More than 325 women have been murdered in the free-trade boomtown of Ciudad Juarez in the past decade. Faced with government incompetence and corruption, people are rebelling.

The body of another murdered woman was found late last month in the Mexican industrial hub of Ciudad Juarez, dumped behind some shrubs in the squalor of the Anapra neighborhood, a ramshackle hodgepodge of corrugated tin and cardboard shacks on the sludge-washed banks of the Rio Grande. Her hands had been tied, and the evidence suggested she had been raped. The body was so badly decomposed that investigators calculated that she'd been dead for seven months.

However horrific the details, they were numbing in their familiarity. The body of a woman who had died in similar circumstances was found in the same dusty lot a couple of months earlier. The bodies of eight women were found in a lot not far away a little more than a year ago. So many women have been murdered here in the past 10 years that there is no reliable count. Most experts place it close to 325, an average of 32 a year, nearly three every month. At least 90 of the deaths are believed to be the work of one or more serial killers. Hundreds more women have simply vanished.
[more: salon.com]