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Frontera
NorteSur
October 2000 |
CASA AMIGA: JUAREZ'S ONLY RAPE & ABUSE CRISIS CENTER
by Greg
Bloom, FNS Editor
Opened in Ciudad Juárez in February, 1999 Casa Amiga is
the only rape and abuse crisis center on the entire length of
the Mexican side of the Mexico-US border. In its first eighteen
months Casa Amiga's three full-time staff members and numerous
volunteers attended 853 cases. Of these cases 33 were rapes of
boys or girls, 64 were rapes of women, 76 were cases of incest,
35 were cases of depression and 486 were cases of domestic violence.
In other border cities and towns, as in Ciudad Juárez before
1999, there is no such place where individuals in need can turn.
Casa Amiga: Located near the Santa Fe bridge in Cd. Juárez
Esther Chávez Cano, the Center's outspoken director, began
Casa Amiga because she saw a need for a US-style rape and abuse
crisis center where women could access medical, psychological
and legal aid. Chávez's background however is not what
one might imagine. She was never a doctor, psychologist, therapist,
or social worker but was rather a successful accountant for a
number of large corporations (quoted almost daily by the press
that appreciates her brutal, nonpartisan honesty she said to me
in typical Chávez Cano style that women work better than
men but she only got ahead because she insisted on the same pay
and the same treatment).
When Chávez began Casa Amiga she imagined that it would
be staffed by women and would serve only women but because the
center soon began seeing sexually abused or raped boys she quickly
saw a need for a male psychologist to help the boys in their recovery.
Another Day at the Office
A little ways into our conversation I asked Chávez about
what had happened to the girl/young woman that she had described
a few days earlier in an editorial for the Cd. Juárez newspaper
El Diario. According to Chávez a woman brought her
goddaughter in for help. The young woman was deaf and mute and
had been repeatedly raped by a neighbor. Another terrible part
of the case was that the young woman had never received any aid
for her condition. She communicated only through a personal sign
language as her family had never sent her to school but rather
had her work around the house. Chávez said that they were
treating the young woman as best they could but was horrified
by the fact that the victim of such terrible abuse would never
really be able to communicate to others what she had suffered.
Esther Chávez Cano
Chávez began telling me about a couple other cases she
had seen over the previous few days and it was hard for me to
believe that Chávez was just not describing her list of
all-time worst cases. But she was not. She was just venting to
me about the terrible things that she had seen in a few days at
the office.
Another woman had shown up at Casa Amiga with her head shaved
and rope burns around her wrists. She was shaking horribly. The
staff feared at first that the woman had escaped from an institution
where a person's head would be shaved to control lice and/or for
other hygiene purposes. The woman began to talk however and said
that she had just escaped from a man's house and control where
she had been tied up and raped repeatedly for eight months. Upon
giving the woman a physical exam they discovered that she had
been burned on her breasts and on the inside of her vagina with
a cigarette.
Casa Amiga contacted the police and had the woman's captor
arrested but he was quickly released. Allegedly, it was the man's
sick ploy to make the woman appear crazy by shaving her head and
making her attend counseling sessions that he sat in on as her
caretaker. Eventually, through legal aid from Casa Amiga the man
was re-arrested and held in prison. It was later found out that
he allegedly had done the same things to his wife when they were
together.
Two days before I visited Casa Amiga Chávez said that a
young woman with five children came to the center to ask for help.
Her youngest baby, just five-days old, was the result of an unwanted
pregnancy as were the three previous children and she did not
want to have anymore. The woman had stopped using heroin when
she discovered that she was pregnant but her husband had kept
her supplied with pain killers. She was tired of her husband too
however, a heroin addict that was abusive to her. She wanted to
leave him and get off of drugs.
Chávez was confident that the woman could get off of drugs
and find a job and a place to live but she wondered what would
become of her five children. Who was going to take care of them
and help them through their own problems, she asked?
So Much to Be Done, Such Little Funding
Cd. Juárez's only rape and abuse crisis center receives
just enough funding from the city, about US$3,000 a month, to
pay the rent and the salaries of the director and two psychologists.
A US border fund gives them $5,000 a year and a US-owned maquiladora
recently gave Casa Amiga $20,000. A San Francisco area writers
union provided Casa Amiga with $15,000 to be spent on educational
material, pamphlets and posters. Chávez says that the organization
is funded sufficiently for the next twelve months but needs more
money if it is going to grow.
Chávez believes that Casa Amiga has already out grown its
tight quarters at its present location and she is currently looking
for land where they could build a new center. Hopefully the city
would provide money for the terrain.
All the center's furniture and all but one computer were given
to Casa Amiga by someone living in El Paso, Chávez says.
She is sickened by the indifference of Cd. Juárez's upper
class who have given nothing to the center. "Everything comes
from the US," she states.
In the future Chávez would like to offer more educational
outreach classes in schools and factories. She also sees the need
for group therapy for abusive men so that families can be kept
intact and improved. Finally, Chávez would love to see
the construction of a children's shelter in Cd. Juárez
and would like to have its own home for women and children so
that Casa Amiga would not have to rely on and impose upon Casa
Peregrina.
While Casa Amiga is clearly off to a great, running start the
center wants to be and do so much more for a city of over one
million people in a region where entire cities go unserved in
matters of women and children's mental and physical health.