Minneapolis hosts women’s rights activist from Mexico – The Minnesota Daily

Esther Chavez Cano stood before a few dozen women, looking out over the skyscrapers on a gray day in downtown Minneapolis.

In a calm but determined voice, Chavez Cano asked the group for help in establishing a women’s center in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and described the atrocities that led her to found the center.

Over the past 10 years, Chavez Cano has documented 274 female murder victims in Mexico’s fifth-largest city, which borders Texas.

On Tuesday, another woman’s body was found in Ciudad Juarez, she said. In 10 years, as many as 4,000 women have disappeared.

A local committee brought Chavez Cano to Minneapolis before she travels to New York next month, where she will receive an international award for her efforts in defense of women’s rights.

She will present a documentary and speak at 1:30 p.m. Saturday at Coffman Union. Admission is $5.

Although many call her a heroine, 69-year-old Chavez Cano does not appreciate the praise.

“When these women regain their self-esteem and start fighting, they are the women who need to be recognized, not me,” she said.

Chavez Cano began her work as a journalist in 1982 in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. She began writing about the thousands of women living in poverty and working in factories.

“When I saw the poverty, I couldn’t believe it,” she said, speaking through an interpreter. “That poverty is always around us.”

Chavez Cano said people have to walk long distances to work and many build their homes with waste from factories.

In addition to long working days in factories, many women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, live in fear, Chavez Cano said.

There are gangs and drug cartels operating in the city, she says, but poverty forces many to resort to violence.

“People have moved here to live on the border and maybe have a shot at the American dream,” she said. “They move to survive, but they’re never going to get out of poverty.”

Chavez Cano heard about the killings when she worked at the newspaper and, along with a fellow reporter, spoke to authorities about the problem.

But police did little to help, focusing their enforcement and investigative efforts instead on car thefts and drug trafficking, she said.

According to Chavez Cano, most of the documented murder victims had been raped.

She registered 93 victims of serial killers because of the mutilation patterns on their bodies.

The rest were killed by their boyfriends or husbands, she said.

Chavez Cano only began documenting the killings in 1993, but they soon attracted the attention of international human rights organizations and media around the world.

“I feel more support from other countries than from my own country,” she said. “Nobody in the (Mexican) federal government wants to investigate the crimes because they say that intervening violates the sovereignty of the state.”

After a CNN reporter asked her in 1998 why she wasn’t doing anything to help women still dealing with domestic violence, Chavez Cano founded Casa Amiga the following year to provide medical, psychological and legal assistance to abused women.

She also plans to open a shelter for women who are victims of domestic violence.

“When she saw the terrible atrocities, she just kept going,” said Liliana Espondaburu of Casa de Esperanza in St. Paul.

Chavez Cano said her dream is to write a book about the female victims of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

“The discrimination in the world is against women who are the poorest,” she said. “People have the idea that women are less valuable, and the worst of this discrimination is experienced in Ciudad Juarez.”