News

Ciudad Juarez –  A poet and women's rights activist was murdered in Ciudad Juarez, a gritty border metropolis that has become Mexico's most violent city, officials and associates of the victim said.

Susana Chavez's body was found last week, but it was not identified until Tuesday, prosecutors said.

Chavez's left hand was chopped off and her body was dumped in a poor neighborhood in downtown Juarez, the Chihuahua state Attorney General's Office said.

Chavez organized protests to draw attention to crimes against women in the border city and participated in poetry readings that she dedicated to murdered women.

Ciudad Juarez, located across the border from El Paso, Texas, first gained notoriety in the early 1990s, when young women began to disappear in the area.

More than 500 women have been killed in Ciudad Juarez since 1993, according to the National Human Rights Commission, with the majority of the cases going unsolved.

Chavez was apparently killed by three young men who had invited her to speak with them at a house belonging to one of them, investigators said.

Police found the woman's severed hand inside the house, the AG's office said.

Chavez's mother said she had not seen her daughter since last Wednesday night.

"She left here after 10:00 p.m., she went downtown ... I waited all night and she did not return. I looked for her on Thursday and did not find her, so I contacted my relatives and we learned that she was dead, they showed us the photos and that's how we identified her," the woman said.

"It is ironic" that Chavez, who worked to draw attention to the killings of women in the 1990s, became a victim of violence herself, Armine Arjona, a Juarez-based writer and close friend of Chavez, said.

At least six human rights activists have been murdered in the state in the past two years.

Marisela Escobedo, who spent two years demanding justice for her slain daughter, was gunned down on Dec. 16 in front of the governor's palace in Chihuahua city, the state capital.

Escobedo had staged numerous marches and other protests in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua city, demanding that the governor ensure there was justice in her 16-year-old daughter's case.

The 52-year-old woman was fatally shot while picketing in front of the governor's palace by one of the three men who approached her and initiated an argument.

Escobedo's daughter, Rubi Marisol Freyre, was murdered in August 2008.

Rubi's boyfriend, Sergio Barraza Bocanegra, was arrested and charged with the crime in 2009, but his trial ended April 30 in an acquittal, with judges citing a lack of evidence.

An appellate court subsequently overturned that decision and found Barraza guilty, but he remains at large.

Josefina Reyes Salazar, a former municipal official in a city outside Ciudad Juarez and social activist for more than 20 years, was murdered on Jan. 3, 2010.

More than 3,100 people were murdered last year in Ciudad Juarez and about 50 have died this year in drug-related violence.