SOME Juarez feminocides resolved?

I’m not convinced the string of murders of women in Juarez are part of any sort of conspiracy… or even as shockingly high a number as some want to believe.  As I wrote back in June 2006 :

Maybe the murder rate is “normal” for an abnormal last-chance hard-luck boom town where the real population is significantly more than the officially recognized 1.3 million, and where transients of all kinds — and of all kinds of psychosocial kinks — change the dynamic from day to day. MAYBE… violence and casual murder is the “norm” in any lawless community in transition — whether the community is a gold rush mining camp (like in Deadwood), or a giant NAFTA spawned work camp, like Juarez, both brutal places where the brutality against the individual is only matched by the brutality by which outsiders (the State and the San Francisco mining interests in “Deadwood”; “maquilladora” plants and foreign corporate interests in Juarez) bring “civilization to a place.

In real terms, the actual murder numbers are not nearly as high as some would have you believe… more in the neighborhood of 30 or 40 a year, and those stories you read about hundreds of murders reflects a ten plus year span. It´s too simplistic to expect there to be one explanation for the crime rate, but “Satanic cult killers” have been a favorite for years.

Daniel Borunda, in Thursday´s El Paso Times reports on the latest claim of one of these “Satanic killers”… needless to say, Jose Francisco Granados de la Paz is most likely suffering from a severe mental illness, and — while he could be a serial killer on his own, or part of a thrill-kill cult — the story has to be taken with a huge grain of salt:

A man who confessed on Wednesday to slaying 10 women in Juárez told court officials a disturbing story that more bodies are buried in the yard of a home belonging to one of his alleged accomplices, Chihuahua state prosecutors said.

Jose Francisco Granados de la Paz, 30, confessed to being involved in at least 10 homicides of women in Juárez between 1993 and 2006, Chihuahua state attorney general’s officials stated in a news release.

Granados claimed that he helped other men kill women and that bodies are buried in a yard of a home in the 600 block of Armando N. Chávez in Juárez, officials said.

He has said the drug-fueled slayings were “offerings to Satan.”

Granados is on trial in the homicide of 17-year-old Mayra Juliana Reyes Solis, whose body was found along with eight others in a Juárez cotton field in 2001.

Granados’ family has said he suffers from hallucinations and delusions and was a drug addict…