Jane Fonda leads march to force action against Mexican city's women-killers

The serial murders and disappearances of young women and girls in the bleak Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez were transformed this weekend from a forgotten tragedy into an international symbol.

The grieving mothers and local activists who have been unsuccessfully trying to draw attention to the murders for years found themselves enveloped in a haze of pink banners and scarves, battling through a media circus shoulder to shoulder with Jane Fonda and Sally Field.

"One of the horrors is feeling that you don't matter, that what happens to you and your family has no impact, there are no ripples, you just don't count," Fonda told the Guardian. "Part of our coming here is to show these mothers that we are hearing and we do care."

For a march through the city centre on Saturday busloads of American students and feminists, and a smattering of other nationalities, joined the locals and the film stars in the Spanish chant "Ni Una Mas" - Not One More.

The day of action culminated in a special performance of the cult play The Vagina Monologues, which forms the centre of the V Day travelling campaign, which highlights violence against women.

Its author, Eve Ensler, bounded centre-stage at the end of the show, and before a cheering crowd proclaimed Juárez to be the "pilot project" for "vagina warriors and vagina-friendly men".

"We are about making sure Juárez becomes the new capital of non-violence towards women around the world," she said. "Let's think about Juárez as the victory place."

Ciudad Juárez is not used to inspiring such sentiments.

There have been about 100 of these murders of women here since 1993, when the often mutilated bodies first began appearing in the wastelands of the sprawling city of assembly-for-export factories, narco-mansions and shantytowns across the Rio Bravo from El Paso, Texas.

The victims have been young, pretty, slim, dark and above all poor, vulnerable and easily ignored by the state authorities responsible for murder investigations.

Many of them disappeared on their way to or from school or factory jobs, and were raped and tortured before they were killed and dumped.

Less systematic but often equally brutal killings of other women, frequently the result of extreme domestic violence, have increased the number of victims in the past 10 years to more than 300. The dozens of disappearances suggest that even more have died.

In the past couple of years the nightmare has spread south to the neighbouring city of Chihuahua.

The lack of precise numbers is one factor which has left most in Juárez assuming that the state police are at best totally inept and at worst directly involved in the killings.

The latter theory gathered momentum this month when the Mexican FBI arrested a gang of police officers for allegedly acting as hitmen for the local drug cartel, killing 12 people who were found buried under a trafficker's suburban home.

The city buzzes with tales of women's bodies misidentified, their clothes switched, DNA tests hidden, physical evidence missing, case files used for bonfires for the homeless, and confessions extracted from innocent people by torture.

Oscar Maynez, a former forensics chief in the state prosecution service, tells of one case in which the accused was set free when his forced confession could not be squared with the fact that he was in jail on the day of the murder. But the two accomplices named under pressure remain behind bars.

Few in Juárez believe in the guilt of the motley collection of bus drivers, gangsters and an Egyptian-born chemist currently in jail for the murders.

"We are in a Kafkaesque situation, the absurdity of the system at work," Mr Maynez said.

He saw how the investigation worked from the inside between 1999 and 2001. He resigned after being asked to help frame two bus drivers for the murders of eight women found in a mass grave in November 2001.

It is clear, he says, that an organised and rich mafia is behind the murders, and in Juárez that points to drug traffickers, politicians and businessmen.

He discounts widespread theories of organ trafficking and serial killer tourism, but refuses to give more details of his own hypotheses in the hope that a serious investigation will one day be carried out.

In the past year a highly publicised Amnesty International report and visits by a UN human rights commission and a delegation of US congresswomen has changed latent international concern about the "Juárez feminicide" into direct pressure on President Vicente Fox to do something about it.

A new federal prosecutor took office last week promising to review all the cases and to prosecute any abuses of power she may find.

Juárez activists doubt that she has the power to cut through the self-protection of the corroded state investigation, but they recognise her presence as the best hope of justice they have had.

To some of the relatives, hope after so much despair seems too much to bear. In a press conference before the march, one of the mothers broke down and screamed at the prosecutor that Juárez needed "actions and not words".

In search of the truth

Brenda Esther Alfaro, 15, disappeared one September morning in 1997 on her way to her first day of work as a domestic servant. She walked from her home in a poor suburb down a busy street to take a bus and nobody, it seems, saw anything happen to her.

Her family say the police made few efforts to search for the girl, and suggested that she had run away with a secret boyfriend.

Outraged, they still show off her glowing grades and say she was going to work temporarily to help out after her mother, Esther Luna, and her drug-addicted father separated.

Three weeks later workers stumbled over a young woman's body in an abandoned football field on the other side of town. Mrs Luna says she knew the raped, stabbed and strangled corpse by a dog bite on her calf. Lorena Alfaro says she knew by the knee-length school socks and a T-shirt she had lent her younger sister.

But it took the family five years to persuade the authorities to hand over the body. DNA tests were lost, there was endless red tape and a total disregard for the family's pain. Brenda was finally buried in 2003, the investigation into her death in effect shelved.

Mrs Luna, who suffers periodic blackouts, says she will never give up campaigning for justice for the victims of the violence: her only hope of making Juárez safe for her other daughters.