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Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon dispatched troops to take on the cartels in early 2007, 35,000 people have died in Mexico's drug war. About 8,000 have died in Ciudad Juarez alone. The gun battles on the streets and the severed heads have overshadowed the ghostly spate of killings of women. There have been 978 murders since 1993, when the state began to keep account of victims of femicide, according to Juarez daily El Diario. Making a Killing contends free trade is the culprit, positing that the existence of "a cheap, disposable labor force" contributes to the lawless climate in the city.
The North America Free Trade Agreement went into effect in January 1994, opening Ciudad Juarez up to an influx of factories, for companies like Delphi, General Motors, Philips, RCA and General Electric. The low-paying jobs making TVs, refrigerators and seat belts for American cars required nimble workmanship and drew young women from all over Mexico and Central America.
In the 1970s and '80s, during the maquila boom, women flooded the labor market, outnumbering men 5 to 1 on some assembly lines. Over a roughly 17-year period, nearly 1,000 of them ended up dead, one third found raped and mutilated. Many of the murders will never be solved in a city where very few trials are prosecuted.
Making a Killing says the violence stems from the companies' "fatal indifference." Workers eke out a living in colonias — shantytowns without water or electricity — and rise in the dark to earn on average $5 a day at the city's 330 tax-free assembly plants. The maquiladora worker is no more than "an insignificant cog in the wheel of production," contributing author Elvia Arriola, a professor of law at Northern Illinois University, states. She accuses the corporations of a "fatal indifference" that encourages "general hostility toward poor working women." This chain has been carried up by some activist coalitions in Juarez, who make the link between the violence and the "neoliberal economic policies that both exploited factory daughters and left them unprotected," as Melissa Wright, a women's studies professor at Penn State University, notes in one essay.
Although Making a Killing is a brutal and striking reminder of the terrible fate hundreds of maquiladora workers have met, it ultimately falls short of making the case that free trade brought about femicide. The alternative explanation — almost a suggestion that the victims deserved their fates — is no more satisfying.
In the context of hyper-religious traditional Mexican society, the authors say, the cases of the dead women were rarely investigated. It was the old dichotomy of the Madonna and the whore — women who defy gender rules to take factory jobs, dramatically shifting the social fabric, somehow also lose their innocence. They are part of "an economic project which replaced men with women, and locals with southern migrants."
The authors point out that some of the victims of gender-based violence were dismissed at the time of their killing as maqui-locas, living the double life of a border metropolis, factory worker by day and sex worker by night. Many of the victims were unknowns, recent arrivals without family. Like the Juarez-El Paso border itself, a "spiritual no-man's land," the victims' morals were viewed as hazy, the ferocity and grotesqueness of the crimes limitless. Assembly workers were disassembled in the sprawling Chihuahua desert.
That female workers in Ciudad Juarez are often poorly treated has been well documented by the U.S. Department of Labor and Human Rights Watch, among others. But neither statistics nor judicial evidence substantiate the theory that free trade is the root cause of the violence against women.
Rather, as the authors themselves point out, Mexico's justice system has repeatedly failed to prosecute the crimes, and the victims, presumed to be whores because they were favored over men for factory jobs, are not the priority of a society steeped in machismo.
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