The Femicide Machine examines the murders of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Elaine Graham-Leigh asks whether the murders are peripheral or central to capitalism

In the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, the murder rate for women is higher than anywhere else in Mexico or the US. Rodriguez estimates that 400 women have been murdered in the city since 1993; others have put it at almost double that. That there can be such uncertainty about the numbers is an indication of how poor the authorities’ response has been to these crimes. For all these murders, only three people have been arrested or convicted. Two of these may have been tortured by the police into confessing, and the third died suspiciously when in police custody.

While the Mexican authorities have put their energies into denying that there is anything unusual happening in Ciudad Juarez, or into blaming it on domestic violence or the war on drugs, as Rodriguez says, the murders have become ‘a cyber-event’ (p.83), well-known across the western world. Perhaps for this reason, Rodriguez does not provide a straightforward account of the developing awareness of the murders and of the various theories about why they might be happening. Instead, the book is an at times illuminating and at times simply elusive consideration of the context in which all these murders of women have been perpetrated.

For Rodriguez, this context includes the drug gangs and the war on drugs, the machismo culture present throughout Mexican society, the maquiladora factories belonging to multinationals, which attract young women to Ciudad Juarez in search of work, and the disastrous effect on Mexico’s economy of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. These are factors which have been identified by other commentators on Ciudad Juarez, but Rodriguez seems to be reaching for an understanding of the murders which sees them as first and foremost the result of a system; the femicide machine.

This is not to say, of course, that individual cases do not have their own specific causes. It is unlikely that all the murders have been carried out by the same person or groups of people, nor for the same precise reasons. An FBI source told Rodriguez that behind the killings were ‘at least one or more serial killers, a couple of drug dealers, two violent and sadistic gangs and a group of powerful men’ (p.74). However, recognising this can lead to a problematic understanding of what the murders in Ciudad Juarez mean.

One interpretation of the fact that a multiplicity of different murderers of women seem to be flourishing in Ciudad Juarez is that this is simply because the city authorities are unable or disinclined to stop them. In other words, that this is what men will always do to women unless they are prevented. The definition of femicide (or feminicide), the murder of women because they are women, can include this understanding that the murder of women by men is part of patriarchy, and that patriarchy is the basic reason why it occurs.

Thus applied to Ciudad Juarez, the maquiladora put young women in a vulnerable position by attracting them to the city to work, and sometimes compelling them to go to particularly dangerous areas in order to get to work. The drug gangs foster a particularly toxic brand of machismo which encourages men to brutalise women, and the collapsing Mexican authorities can only respond by torturing a few suspects into false confessions (if they see the murder of poor women as important enough to investigate at all). So the chair of the 2004 Special Commission on Feminicide called the situation in Ciudad Juarez ‘a crime of the state which tolerates the murders of women and neither vigorously investigates the crimes nor holds the killers accountable … feminicide is when the state offers women no guarantees and creates no conditions of security for their lives’ (K Staudt, Violence and Activism at the Border: Gender, Fear,and Everyday Life in Ciudad Juárez. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press; 2008). Femicide could therefore happen anywhere there are not the conditions to prevent it.

Rodriguez certainly does not disagree that the failure of the Mexican state is a key factor in the Ciudad Juarez murders. He points out how the economic ‘reforms’ imposed on Mexico under NAFTA resulted in a lost decade from 2001-2010 in which ten million Mexicans were forced to leave in search of work, and which imposed ‘the war machine, crime machine and femicide machine’. He sees Mexico now at a turning point, in which the options are ‘the evolution of a new, unforeseen model of organisation, or the further devolution into a state with no functional order at all’ (p.97). However, the collapse of public authority in Ciudad Juarez seems here to be more than simply the condition which allows an ever-present tendency towards femicide to become reality. This is not a book which presents explicit arguments, but it is possible to use the information here to construct an understanding of the murders in Ciudad Juarez which sees them not as an essential result of patriarchy, but as the active creation of free market capitalism. In this sense, ‘the femicide machine’ can be seen as a contradiction in terms; an organic result of neo-liberal processes rather than an expression of patriarchy.

Ciudad Juarez is in many ways a company town, in which what public infrastructure there is, was created for the benefit of the corporations which have their factories there. Outside the factory areas and the gated communities of the city’s elites, the majority of residents live in streets with no sewerage, street lighting or sometimes even running water. Public transport is minimal, so factories put on their own buses to transport their workers from the main residential areas to their jobs. In some ways, it is possible to see Ciudad Juarez as one gigantic, badly-maintained company dormitory, in which the only reason for people to exist is their use to the corporations for whom they work. With Mexico’s economic difficulties providing a plentiful supply of potential new workers, the reproduction of labour for these companies is unproblematic, so there is no systemic reason why they should object to some of their young, female workers being used in other ways.

Rodriguez cites the example of one murdered woman, Alejandra, who was abducted by a gang on her way home from work in a maquiladora, and who her mother thinks was selected for abduction because she had appeared in promotional material put out by the company. The suggestion here is that Alejandra somehow got onto a list of women who the gang might wish to abduct; that there was some connection between her use in company advertising and her selection for rape and death. It is not necessary to suggest that there is anything so definite as a company policy to see how the murder of young female workers could function as part of a general interrelationship between the corporations who site their factories in Ciudad Juarez and the gangs who proliferate on the exchange of drugs and guns across the US border.

For Rodriguez, Ciudad Juarez’s role as a border town is also fundamental to an understanding of why so many women there are murdered. The comparison between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, its twin town on the Texas side of the border, are indeed telling: while Ciudad Juarez is renowned worldwide for its murder rate, Rodriguez says that El Paso is the second safest town in the US. However, understanding Ciudad Juarez’s problems as arising from its liminality can be to underestimate its centrality within capitalism.

Rodriguez argues that for the US, cities like Ciudad Juarez can be a bridge, a wall or a garbage dump, the latter representing ‘the most realised product of a sinister ecology that converts a developing nation’s cities into garbage dumps or “backyards” for the developed nation it shares a border with’ (pp.58-9). The observation that cities in the poor world function, literally or figuratively, as garbage dumps for the rich world is demonstrably correct, but this is not all that is happening in Ciudad Juarez.

Ciudad Juarez is an attractive site for the maquiladora factories because the availability of lots of poor potential workers keeps wages low and conditions cheap. This is not incidental to late twentieth and early twenty-first century capitalism but central to the globalisation of the system, in its search for ways of maintaining the rate of profit. In the same way, the destruction of public authority in the city was not an accidental by-product but a result of the free market ideology which holds that spending on public services is undesirable, and which was imposed on Mexico under NAFTA. The lesson of the femicide in Ciudad Juarez is not that this is the dark underside of capitalism, nor that this is the result of unchecked patriarchy, but that this is what free market capitalism looks like. Ciudad Juarez is not the rubbish dump, it is the centre of the system. It is where the logic of austerity takes us.