Reuters

Imagine your own daughter or even your niece being taken against their will or being lured in by a gang, being used for sexual pleasure by some random men, or being sold to be used, but when they don’t need them anymore they are disposed of like pieces of garbage. However, this is what happens to many young women from the ages of 15- 21. They are kidnapped to be used over and over again until they are then simply disposed of. Many of these women never again see their loved ones. Many had just disappeared into thin air after a couple of months or even years and were found dead with many visual signs of sexual abuse, gunshots, or even burned alive. Almost 1500 women have disappeared and about half of them they just simply didn’t find and the few that were found died. There’s one woman who did make it out alive. This is the well-known case of Ciudad Juárez also known as “Juarez’s missing girls who were sex slaves.”

The great trial, the first trial of the witch was their Juarez case. This case tackled the issue of hundreds of unsolved murders and disappearances also known as femicides because women from Rio Grande to El Paso were killed. Almost more than 727 disappearances between 2010 through 2014 and some say that it can go back to the 1990s. Out of the 727 cases of women who had just disappeared, 11 young women were found dead. Until January 2012 the bodies of 21 young women were found between the ages of 15 to 21. Their remains were found in Arroyo del Navajo, 80 miles south of Juarez Valley.

In total 32 young women were found out of 727 disappearances. 695 women have not been found yet. They could be dead somewhere 60 to 90 miles south or north of Juarez or they could now be added to the number of disappearances of young women who have been kidnapped and turned into sex slaves and then simply disposed of. Six people were on trial for this case and they were a part of a street gang called Los Aztecas which were linked to the Juarez cartel.

Many witnesses have testified the defendants had operated a kidnapping ring in front of everyone in Juarez from 2008 to at least 2011. The six defendants have been accused of terrorizing young women between the ages of 15 and 21 from humble respectful families selling them into prostitution and then simply disposing of them as they pleased. So many families have lost their daughters to gangs kidnapping them and then simply killing them out of their own will.

There’s one girl who has made it out alive, Maria (name changed for safety reasons) had said she was only 16 when a gang had lured her in by promising her a job in an office one of the gang members was also presented with gifts before she was ultimately kidnapped, raped and sold to men. In 2009 there were 55 teenagers who had vanished in a town that had ended in violence with two drug cartels. The teenager had gone into hiding and after a while, the FBI had flown her down for an interview in which Maria had told them about a girl who had tried to escape, “They took a gallon of gasoline and started pouring it over her. One of the men told me, ‘If you don’t do as I say, I will do the same to you.’ I wanted to look away – but they didn’t’ let me’ Even though the girl was on fire, they kept hitting her. They were laughing as if they were enjoying what they were doing. They burned her alive.“

Now to have witnessed this yourself you would have been pretty traumatized but to know that they had also dealt with children that’s even worse because half the time these kids were under the age of ten. In one case Maria had heard the gang talking to a woman who needed a seven-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy. To that not only are families losing their daughters to gangs but also their sons. For many of there’s children they don’t make it out alive they end up dead in the middle of the desertlike the 11 women who were found. The US State Department estimates that more than 20,000 young women and children have been trafficked from this border of Mexico each year.

However, since the 1990s, an estimated 1,500 young women have just disappeared into the city that was once called, “the most dangerous city in the world.” Once they simply didn’t need the teenagers or women anymore they would simply be disposed of them, now hundreds of mutilated bodies were found, buried in the surrounding desert. In a way, some families have got their closure after their daughter or any woman in their family was found. If you imagine if this would happen to you but not knowing how much pain they are going through, yes you know the scaredness of losing your daughter or being worried they aren’t coming home but finding out that they have been murdered. This was the case of Ciudad Juárez