Next, we attended a meeting that night at the hotel between the family groups and 4 deputies from the Mexican Federal Congress, who were on a special congressional committee to investigate the murders. The small conference room filled rapidly with the families, our delegation, and the media, all waiting till the congresspeople finally showed up. The meeting commenced with long speeches by the deputies, but they finally gave the floor to the mothers who were there, who took turns telling their stories and voicing their demands, displaying a variety of different levels of emotion and outrage (from tired disillusionment to fresh anger).

In the end, the deputies made conciliatory remarks, mentioned a new resolutoin in Congress, but seemed bored during most of the meeting. We were told afterward that this seemed to be the usual runaround. The families had been experiencing this sort of thing for 10 years, with a parade of different politicians pretending to care, appointing special commissions and prosecutors and investigators, saying nice things, but nothing ever really getting done. So the local groups did not have a lot of optimism for this evening's meeting.

On November 1, the next morning, we attended an all-day conference, also at the hotel, organized for our benefit, in which each local organization in Juarez involved in the this fight for justice gave a 90-minute presentation, with english interpreters provided for us dumb spanish-impaired types. firsts were the two main family groups, Para Nuestras Hijas Regresso a Casa (So that Our Daughters May Return Home), and Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas (Justice for Our Daugters). Several mothers of the murdered women spoke, including the 5 who travelled with the 5 legs of the Caravan through the U.S. Also the lawyer who represents many of the mothers, Lucha Castro, gave a speech. Needless to say, the morning was an intense experience, listening to these women talk about what they had been through, struggling for up to 11 years with the corrupt and inept police and government.

After lunch was Mujeres de Negro, or Women in Black (not the same as the U.S. group Women in Black), who formed specifically to address the murders in Juarez and Chihuahua. At the conference they showed a video about their work, called Ni Una Mas!, which showed many actions and protests they organized. One thing that they do that I feel is very visually and symbolically powerful is when several of them wear one huge black tunic, which looks like a giant tent or drapery with holes in it for the women's heads and arms to stick out. As they march in this tunic the viewer quickly realizes that there are several empty holes - this symbolizes the missing women, and the tunic itself stands for the unity of the women who remain and struggle.

Next was a presentation by CETLAC ( Center for Labor Studies and Workshops), an organization devoted to workers in the maquiladoras, the border factories in Juarez where many of the murdered women worked. These factories and the underlying free trade conditions that brought them to the Mexican border (and especially Juarez) are heavily linked to the murders. In Juarez there are roughly 315 maquilas ("maquila" is short for maquiladora, and the 2 terms are used interchangeably), with over 200,000 total employees, and over 57% are women. The common myth is that more women are hired at the maquilas because they have smaller, more nimble hands for working on delicate tasks, like assembling car stereos and other consumer electronics for Delphi Corporation, Lear, and RCA. However, the real reason is more likely to be that women are more easily exploited, less likely to resist and organize, and attractive to factory supervisors who would like an easy extramarital affair with a pretty young employee. The director of CETLAC, Beatriz Lujan, spoke first, followed by women who work or recently worked in maquiladoras. They told their personal stories that confirmed all the accounts that one reads about the maquilas: the long hours, the low pay, the exposure to toxins, the sexual harrassment... detailing all the statistics and details is beyond the scope of this article, but there is a lot of information out there.

The final presentation was by Esther Chavez Cano, the director of Casa Amiga, the only battered women's clinic in all of Juarez, a city of almost 3 million people. This was a truly moving talk, and here is where I will repeat some of the numbers: every 7.42 days, a woman disappears in Juarez; every 12.8 days, a woman is assinated; every 40.34 days, a woman is raped, tortured, and assasinated. Doctor Cano confirmed a horrific story that I had heard before: in recent years, the shelter is hearing more and more from women that their husbands, while abusing them, mention the femicides as a threat, saying things like "If you tell anyone I'll dump your body in the desert like those others and I'll get away with it." And yet in response to this situation the Attorney General of Mexico once said, "To be a woman in Juarez is like wanting to go out in the rain and not get wet." Since opening its doors in 1999, Casa Amiga has served a total of over 134 thousand women. Their website has more statistics and information.

The next day, November 2, we were released from our captivity in the hotel. (the hotel, I learned later, would soon be host to a very different group, some of the attendees of Maquila Expo 2004, foreign businessmen being persuaded to move their companies' manufacturing to Juarez!) It was election day, but to us it was Dia de Los Muertos. We had all voted before leaving home, and now our attention was here, on the border. We started the morning with a visit to Casa Peregrino, a shelter for women and their children. One of the staff there talked about the kinds of women that they served and then we met one of the mothers staying there with her 5 children. Many of the women at Casa Peregrino are either on their way to crossing the border, or are one their way back, having failed to get across. Many are also victims of domestic violence.

Our next appointment was at noon at a Day of the Dead Mass at the border, in a poor neighborhood on the edge of Juarez called Rancho Anapra. Anapra is a shantytown, basically, a chaotic jumble of shacks made from pallets, cardboard, and other scraps, scattered over the desert between dirt streets, built by people who moved to Juarez and couldn't afford anything better. In the midst of this sqalid environment that literally squatted at the edge of the "Third World," the mass we attended was truly inspiring. I'm not a religious person, at least not in the sense of organized religion, but this catholic ceremony was extremely moving to me, because of its unique circumstances: first of all, it was here where "Los Muertos" included hundreds of people whose deaths may never be explained or met with any closure.

Second, it was right on the border, which is moving enough: I had never been to the U.S. Mexico border prior to 3 days ago. crossing a bridge is one thing - bridges are a symbol of free communication and movement, but here we were at the opposite symbol - The Fence. Here is what I had seen many photos of and heard a lot about, but what nothing prepared me for actually seeing in person: The Fence, the fine-meshed chainlink metal barrier, about 15 feet high, stretching in a straight line in both directions for as far as the eye could see. Here I was, on the Mexican side, looking through a steel screen into my country, and thinking about the fact that even if I decided to climb over and jump to the other side, I could be arrested and prosecuted; trying to imagine what it was like for those who could not legally cross, even at the bridges a few miles away, who had family on the other side who they were now talking to and touching fingers with through this fence.

The third amazing thing about the Mass was that it was an incredible example of, literally, international cooperation. The ceremony happened on both sides of The Fence, with Texan and New Mexican priests and activiststs on one side, Chihuahuan ones on the other. The level of organization and cooperation was incredible: the priests and other speakers took turns, back and forth, speaking in Spanish and English, and musicians on both sides took turns providing music for the hymns, which were sung by all in unison. There were probably a couple of hundred people on each side, and the event truly made the fence seem to be what it represented - an imaginary and unjust line in the sand. As if to underscore this point, after the ceremony, as people began to pack up and leave, several young boys on our side scrambled over and dropped to the U.S. side. We franctically looked around for any sign of Border Patrol, but no immediate consequences of this transgression appeared, and the kids melted into the crowd.

The next day we got up early to get on a bus to Chihuahua City, capitol of the state of Chihuahua, where we had meetings planned with various government officials. Six hours later we found ourselves at the Palace of the Governor, Jos