Ciudad Juárez Femicides

In 1993, activists in Ciudad Juárez began documenting the serial murder and disappearance of women and girls — many of them young maquiladora workers — whose bodies were being dumped in peripheral desert lots. As the count rose and police investigations failed, the protesters became activists, coined the term “femicide” for what they were witnessing, and demanded state response. Over the following three decades the pattern expanded across Mexico.

The Juárez femicides are historiographically important because they predate the Calderón drug war (2006–) by more than a decade, demonstrating that gendered lethal violence in Mexico cannot be explained solely as a byproduct of cartel conflict. They are the empirical anchor of Melissa Wright’s necropolitics framework, which argues that maquiladora capitalism, structural patriarchy, and narco-violence are mutually constitutive rather than parallel phenomena — and that the politics of meaning around Mexican violent death has always been fought on gendered terrain.