College Times

Media Credit: ROSE PALMISANO- ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

In researching for her new novel If I Die in Juarez, Phoenix author Stella Pope Duarte walked in the shoes of the hundreds of Mexican women who have been murdered in the Mexican border town of Juarez while walking home from factory jobs at night. Duarte recently spoke with The College Times about Mexican corruption, the dangers of reporting and what’s being done to end the murders for good.

College Times: What inspired you to write about such intense subject matter?

Stella Pope Duarte: What inspired me was the heinous murders of the girls. There was no way I felt that I could live in this era, at this time in my life on the earth and not tell their story. It just seemed to me like it’s just so horrific that there’s no way I could look away. That’s my pledge to the women; that I would not look away. That I would look, and I would put light on that kind of darkness.

What emotions were conjured up while covering this? With a novel, you have to become emotionally-invested, right?

Oh yeah, very much so. You’re living and breathing the city. I think the hardest thing for me was reading details of what was done to the bodies. Because these are hate crimes, they’re femicides, they’re hate crimes against women. Somehow the city has given permission in some dark and terrible psychological manner for these murders to continue, either through the activity of the cartels, or drugs, traffickers, there’s many, many aspects, serial murders, but somehow, permission has been given. Like, ‘if you want to kill a woman, you can come here and probably get away with it.’

Why don’t Mexican authorities do something about these crimes?

A lot of it is corruption of the highest form, with authorities who are in control and power willing to do something because the people involved are powerful at times. And at other times, there’s money being laundered, and what they called “motividas” in Mexico, the bribes and so forth, and it’s not to their advantage … Other times, they’ll be killed. There’s several reporters who have been killed for reporting the facts in some of these crimes.

Were you ever overwhelmed by fear when you walked the same paths of these women that were murdered?

I went to the sites where the girls were murdered, and I walked the red light zones, and was in the dump sites where the poorest of the poor live. It’s a city like any other, it’s a city like here: you have your shops, you have your schools, your churches, people going by their daily routines. So, you’re okay as you walk the streets, it’s just like any other border town. But, of course, if you go into the areas where there’s darkness and there’s danger, oh my goodness, yes, of course, something’s going to happen. But, the one thing that hit me the hardest was really the details of what they did to the bodies. I’m serious, there was a time when I just said, ‘I can’t continue with this book.’ But then, you go inside yourself and say, ‘Wait a minute. Why should I be afraid?’ You ask yourself questions, as an author, you have to. You have to bring yourself to back to the table again.

Is there anything being done on the U.S. side can do to prevent such crimes?

There’s already many things being done by organizations, women’s collective groups … This legislation that came out of California with one of the representatives there and couple Senators that got together and asked that the United States take a closer look, backed up by international law, into the Juarez murders.

Will new legislation and projects like your novel put an end to these murders?

I hope so, because they are still finding bodies. I wish I could say they’re not. That’s why I keep telling people it’s so important not to look away. It’s so important to keep the light shining on this situation.

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