His few writer friends, those who came to visit him at the arts department, had no idea what was happening in Santa Teresa, although news of the dead women reached Mexico City at a steady rate, and Sergio imagined they probably didn’t care much what was happening in some distant corner of the country. His fellow reporters, even those on the police beat, were indifferent too. One night, after making love with a whore, as they lay smoking in bed, he asked here what she thought about all the kidnappings and all the bodies of women found in the desert, and she said she had only a vague idea what he was talking about. Then Sergio told her everything he knew about the dead women and described the trip he’d taken to Santa Teresa, and why he took it, because he needed the money, because he’d just gotten divorced, and then he talked about the killings, which he, as a newspaper reader, had followed, and about the press releases from a women’s organization whose initials, WSDP, he remembered, though he’d forgotten what they stood for, Women of Sonora for Democracy and the People?, and as he was talking the whore yawned, not because she wasn’t interested in what he was saying but because she was tired, which irritated Sergio and made him say, in exasperation, that in Santa Teresa they were killing whores, so why not show a little professional solidarity, to which the whore replied that he was wrong, in the story as he had told it the women dying were factory workers, not whores. Workers, workers, she said. And then Sergio apologized, and, as if a lightbulb had gone on over his head, he glimpsed an aspect of the situation that until now he’d overlooked.
—Roberto Bolaño, 2666
I’m ashamed to admit that unlike the whore, I did not catch Sergio’s mistake, even after many, many pages describing all the victims to date, who they were, where they worked, and what happened to them. They were indeed all workers, or students, completely “innocent.” And there is the diabolical twist of logic, the categorization of women as either Madonnas or whores, the former being essentially nonexistent, the latter being fair game for abuse, humiliation, and punishment for their supposed misdeeds. Is it possible that this logic is tucked away in the darkest corners of my mind, of all minds? It is something all too familiar to us here in British Columbia after the disappearance of dozens of women in Vancouver. For years the police ignored the missing person reports because the victims were prostitutes and drug addicts, and mostly native. They said the women were shiftless and probably just left town. Their friends and family knew different, but they were also ignored. Some of the street people even suspected who it was, but the police didn’t want to know. It took street protests to finally shame the police into investigating and arresting the guy. And it’s only today, 8 years after the killer was arrested, that the government has initiated for an inquiry into the police investigation (or non-investigation). So it’s not just Mexico. It’s everywhere, this notion that women are guilty and guilty women are disposable. It has to stop.
It is a sad confirmation of the lack of concern about murdered women that Wikipedia has only a few sentences on the Ciudad Juarez murders, with no information past 2005. Does anyone care?
