Frontera NorteSur 

For the second time in recent weeks, the state of Chihuahua and the Paso del Norte border region have lost an important voice for the rights of women. On Christmas Day 2009, news broke that Esther Chavez Cano passed away from cancer in Ciudad Juarez. The founder of Casa Amiga, a non-profit center dedicated to helping victims of domestic violence, Chavez was well-known nationally and internationally for her strident denunciations of the murders of women and gender violence in all its forms.

She was an active feminist, long campaigning for the rights of women in all spheres.

In the early and middle 1990s, Chavez was instrumental in alerting the world about the serial murders of young women that later become known as the Ciudad Juarez femicides. Rejecting the sensationalist, crime-beat media coverage of the slayings, Chavez began tirelessly documenting the femicides and demanding that government and society uphold the humanity of victims who were young, poor and female.

In a 2007 interview with Frontera NorteSur, Chavez lamented the impunity that continued-and continues-to surround the femicides.

“There’s a lot to do, but there are many more voices demanding justice,” Chavez said. “Although you are Americans and we are Mexicans, the murdered women are the world’s murdered women, because women are killed all over the world. We have to join together to bring an end to this.”

Ironically, Chavez died in the most violent year of Ciudad Juarez’s history.

By the end of the 1990s, Chavez had established the first Casa Amiga in a modest, crowded house near downtown Ciudad Juarez. The non-governmental organization played a crucial role in offering services to victims of domestic violence, an issue which was all but ignored by the state at the time.

In 2007, an ailing but still fighting Chavez was honored in a ceremony held at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, about forty minutes north of Ciudad Juarez. Speaking to an emotional gathering, then-Provost Waded Cruzado, who later became NMSU’s first female president before accepting the presidency of Montana State University this year, praised Chavez for her contributions.

Chavez’s December 25 death followed the passing last month of another prominent Chihuahua women’s activist, Irma Campos Madrigal, who in her last days helped organize the Exodus for the Life of Women that began in Mexico City and reached Ciudad Juarez on November 23. Esther Chavez Cano was expected to be buried this past weekend, with a tribute reportedly scheduled for Sunday, December 27, at Casa Amiga.

Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico.