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     News: Police say tests show Ciudad Juarez victim was raped

    Sexual ViolenceAP WorldStream English: CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico_A woman whose body was found in an irrigation canal only a few feet away from the U.S.-Mexico border had been raped, a state prosecutor said Thursday.

    The woman, who was about 25 years old, was found Wednesday by a passer-by near an area of northwest Ciudad Juarez where other victims in a string of sexually motivated killings have been found.

    Manuel Esparza, of the government's special prosecutor's office for crimes against women, said the victim, who has not been identified, had been dead for a few days before she was found.

    He refused to reveal the cause of death and said no details about the crime would be revealed as to not interfere with the investigation.

    Esparza said more than 93 people living in the area where the body was discovered have been questioned but no suspects have been detained.

    Police said the woman was found in some bushes and was wearing navy blue pants and shirt. Neighbors in the area told reporters the body was partly nude when it was discovered.

    The case bears some similarities to about 100 eerily similar murders over the last decade in which young, slender, dark-haired women have been sexually abused and strangled to death, and their partially-clothed bodies dumped in sparsely populated areas west of the city.

    State investigators said the victim found was slender, with dark, straight hair and had a scar from a C-section. However, the site where the body was found appeared to be closer to the city's center than where bodies of past victims have been found.

    The federal Attorney General's Office estimates that a total of about 340 women have been killed in various ways since 1993 in Juarez, a city of 1.3 million across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas.

    There have been more than a dozen arrests, but only one man _ an Egyptian resident of the United States _ has been convicted of killing one of the earliest victims.

    reported the victim had been strangled, the same method used in the other sexually-motivated killings, but Esparza refused to comment on that report.

    One newspaper reported the victim had needle scars and that police believed she may have been a prostitute, comments that outraged women rights activists who said investigators were trying to stigmatize the victim . [I think it is a mistake to say we don't information that a woman may have been a prostitute to be revealed. For some it may cause them to dismiss the murder of a woman, but for most of us, this is the way we are able to track the murders of women and children in prostitution. It would be a mistake to pretend she had a job like any other woman. It hides crucial information about how women are victimized and how perpetrators choose victims. - Donna]

    "If we can prove Esparza made those comments we're going to sue him. Enough is enough," said Ester Chavez, director of Casa Amiga, a nonprofit center that helps rape and abuse victims in Juarez. "The media too needs to have some ethics and not disseminated baseless information."

    Esparza denied making the comments.

    Chavez said the killing of the woman may be a signal to the new state government.

    "We have seen this before," Chavez said. "Every time there is a change in government there is also a woman killed."

    The discovery of the body coincided with the first visit of Jose Reyes Baeza, the state's new governor, to Ciudad Juarez.

    Reyes Baeza, who was sworn in as governor on Sunday, pledged greater cooperation between officials in the state of Chihuahua, where Ciudad Juarez is located, and a special prosecutor appointed by President Vicente Fox to get the bottom of the killings.

    >




         myth-heard by men
    Contadct with menstrual blood or menstruating women will sicken a man and cause persistent vomiting, kill his blood so that it turns black, currupt his vital juices so that his skin darkens and hangs in folds as his flesh wastes, permanently dull his wits, and eventually lead to a slow decline and death. -The Mae Enga of New Guinea (20th Century)

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    That never wrote to Me... -Emily Dickinson

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