Eight bodies found as violence goes on in Mexican border town

CIUDAD JUAREZ -- After police made arrests and the bodies stopped turning up in the desert, authorities hoped that a string of rape-murders -- among the most horrific of crimes even for this violent border city -- finally were at an end.

But the shocking discovery this week of eight more bodies showed they were wrong, said women's rights activists who have long insisted that the killings continued.

Authorities in Ciudad Juarez found the skeletal remains of five women Wednesday near a field where they had uncovered the decayed bodies of three other young women the previous day.

"My God, I'm so angry," said Victoria Caraveo of Mujeres por Juarez, one of a dozen women's groups that has pressured police to do more. The activists marched to the prosecutor's office Thursday to demand action.

"Tell me, in what part of the world do you find a cemetery with bodies of girls who didn't do anything wrong -- they just worked -- and for that they have been raped, tortured and murdered, their bodies thrown in the desert like dogs," she said.

Between 1993 and 1999, police found at least 57 bodies in the desert around Ciudad Juarez, a sprawling city of 1.3 million people across the border from El Paso, Texas.

Most were young teen-age women who had come from small, poor towns in the Mexican countryside to work in the city and support their families. Some aspired to earn enough money to eventually go to school and begin new careers.

Women's groups have insisted that the number of women who disappeared had risen to more than 200, and they accused police of failing to investigate. More than a dozen Juarez women disappeared this year alone, they say.

"We want straight answers," Caraveo said.