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See video link and more at www.journalistsforjustice.wordpress.comThe Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, the first investigative book about the Juarez murders by a U.S. journalist.

http://journalistsforjustice.wordpress.comThe Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, the first investigative book about the Juarez murders by a U.S. journalist.

http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_15319463?IADID=Search-www.elpasotimes.com-www.elpasotimes.comThe Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, the first investigative book about the Juarez murders by a U.S. journalist.

http://www.fifa.com/



Brazil (Brasil) in 2014 !!! Un pais tropical ...The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, the first investigative book about the Juarez murders by a U.S. journalist.

El Paso Times

Fallen Soldiers: Men of bravery, sacrifice remembered

http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_15191773The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, the first investigative book about the Juarez murders by a U.S. journalist.

Director: Lorena Mendez Quiroga
Editor and co-producer: Emily KoonseThe Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, the first investigative book about the Juarez murders by a U.S. journalist.

Courtesy photo/ArtMarch blogger

5/25/2010
El Paso Times online: Frank Bender, forensic artist, and the Philadelphia ArtMarch

PHILADELPHIA - Forensic artist Frank Bender assisted in identifying several women who were killed in Juárez and Chihuahua City.

He is an international facial reconstruction expert who has worked with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies around the world. He has also helped catch some of the most-wanted U.S. criminals.

Now that the episode in Juárez is behind him, Bender, 69, said, he can talk freely about the harrowing experiences he had there in 2003 and 2004.

Bender was at his home-studio on South Street in Philadelphia. The place is filled with trinkets, mementos, souvenirs, a train set, childhood photos, books, busts and art that Bender has collected over a lifetime. He was busy at work on a new art series about his late wife, but much of his focus this particular day was on

Juárez.
Bender said he was threatened and drugged while he was in Juárez. At the time, the authorities required him to maintain secrecy on his role in the investigations of murdered women. Since 1993, more than 800 girls and women have been murdered in the city.

"I couldn't reveal the identities of the girls because it would endanger their families. In fact, they would be killed," Bender said. "One of the girls was actually identified by someone in El Paso."

Chihuahua state officials introduced him at a news conference in 2003 in Juárez to announce that he was going to help with the women's murder investigations. At the conference, officials displayed skulls of unidentified victims they had turned over to Bender.

Bender is among the artists whose work is featured at the "Ni Una Mas" (Not One More) exhibit at Drexel University's Leonard Pearlstein Gallery. It opened May 15 with the ArtMarch performance art to protest the murders. The exhibit will run through July 16.

A week before the ArtMarch, Bender's wife, Jan, died of cancer. Frank Bender is terminally ill with the same disease.

"The doctors told me I might have a month left to live," he said.

He gave this account of his time in Juárez:

"I was forced to work out of a room at the Hotel Lucerna, and my phone calls and visits were closely monitored. I came to suspect that police were involved somehow in the abductions of the missing women.

"People from the United Nations were there at the time, looking into the murders. Amnesty International also had gone to Juárez to report on the femicides. An official for Chihuahua state told me 'they were the enemy.'"

On another occasion, Bender said, his Mexican hosts offered to take him to a brothel to have sex with young women.

"I declined the part about sex, but I did want to go to the clubs so I could study Mexican women's facial features," he said.

At some point, Bender's persistent questions about the women's murders began to bother the authorities. Although assigned police bodyguards, he said, he did not feel safe in Juárez.

The scariest experience he had occurred shortly after a meal with a high-level law enforcement officials and the official's entourage.

Bender said he and Ed Barnes, the Time correspondent, suspected they were drugged during a meal with Mexican officials. However, Bender said, he wasn't as affected as Barnes because he threw up right after the eating-and-drinking session.

"That's what saved me. But Ed Barnes was out for about a day and a half," Bender said. "One of the officials came to see me later and demanded to know where Ed was. I told him that he had left for his next assignment, which was in Russia. Actually, he was still interviewing people in Juárez, and then he left after I warned him they were mad at him."

Back in Philadelphia, Bender's wife had received an anonymous e-mail from Mexico recommending that Frank Bender look out his window.

"I didn't want to leave until I finished what I set out to do. I was able to help identify three of the five victims from the skulls they gave me to work with," Bender said.

A woman in El Paso with connections in Mexico helped to finance Bender's final trip to Juárez, this time under the cover of the Mexican federal government. But strange things continued to happen, and Juárez police continued to monitor Bender's every move.

Former FBI profiler Robert Ressler, a friend of Bender's, told him he should leave the border city immediately. The Mexican authorities had invited Ressler to the border during the 1990s to get his views on the women's murders.

Bender said he left as soon as he wrapped up the last details of his reconstruction work at another hotel in Juárez.

Ted Botha wrote a book about Bender titled "The Girl With the Crooked Nose." Botha also attended the art exhibit opening, along with Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and other dignitaries.

According to Botha, two of the girls Bender's work helped to identify were Mayra Juliana Reyes Solis and Veronica Martinez Hernandez.

A girl with a crooked nose was tentatively identified, but possible relatives who saw the reconstruction would not provide DNA samples to confirm her identity. They did not trust the authorities.

Brian Maguire, an art activist from Ireland, showed up to visit Bender at the Philadelphia studio to pay his respects. The two men bantered about civil wars, the Mexican drug cartel wars, politicians and injustices around the world.

Maguire had taken several drawings by children in Juárez to the "Ni Una Mas" exhibit. Maguire said he first traveled to Juárez and El Paso about two years ago. He did so after reading a story about the women's murders.

Marisela Ortiz, a teacher in Juárez who works with children who suffer the effects of violence, asked Maguire to do an art workshop when he came to Juárez.

Maguire decided the rest of the world should also see the children's work, and asked Ortiz for permission to take several drawings with him. Ortiz saw those drawings next at the "Ni Una Mas" exhibit.

As for Bender, he tried to pace himself so he didn't wear out. He was mourning his wife's death, but was excited about the ArtMarch events. He had to rest because of his illness, and said he lamented that he could not take part in the ArtMarch protest march.

His daughter, Vanessa Bender and his friends stood in for him.The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, the first investigative book about the Juarez murders by a U.S. journalist.

http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_15155425

El Paso Times online: Frank Bender, forensic artist, and the Philadelphia ArtMarchThe Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, the first investigative book about the Juarez murders by a U.S. journalist.

ArtMarch May 15, 2010, in Philadelphia on YouTube by Al Dia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTLX4VBuh90


More links

http://www.lisebjorne.blogspot.com/

"Desconocida Unknown Ukjent is using a traditional female activity; embroidery. to invite people globally to engage, protest and show solidarity with the fight against abuse and violence towards women, focusing on the situation in Ciudad Juarez." - Lise Bjorne Linnert, Norway

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Killing-Fields/Diana-Washington-Valdez/e/9780615140087




Philadelphia Weekly
Article on the ArtMarch by Gustavo Martinez
May 15, 2010

A Piece of Cuidad Juarez in Philly

Despite having two bodyguards for the last two years, Marisela Ortiz does not feel safe.

"I will never see having bodyguards as something normal," says Ortiz, who got the protection because of the decade-long fighting in Cuidad Juarez, an increasingly dangerous Mexican city. "But me and my family have been the target of death threats, insults, repression because there are people who don't want the truth to be uncovered."

Since 2001, Ortiz, 50, has been leading Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (Bring Our Daughters Back Home), an organization that helps the families of the many women who have disappeared or who have been killed in that city just across from El Paso, Texas.

About 800 women and students from working-class neighborhoods in Cuidad Juarez have been kidnapped, tortured, raped and killed since 1993. It’s part of an ongoing wave of violence resulting from drug wars, says Diana Washington Valdez, a reporter for El Paso Times who has been investigating the killings since 1999.

"Well, we see the results of the so-called investigations and that's coming up with scape goats, chivos expiatorios, misidentifying victims," she says. "Cases keep getting old and the statue of limitation is expiring, so cases that happened in 1993, ‘94, they have expired now. They're getting away with murder no matter who committed the crimes."

She also points to the widespread corruption that has allowed these killings to continue, despite local and international pressure to intervene.

But a series of events in Philadelphia this weekend will help keep the memory of these women alive.

Ni Una Más (Not One More), a Drexel University collaboration, seeks to raise awareness about gender violence and, in particular, crimes against women in Juarez, says Abbie Dean, a co-curator of one of the event’s exhibits.

The event will kick off with ARTMARCH, a mass demonstration/performance-art piece that will include more than 700 young women from Drexel University dressed in the iconic pink that can be seen on the victims’ memorial crosses in Juarez.

The event is scheduled to start at 2 p.m. Saturday at the 33rd Street Armory. The group will march toward the university and end with a rally outside Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, 3401 Filbert St.

At the gallery, an exhibit will gather 70 works by 20 international artists. One of the highlights is the work of Frank Bender, a Philadelphian whose art has taken him from being featured in “America's Most Wanted” to a hotel a room in Ciudad Juárez, where he tried to reconstruct the faces of six women.

"I stayed there for a month and in that month my wife received a threatening email," Bender said. "We had to move out the hotel room in the middle of the night."

For him, that was the beginning of an ordeal that led him to believe that Mexican authorities had no will to solve these murders.

"How could these bodies lay there all these time and nobody found them until they're decomposed," he said. "How come the evidence locker in Juárez is open for anybody to take whatever they want? This is incompetence by design. They don't really want to solve these cases."

Washington Valdez's work on both sides of the border has resulted in The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, a book that reveals high-level corruption, specifically the deal between the drug cartel and Mexican officials that allowed for such widespread violence.

"The murders committed by some of the suspects stopped [after the book came out]. Because there was too much scrutiny put on the whole situation," she said. "But the organized crime in general, because that network still exists, is still protecting the killers of women and children."

For more information, visit www.drexel.edu/juarez/

**********

Reuters article

(Reuters) - In the middle of a West Philadelphia art gallery, a sculpture of a naked woman lies on a low plinth.

Arts | Lifestyle

The three-foot-long figure by Philadelphia artist Arlene Love is missing its right arm and leg and has a huge gash running the length of its leather-covered torso, along the side of its throat and ending near the right ear.

The gruesome effigy entitled Beverly is part of an exhibit that epitomizes the violence done to women in Juarez, Mexico, where at least 700 women have been murdered since the 1990s in a wave of often sexual violence that is highlighted by the Philadelphia show.

Ni Una Mas or "Not One More", in the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery at Drexel University, uses painting, sculpture, photography and other media to draw attention to the savage killings of hundreds of women in the U.S.-Mexico border city that is better known to the outside world for its drug-related violence.

"The aim is to encourage others to action and to open their eyes, and their minds and their hearts to this poignant situation in Juarez," said Abbie Dean, a co-curator of the exhibit that runs until July 16.

Works in the exhibit include "Heal", by Yoko Ono. It consists of a 20-foot-wide plain canvas sheet covered with gashes and rips. Viewers are invited to repair the fabric with needle and thread on an adjacent table, in a gesture intended to symbolize the need for healing after many years of violence.

On a pink-painted wall nearby, hundreds of embroidered name tapes commemorate the victims. The tapes have been made by some 1,900 volunteers in 27 countries. The meticulous nature of embroidery represents the care shown by the volunteers toward the dead women, said the Norwegian artist Lise Linnert.

In the center of the exhibition floor there is a translucent banner in which an image of a police badge is superimposed on many reports of the murders, an image designed to show official inaction or even complicity with the killings, the organizers say.

The show is "unabashedly activist" in its intent, according to a statement from the curators, and is intended to generate international demand for a halt to the killings.

"It is open season on women in Juarez because there is no one in authority to give the murderers pause or to protect the innocent," the curators wrote in an exhibition guide. "The faces of the perpetrators and protectors are blurred into one, and this political paralysis has made it a land of murder without debt."

The known names of the victims line a wall at the entrance of the show. The list ends in 2006 when the Mexican government stopped releasing names, said Dean. But information from prosecutors indicates that 34 women were killed in Juarez in the first three months of 2010, a doubling over the same period of 2009, she said.

"The entire situation in Juarez is an indication that the government is no longer in control," Dean said.

Calling the killings "femicide", she said they surged in 1993 when the beginning of the North American Free Trade Agreement brought many young women to the U.S. border area near Juarez to work in "maquilladoras", the factories set up by U.S. corporations to take advantage of cheap local labor.

"The women were easy prey," Dean said.

The killings may also be an "instrument of terror" in the city's current wave of drug-related violence, she added.

Beyond the focus of the Mexican killings, the show aims to highlight violence to women in other parts of the world. It includes a sculpture commemorating the burned brides of India, young women who have died in fires set by their husbands who intend to collect a further dowry.

The show runs until July 16.



*******************The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, the first investigative book about the Juarez murders by a U.S. journalist.

Conversation: Mass Murders of Women in Juarez Rally Drexel to Art and
Activism

Subject: Mass Murders of Women in Juarez Rally Drexel to Art and Activism.

(Attn. Local Media: Marisela Ortiz, co-founder of Nuestras Hijas de Regreso of Casa in Juarez, Mexico, will be among the featured speakers.)

Ni Una Mas is an exhibition that will run May 15 - July 16 at Drexel
University featuring more than 70 works by 20 international artists
including Yoko Ono, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, Irish activist painter Brian
Maguire and local Philadelphiaartists Arlene Love and Jen Blazina. The
exhibition seeks to bring attention to the continued killings of hundreds of
women in Juarez, Mexico. A central part of Ni Una Mas is ARTMARCH for
Juarez, a mass demonstration/performance art piece that will open the
exhibition on the afternoon of May 15 with 700 young women from Drexel
University moving through the streets of Philadelphia, dressed in the iconic
pink color of the victims memorial crosses in Juarez.

News Release

Mass Murders of Women in Juarez Rally Drexel to Art and Activism
Art Exhibition to Draw Attention to the Murders of over 700 Women in Juarez, Mexico


PHILADELPHIA - Ni Una Mas (Not One More): The Juarez
Murders is a powerful art exhibition that will run from May 15- July 16 at
the new site of Drexel University's Leonard Pearlstein Gallery (3401 Filbert
Street). The exhibition will feature more than 70 works by 20 international
artists including Yoko Ono, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, Irish activist painter
Brian Maguire and local artists Arlene Love and Jen Blazina.

Organized by Drexel University's Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design
through a collaboration of academic, student and institutional departments,
the goal of Ni Una Mas is to raise awareness about gender violence and, in particular, crimes against women in the Mexican border town of Juarez.

Yoko Ono is an artist, musician and peace activist known for her
groundbreaking work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking.

Ono is a pioneer in feminist art and will be creating an original, interactive
piece for the exhibition. Her Ni Una Mas work is a site-specific
installation involving a large canvas that is cut and slashed and asks the
audience to "heal" it. Ono has donated heal buttons for ARTMARCH for
Juarez for the marchers. Kiki Smith, also a feminist artist, will have her
Little Red Riding Hood piece in Ni Una Mas. The well-known piece experiments
with fairy tale imagery and references issues of identity, gender and
violence. Local artists will be represented by Arlene Love and Jen Blazina.
Fusing science with art, autodidact forensic and fine artist Frank Bender
will also participate in the exhibit.

Many of the artists will be traveling to Drexel to install their pieces
personally. Artist Tim Rollins, a Bronx public school teacher and founder of
the Art and Knowledge workshop, along with a group of at-risk students who
call themselves K.O.S (Kids of Survival) and have exhibited their work
worldwide, will travel to Drexel to install an original piece they created
specifically for Ni Una Mas. Lisa Bjorne will be coming from Norway to
install her piece Desconocido/Unknown, which has travelled the globe, and
Brian Maguire, an activist painter will travel from Ireland to install
paintings he just completed in Juarez.

Ni Una Mas, seeks to inspire viewers to action in the face of the ongoing
crimes against women in Juarez. The exhibition has gathered the voices of
gifted artists who have been deeply moved by the femicides. Each artist adds
a unique voice to the chorus of lamentation; different aspects of the
tragedy are addressed in different ways by different artists. But there are
also common tones and themes that rise to the surface from this diversity,
giving the exhibition the cohesive power of a single outcry.

A central part of Ni Una Mas is ARTMARCH for Juarez, a mass
demonstration/performance art piece that will open the exhibition on the
afternoon of May 15 with 700 young women from Drexel University moving
through the streets of Philadelphia, dressed in the iconic pink color of the
victims memorial crosses in Juarez.

Event Facts:
What: Ni Una Mas(Not One More): The Juarez Murders Gallery Exhibition
Where: The new site of Drexel University's Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, 3401
Filbert Street.
When: May 15- July 16.
Cost: FREE and open to the public
More Information: 215-895-1029 or visit http://www.drexel.edu/juarez/

About the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design:
Drexel University's Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts; Design
offers 14 undergraduate and five graduate programs in media, design and the
performing arts. The College empowers students with the knowledge, skills
and techniques to succeed in highly competitive creative fields. Programs
are taught in small studio settings, featuring hands-on learning and a
faculty of industry practitioners who emphasize the use of the latest
technologies. Westphal College is home to the Mandell Theater, the Leonard
Pearlstein Gallery, Drexel's cable television (DUTV) and FM radio (WKDU)
stations, the Rudman Institute for Entertainment Industry Studies, MAD
Dragon Records and Drexel's Historic Costume Collection.

In January 2009, Westphal College received the largest single philanthropic
gift ever recorded at Drexel University, $25 million. The gift is being
used for the development and expansion of the college, purchasing a 130,000
sq ft. Robert Venturi-designed building on Market St. It is one of two
buildings that will serve as new home for the programs of the Antoinette
Westphal College of Media Arts & Design beginning in fall 2012.

Drexel University, one of the premier co-op schools in the United States, is
a top-ranked, comprehensive research university. Allen Sabinson is the dean
of the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design. For more
information about the College, go to:
###

News Media Contacts:

Zeek Weil, Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design
215-895-2629 or zeek.weil@drexel.edu
Noah Cohen, Drexel News Bureau
215-895-2705, 267-228-5599 (cell) or noah.cohen@drexel.edu
Niki Gianakaris, Drexel News Bureau
215-895-6741, 215-778-7752 (cell) or ngianakaris@drexel.eduThe Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, the first investigative book about the Juarez murders by a U.S. journalist.