El Paso Reporter Risked Her Life on a Mass Murder Story

“By 1999, when the El Paso (Texas) Times’ Diana Washington Valdez began reporting on a string of murders of young women across the border in Juarez, Mexico, the killings had been going on for six years. But the level of U.S. media frenzy generated when a young blonde woman goes missing somewhere was notably absent in Juarez, even as the number of victims — most of them poor, attractive girls attending school or working at one of the city’s many large assembly plants — steadily grew into the hundreds.

Many of the women were raped and mutilated prior to their deaths, their bodies dumped in ditches or vacant lots in the desert. State law enforcement authorities responsible for investigating the crimes (at least 90 women were raped and killed in similar ways) consistently failed to preserve crime scenes, collect evidence, or interview witnesses. Valdez, a bilingual reporter with plenty of experience investigating corruption on the U.S. side of the border, says, “Even I had no idea how bad it was, and how high up the corruption was occurring.” “

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