Mexican President Vicente Fox accused the media Monday of rehashing the story of a 12-year spate of women’s murders on the U.S. border, minimizing a tragedy seen as among the nation’s worst crime outrages.
His comments came just weeks after two girls, aged 7 and 10, were sexually assaulted and murdered this month in Ciudad Juarez, an industrial city across from El Paso, Texas, where more than 340 women and girls have been strangled, battered and stabbed to death since 1993, 17 of them this year.
“We must attend to the case of Juarez and we are, but it must also be seen in its proper dimension. These murder cases have been solved,” Fox said, accusing the press of overplaying the story.
‘Unfortunate declarations’
“We are offended by what has happened in Juarez, but nor is it right to be reheating the same 300 or 400 cases,” he told reporters, in what the left-wing opposition party was quick to call Fox’s second big gaffe this month.
Women’s groups say most of the Juarez murders are still unsolved and there are questions about how convictions were obtained in many of the cases that have been closed.
Fox is still experiencing fallout after asserting this month that Mexican immigrants do jobs that “not even blacks want to do there in the United States.” That prompted American civil rights activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to visit Mexico and chide him for what they said was a racist comment.
“Today President Fox has once again made one of his most unfortunate declarations,” said the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, one of two main opposition parties in Mexico.
“His declaration is not only flippant and irresponsible but it is offensive to the families of the women murdered ... What’s more, his ignorance is proverbial and now deserves a place in the Guinness Book of Records,” the PRD said in a statement.
Flawed justice
The United Nations has called the Ciudad Juarez murders emblematic of rampant rights abuse and flawed justice in Mexico, and a U.N. panel accused Mexico of “grave and systematic violations” in its handling of the cases.
Last week, Amnesty International cited the killings and impunity in Ciudad Juarez as a sign of Fox’s “betrayal” of human rights.
Many of the murders have been particularly brutal, with bodies dumped in the street or desert. Victims’ families have complained of gross police negligence.
On Monday, Fox’s new attorney general called the Ciudad Juarez murders a top priority and announced that special prosecutor Maria Lopez, appointed last year to clean up botched local investigations, was being replaced.
Lopez investigated some 100 public officials for negligence, though none has yet been punished.