Stella Pope Duarte: "If I die in Juarez". The collapsed cooperation of two national Police Departments

Abstract or Introduction

In fictive works about the border femicides the police work in two countries (the United States and
Mexico) is described differently. In Stella Pope Duarte's book If I Die in Juárez and in Meredith
Stiehm's and Elwood Reid's Pilot of the series “The Bridge-America” (2013/14 FX/Netflix) the national
police departments of the USA and Mexico are confronted with a femicide¹
. In her book Duarte
integrates a great knowledge of the real situation regarding the femicides in Juárez, after she had
interviewed some of the victim's families. The protagonists of the book are 14-year-old Evita, a poor girl
who was forced to prostitution and to live on the streets, her 19-year-old beautiful cousin Petra who
becomes a maquiladora worker and Mayela, a young Tarahumara Indian girl who is gifted with an
outstanding talent in art. The three girls meet under fateful circumstances to investigate the femicides
occurring in Juárez: they reveal the intrigue of a group of criminals until one of them is tortured and
killed in an inevitably sadistic way too. The Pilot episode of “The Bridge-America” is about the
investigation of a corpse: On the bridge connecting El Paso with Ciudad Juárez, a bisected, mutilated
body is found. The two detectives, Mexican Marco Ruiz and American Sonya Cross decide to cooperate
to solve the case. After further investigation Cross discovers that the two body parts belong to different
persons: Judge Gates and Christina Fuentes, a young Mexican girl and maquiladora worker. Christina
Fuentes is one of the world-famous femicides of Juárez and therefore one of uncountable inexplicable
corpses. Cross suspects a serial killer behind all the cases, but learns that the Mexican police refuses to
investigate further and benefits from bribery instead. The US-American and the Mexican cooperation on
the Juárez femicides collapses because of the different development of the police departments, the
corruption of the Mexican police and the increasing number of victims.