, disappearances, and murder, to name but a few. Indeed, twentieth-century examples can be found in the conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Vietnam, Argentina, Yugoslavia, El Salvador, Peru, Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, Congo, and Mexico, among other countries. Gender-based violence has come under greater scrutiny in recent years due, in part, to the work of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice, which successfully argued before the “newly constituted International Criminal court (ICC) at the Hague”³ that “Gender crimes are incidents of violence targeting or affecting women exclusively or disproportionately, not because the victims of such crimes are of a particular religion or race, but because they are women.”⁴ As Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano have pointed out, the last decade of the twentieth century has seen a rise in such crimes.

Among feminist scholars of the law, the social sciences, and theology, as well as among feminist human rights activists, the terms femicide and feminicide have been used to refer to the murder of females because they are female. Frequently, scholars use these two terms interchangeably. Even so, as the discourse has evolved (and continues to evolve) distinctions between the two have emerged. Anthropologist and sociologist Marcela Lagarde has pointed out that femicide and homicide are synonyms, femicide specifying the murder of women. But the term femicide is insufficient to speak of the tragedy in Ciudad Juárez because, like homicide, it does not refer to systematic violence based on gendered power inequalities. Further, as Fregoso and Bejarano explicated, femicide is a term that has been developed by feminist scholars in the United States, especially by feminist sociologist Diana Russell.⁵ Thus, discursively it reflects the movement of a concept from “its usage in the English-language (North) to a Spanish-speaking (South) context.”⁶ The term feminicide is taken from the Spanish feminicidio, a concept first documented in the Dominican Republic in the 1980s by feminist activists who used it in their campaign to bring violence against women to an end. Lagarde introduced this term into scholarly discourse in 1987. Feminicidio, and thus feminicide, linguistically reflects the way that the Spanish language creates a compound out of two terms with Latin roots, that is, femina, meaning “female,” and caedo, caesum, meaning “to kill,” with an i used to link them.⁷

My choice of the term feminicide reflects not only this history laid out by Fregoso and Bejarano but also their definition, which follows:

Building on the generic definition of femicide as “the murder of women and girls because they are female” [the definition advanced by Diana Russell], we define feminicide as the murders of women and girls founded on a gender power structure. Second, feminicide is gender-based violence that is both public and private, implicating both the state (directly or indirectly) and individual perpetrators (private or state actors); it thus encompasses systematic, widespread, and everyday interpersonal violence. Third, feminicide is systemic violence rooted in social, political, economic, and cultural inequalities. In this sense, the focus of our analysis is not just on gender but also on the intersection of gender dynamics with the cruelties of racism and economic injustices in local as well as global contexts. Finally, our framing of the concept follows Lagarde’s critical human rights formulation of feminicide as a “crime against humanity.”⁸

According to this definition, feminicide builds on femicide but now includes the phenomenon of impunity for the perpetrators because the state is implicated, either explicitly or implicitly, and makes clear that this crime transpires on a large scale, that is, it is widespread and rooted in the structural inequalities that render some women and girls acutely vulnerable. To this I would add one further descriptor, namely, that the killings are exceptionally brutal and vicious, a point exemplified in the case of Ciudad Juárez and several of the other cases listed above.⁹

Most journalists and other investigators agree that the Ciudad Juárez feminicides began in 1993, with one of the first victims being identified as Alma Chavarría Fávila, who was brutally raped, anally and vaginally. Some journalists state that she was a five-year-old girl, while others claim she was a young woman. Her body revealed that she was severely beaten and eventually murdered through strangulation.¹⁰ In April of 2009, the El Paso Times reported that since 1993 more than six hundred girls and women have been tortured, raped, and murdered, most between the ages of ten and thirty. Many more are missing.¹¹ “Nearly all of the victims [have been] poor, young, and slender, with dark flowing hair and warm, reddish brown complexions.”¹²

Juárez, a city of over two million inhabitants, sits directly on the U.S.-Mexican border alongside El Paso, Texas. Only a fairly insignificant Rio Grande river separates the two cities. During the past sixteen years, repeated investigations (local, state, national, and international) into these murders by “the authorities” have ended in failure. One early telling example is found in the experience of forensics chief and criminologist Oscar Maynez Grijalva. He began his investigation of these crimes in 1994 only to have his reports consistently ignored by his superiors in the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office (Procuraduría General de Justica del Estado de Chihuahua). In time, his superiors instructed him to plant evidence to incriminate innocent men. When he refused, he began receiving threats and eventually was forced to resign.¹³ Journalists, scholars, critics, and public officials have all offered a wide range of explanations for the feminicide, which collectively indicate conflicting possibilities.¹⁴ Rosa Linda Fregoso has posed a list of questions illustrating the spectrum of theories:

Are they committed by a single or multiple sex serial killers? By the police- and state-sponsored paramilitary groups? By the “Juniors” (sons of the elite)? By traffickers of illegal human organs? By an underground economy of pornography and snuff-films? By a satanic cult? By narcotraffickers? By unemployed men envious of women workers? By men expressing rage against poverty? By men threatened by changing sex roles? By abusive spouses or boyfriends?¹⁵

Fregoso has further noted that these widely divergent explanations have served to fuel the sense of terror and trauma that currently grip Juárez, making the people’s capacity to resist this evil far more difficult.

The following story of seventeen-year-old María Sagrario González Flores helps develop in some detail one example. Sagrario’s story is fairly typical of the victims. In 1996 the González family moved from the interior state of Durango to the Juárez area in search of a better life. By 1998 Sagrario, along with her father, Jesús, and sister Guillermina, were employed at a maquiladora.¹⁶ Managers at this plant had Sagrario change her shift to early morning from the overnight shift, which she, her father, and older sister had all shared. This meant that Sagrario would have to travel alone and leave home at 4:00 a.m. to make it to work on time. The poverty of the Gonzálezes forced them to live in an outer lying area of Juárez in a one-room home thrown together with tar paper and wood, a home without running water.

On April 16, 1998, Sagrario’s shift ended at 3:00 p.m., yet at 10:00 p.m. she had not returned home. Frantic, Jesús took his oldest daughter, Guillermina, and the two went looking for Sagrario. They quickly figured out that she was not with her boyfriend, who at 10:00 p.m. was at the same maquiladora plant working his own shift. They went to the local jail in downtown Juárez seeking help from the Juárez police, asking that they commence a search for Sagrario. Jesús’ request was met with a patronizing response and the suggestion that Sagrario had run off with her boyfriend. The police made it clear that they would do nothing in the effort to find Sagrario, even though over the previous five years Juárez had a rapidly growing list of missing young women who turned up tortured, raped, and dead.¹⁷

Having had no luck with the Juárez municipal police, Jesús González then sought help from the district attorney’s office and the state police. These offices were charged with handling the investigations of the string of murdered young women in Juárez. But this office, too, rebuffed Jesús, claiming that he had to wait twenty-four hours before he could file a missing persons report. He argued that he was looking for his daughter alive, not dead, but to no avail. After checking the local area hospitals, Jesús and his son Juan began their own search for Sagrario along the path she typically traveled. Fairly quickly the family sought the help of neighbors, who organized themselves and began a search in the desert where other victims had been found.

After the family had been searching for two weeks, they learned that a body had been found in the desert area called Loma Blanca. Sagrario’s mother, Paula, took her son Juan and w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Suffering—A Social Reality
• Chapter 2: Suffering, Social Imaginaries, and the Making of Evil
• Chapter 3: Anselm and Salvation
• Chapter 4: Responding to Social Suffering—Practices of Resistance
• Chapter 5: On the Possibility of Salvation
• Notes
• For Further Reading
• Index