"THE MAQUILADORA MURDERS, OR, WHO IS KILLING THE WOMEN OF JUÁREZ?"

On Days of the Dead, 2003, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, in co-sponsorship with Amnesty International, will be hosting an international conference on the unsolved, ten-year crime wave of kidnappings and murders of over 300 women, many of them young, mestiza maquiladora workers, in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.

The conference will take place from October 31 - November 2, 2003, to mark a decade since the murders started, and will bring together scholars, journalists, artists, activists, writers, and policy specialists from the U.S., Mexico, and Europe, as well as families of the victims in a series of roundtable discussions and presentations.

The purpose of the conference is to facilitate more scholarly inquiry into the crimes, but also to examine the social, political, economic, and cultural infrastructure in which those crimes continue unabated. The press has described these crimes as "Jack-the-Ripper style serial killings." The bodies were immolated, mutilated, dismembered, or beaten beyond recognition. At least ninety of those murdered women were also raped. In February 2003, four new bodies were discovered, one a six-year-old girl with multiple stab wounds and her eyes removed.

The conference will include a screening of Lourdes Portillo's award-winning documentary, "Señorita Extraviada," a keynote speech delivered by Eve Ensler, founder and artistic director of V-Day, celebrity appearances, literary presentations, a silent auction, and a multi-media student exhibition of written, aural, and visual materials collected in a year-long undergraduate research internship. Starting this summer, a conference web site will provide information on the conference and a chronology of actions being taken around the world to end the crimes, as well as an updated comprehensive bibliography of related online and print documents.