Teresa Rodríguez, an Emmy Award-winning journalist at Univision, recently published her first book -
The Daughters of Juárez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border. The book jacket tells us that "
The Daughters of Juárez promises to be the first eye-opening, authoritative nonfiction work of its kind to examine the brutal killings and draw attention to these atrocities on the border. The end result will shock readers and become required reading on the subject for years to come."
Throughout the book, Rodríguez weaves narrative details about the last days of the murdered women with investigative reporting into the causes of the horrific violence that claimed their lives. She told us about the process of researching and writing
The Daughters of Juárez in the following Q&A.
Juego de Palabras: You have been reporting on the murders in Juárez for Univision for over ten years. How did you first learn about the murders? What drew you to continue investigating the story?Teresa Rodriguez: Actually, it was towards the end of 1998 that I first heard about the crimes. I was researching story ideas for our news magazine series of specials,
Aquí y Ahora con Teresa Rodriguez, when someone in our office mentioned they had read something about women being murdered in Cd. Juárez in Mexico. I began to look into it and could not believe the number of murders, (there were a little over 200 at the time), and the brutality behind the homicides, (how the women were raped, tortured, beaten, their bodies mutilated, many found with their left nipples bitten off and strangled with the shoelaces from their sneakers.... all of them left to die in the desert wastelands that surround this city). At first, it seemed that there was a serial killer or killers at work due to the similarity of the victims' appearance (they were young, slender, had long dark hair, full lips and almond-shaped eyes and they were all poor) and the modus operandi of the criminal, which authorities did not disclose completely given the fact that the investigation was still open. However, the more we researched, the more we became aware of the machista attitude that prevailed, the indifference on the part of the authorities towards the victims' families, the police corruption and ineptitude, the death threats directed towards those who tried to get to the bottom of these crimes and what can only be described as an apparent disregard for human life, especially the lives of young, poor women.
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