Gunillocentrism – web diary of a freelance journalist

In the Swedish database Mediearkivet, I have found a strange news piece from Aftonbladet, originally published on March 21.

You can see the entire text, in Swedish, pasted below (it is not available online, so I am clearly violating copyright laws here). It deals with the “femicide” in Ciudad Juárez, an industrial city in northern Mexico, on the border of Texas:
Map: El Paso/Juárez

In translation, Aftonbladet’s title reads: “Here, Hundreds of Dead Bodies are Dug Up”.
The first sentence in the lead: “Here, FBI digs up dead women’s bodies from mass graves that have been found in Mexico.”
The text starts: “Mexico is staggered by the discovery of at least two mass graves, where at least a hundred women’s bodies in each have been found.”

Can somebody please help me guess where this information comes from?

I have looked all over Internet and Lexis Nexis to find texts with similar facts that might have been wandering around.
This blog mentions the discovery of three (3) bodies, one month earlier:
Mass Grave Discovered
That’s the closest I have come so far.
Also, more than five years ago, corpses of men that had been involved in cross-border drug-trafficking were found in the same area:
The Christian Science Monitor, December 2, 1999
But, there just is no evidence of enormous mass graves with hundreds of female bodies…because there are none.

The rest of Aftonbladet’s text is largely correct. Tragically enough, more than 350 young women have indeed been found murdered (and often sexually assaulted) in Juárez during the last decade, and the judicial system has failed investigating this.

As you can see in my posting of March 31 (”¡Alto a la impunidad! Ni una muerta más!”), I sent myself to Juárez a few weeks ago. It was the recent arrest of five men – suspected purpetrators - that prompted my interest in the issue.
My text was wired by TT (the Swedish National News Service) on April 17, and published – I hope – in various regional and local Swedish papers.

The largest “mass grave” I heard about was the field in Juárez where ten (10) women’s bodies were found in 2001, and where there is a memorial today that I visited.
Please take a look at the picture of the memorial here (and, yes, read the report by the Washington Office on Latin America, an NGO):
WOLA: Violence Against Women in Juarez

This is another text on the so called femicide, published in 2002:
Jo Tuckman, Guardian; “Deadly frontier”

Authorities claim the 350+ murdered women are victims of jealous lovers or husbands, or robbers – i e, singular cases; human rights groups on the other hand claim it must be serial crimes, organized by people enjoying support of powerful politicians and/or businessmen.

The staff at Casa Amiga, the only centre for abused women in Juárez (which, by the way, would be happy for donations!) that I visited, told me violent husbands sometimes tell their wives that they will beat them up or kill them if the women go to Casa Amiga for help when abused. “The husbands have understood the authorities don’t care much anyway when poor females are murdered, so they use this as a threat,” the director said.
Casa Amiga Centro de Crisis

Female teenagers are sadly still being murdered in Juárez – and occasionally, corpses are being found in the city or in the desert surrounding it. At least 20 women, probably more, are missing and their bodies have never been found.

These tragic events have earned massive national and international attention the last years. So, if two mass graves, with “at least a hundred women’s bodies in each”, would have been discovered recently, it would be a world sensation and published everywhere.

I am sincerely curious in how Aftonbladet could get this so utterly wrong.

A cynic might claim this is in the realm of “sensationalist tabloids” dramatizing their news. But there is no reason to doubt the reporter _thought_ this was correct when she wrote it. Apparently she had no reason to distrust her source and check facts. Why? Probably because of the usual news room-stress and lack of time, but still - the facts must have come from somewhere.
I would like to know if the misunderstanding/mistranslation/mis-whatever first happened at Aftonbladet, or earlier in the news-chain? A misleading caption from the photo agency? A bug in the news wire service? A hoax? I have no idea. Perhaps this is what sometimes happens when “foreign news” are being reported from the news rooms in Stockholm.

If somebody reading this - unlike me - has access to the print version of Aftonbladet of March 21, please check for me what it looks like! I wonder if the picture really showed something that made the reporter and editors think the headline and start of the text were correct.

/Gunilla

THE PIECE FROM AFTONBLADET

Datum: 2005-03-21
Artikeltyp: Nyheter

Sida: 12

Av: Mira Micic

[Rubrik:] Här grävs 100-tals döda upp

5 män misstänks vara seriemördare

[Ingress:] Här gräver FBI upp döda kvinnokroppar ur massgravar som hittats i Mexiko.
Minst 350 unga kvinnor har mördats – de flesta blev våldtagna och strypta.
Nu har fem män gripits för dåden.

[Brödtext:] Mexiko skakas av upptäckten av minst två massgravar där man hittat minst hundra kvinnokroppar i varje grav. Totalt har 350 kvinnor i åldrarna 15 till 30 år hittats döda på olika platser.

370 kvinnor saknas

Enligt Amnesty International handlar det om 370 unga kvinnor som rövats bort, våldtagits och mördats, en del är fortfarande försvunna. Morden har skett de senaste tolv åren i den mexikanska gränsstaden Ciudad Juárez.
De flesta av offren var fabriksarbetare, men bland offren finns även tonårsflickor som försvann på väg till och från skolan. Det yngsta offret som identifierats var bara 11 år. Bland offren finns både mexikanska och amerikanska medborgare.
Teorierna kring morden är många.
Vissa tror att det är ett gäng som ligger bakom, andra hävdar att i Ciudad Juárez utvecklats en kultur som tillåter sexuellt våld mot kvinnor.
För två år sedan tillkännagav en åklagare att man misstänkte att en del av offren fallit offer för handel med transplantationsorgan.

Fem män gripna

Polisen har tidigare gripit flera misstänkta, men trots det fortsatte nya offer att hittas. I fjol tillsattes även en speciell åklagare för att endast utreda kvinnomorden. Men först efter att polisen nyligen intensifierade utredningsarbetet kunde man gripa fem män som nu misstänks för morden.

Mira Micic

Copyright: Aftonbladet eller artikelförfattaren.

[For comparison, this piece was published by LOS ANGELES TIMES the day before. /Gunilla]

All Rights Reserved
Los Angeles Times
March 20, 2005 Sunday
Home Edition
SECTION: MAIN NEWS; Foreign Desk; Part A; Pg. 18

LENGTH: 81 words

HEADLINE: IN BRIEF / MEXICO;
5 Arrested in Slayings of Women in Ciudad Juarez

BYLINE: From Times Wire Services

BODY:
Mexican authorities said they had arrested five men suspected of killing women in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, where more than 300 women have died in a wave of killings dating back more than a decade.

The five men were arrested over the last three weeks in the slayings of women in 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2005, police said.

Mexican police said the arrests were the result of a yearlong analysis of files on women who were killed as long ago as 1993 in Ciudad Juarez, just south of El Paso.