Juarez Prison Celebrates International Women's Day With Lurid "Captive Beauty" Pageant

If last week's celebration of International Women's Day was any indication, the 99 year-old holiday is going stronger than ever.

In New York City, UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that world peace is not possible without women's full and equal participation in every social arena. Meanwhile, around the globe, symposia and conferences, performances and exhibitionss, rallies and marches and more celebrated women's contributions, acknowledged victories, defeats, and remaining fronts in their struggle against worldwide inequality, injustice, poverty, and violence.

Rarely in recent history has there been any focused attention on the continuing victimization of women in Ciudad Juarez, in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, where, since 1993, more than 500 women have been kidnapped, tortured, mutilated and murdered with impunity. Yet on International Women's Day, women artists in Los Angeles and Chicago mounted exhibitions to chronicle the ongoing femicide and commemorate its victims. In Sydney, Australia, women marched through the city to honor the women of Juarez.

But perhaps the most publicized event for this year's International Women's Day, in Juarez itself, was a march of a very different kind.

Belleza Cautiva (Captive Beauty) commemorated no one. A beauty pageant, it was planned, overseen, and judged by the authorities of Juarez's Cereso Prison, who selected 15 out of the 600 inmates of the over-crowded facility to compete for the crown, title, and some cash. A February story produced by Mexico City's large Millenia TV network showed the young women practicing for the big day: Wearing skin-tight jeans and T-shirts, they strike poses, produce provocative pouts, and wrap their bodies around poles, looking drained and scared, as if someone out of view holds a gun. The prison director, in a close-up, explains that these are not bad women, just women who made a bad mistake.

The real mistake was living in Ciudad Juarez, where drug trafficking, the crime for which most all of the women inmates have been convicted, is one of the few available jobs besides prostitution. The jobs at the maquiladoros, mostly U.S.-owned plants assembling clothes and electronics for U.S. consumers, are both dangerous -- the bodies of women continue to show up in fields and garbage dumps -- and dwindling. As the economy slows, corporations are moving on to other countries, where they can pay even lower wages than the prevailing $2 and change paid to women in Juarez. Time Magazine recently reported a 40 percent reduction in cargo trucked across the U.S. border in the past year, and the El Paso Times has reported that, in the last two years, some 11,000 Juarez businesses have closed and 116,000 houses -- a quarter of the city's housing -- have been abandoned.

In a country where prostitution is legal, 10- and 20-year sentences are not uncommon for women convicted of carrying drugs. The director of the Cereso Prison, Gerardo Ortiz Arellano, declared the goal of project Belleza Cautiva to be "Recapturing Women's Self-Esteem." But it's hard to see how strutting down a catwalk for the judgment of prison officials could do anything for the contestants (or the hundreds of other women prisoners lined up to watch). Millenia's coverage of the event revealed few proud smiles, but rather a line-up of sad women, forcing viewers to wonder whether the real goal of the pageant had more to do with recapturing the esteem and reputation of the prison administration, the prison, and the city. (Last March, the Juarez prison was the site of a riotous battle between two rival gangs, which left 20 dead. Director Ortiz Arellano, who some commentators refer to as "el Monstruo," was appointed last year while still under investigation for possible involvement in an assassination at the Chihuahua prison he'd directed.)