The pink crosses in the desert of Ciudad Juarez

Pink-painted wooden crosses sunk into the ground. These are the cemeteries for women in the Juarez Valley desert that have been created by mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, for the remains of victims of enforced disappearance, human trafficking and feminicide when they are found. Raped, tortured and cruelly mutilated. Crosses form pantheons, on which are engraved the names of murdered women, messages from their families and floral decorations, which are an act of consolation for the relatives and a plea for justice because the rate of impunity is so high. They go so far, even among the authorities, as to disqualify the victims, often young people of humble class, dismissing them as prostitutes and drug addicts. Anthropologist Julia Monárrez Fragoso has therefore proposed the definition of “systemic sexual feminicide”.

Throughout Ciudad Juarez, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, also widely referred to as the land of narcos, where thousands of women have disappeared in the last thirty years (some estimates speak of more than two thousand). The pink crosses have become a symbol in the fight against feminicides, so that the world will not forget, be ashamed and will intervene. In the photos (Wikimedia Commons), here is the memorial in honour of Marisela Escobedo, who was the mother of a murdered girl and was killed because she demanded justice, on the opposite page the cemetery where the bodies of eight women were found in 1996.