Ramona enjoyed listening to her daughter's melodic voice but grew upset each time she heard Silvia purring the seductive Spanish verses of Selena's love songs. The lyrics were too sexually charged for a girl of such a tender age, she thought.
On the morning of July 11, 1995, Silvia's eldest brother, Domingo, gave her a ride to school. He was now living in a house he and his father had built on their small property. The two residences shared a common driveway, where Domingo kept his car.
Domingo spotted his sister just before ten that morning, hurrying to the bus stop with a neighborhood boy. He yelled out to her from the car window. He and his wife, on their way downtown, offered Silvia a ride.
It was supposed to be an easy day for Silvia. She had a light schedule at school, just one exam, because it was summer, so she was leaving the house much later than usual. Her normal routine was to leave before 4 a.m. to get to school by six. By 1 p.m. she was to be on her way to the shoe store, where she worked until closing.
Domingo noticed that Silvia was unusually quiet during the twenty-minute car ride. He wondered if maybe she'd gotten into an argument with their mother that morning. Not one to pry, he just let it go.
It was nearing 11 a.m. when he let his sister out in front of the Universidad Iberoamericana, a private high school where Silvia was taking classes in business administration. She was to sit for an exam that morning and then go straight to work at the shoe store downtown. Her shop was located in a touristy part of the city, adjacent to the historic Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission. The white adobe structure was the municipality's oldest surviving church. Completed in 1668, it was the first house of worship erected on the border between Mexico and the United States. In the same square is a second house of worship, the breathtaking Juárez Cathedral, with its neoclassical façade and striated towers. It was constructed in the early part of the twentieth century as an annex to the Guadalupe Mission to accommodate the rising number of worshippers. An ornate iron fence encircles the two buildings, which are among the few tourist attractions of historical note in the otherwise industrial city.
It was already dark when Ramona set out to meet Silvia's bus that Tuesday night; there were few street lamps illuminating the way. Pebbles crunched beneath her feet as she hastened along the unpaved roads, virtually breathless as she neared the stop.
Ramona was no youngster. At fifty-one, she was slightly overweight for her five-foot frame. Her short dark hair was streaked with gray and her wrinkled hands were a testament to years of washing dishes and doing laundry for five children. In recent months she had begun to suffer from back pain that often radiated to both her knees. Still, she was cheerful and quick to smile.
Ramona hastened her pace as a bus rumbled by, its directional signal flashing the driver's intent to pull over beside the solitary tree that marked the local bus stop. It was 8:45 p.m. Silvia would be arriving soon. She had told her mother to expect her on the next bus, the one that arrived just after nine. Her shift at Tres Hermanos would end at eight that evening.
Ramona was forever worrying about her pretty child because, at sixteen, Silvia was far too trusting and possessed a naďve confidence in her ability to protect herself.
"Take care," Ramona had repeatedly admonished the teen. "Girls are disappearing."
"They can't do anything to me," Silvia always replied; it was the typical response of a sixteen-year-old girl who believed she was invincible.
It was just after 9 p.m. when Ramona stepped up to the door of the arriving bus, a blue and white version of the bright yellow school buses ridden by children in the United States. She watched the weary passengers get off, waiting to see her daughter. But as the last traveler descended the steps, there was no sign of Silvia.
She must have stopped to chat with friends while waiting for her connection at the bus transfer site downtown, Ramona thought. Most of the city's buses stopped at the site, marked by an enormous statue of Benito Juárez García, the Mexican revolutionary war hero and former Mexican president for whom the city was named. The eight-foot-tall statue, which stood atop a large pedestal base, was made of white Carrara marble, black Durango marble, and stone quarried from Chihuahua. It stood at the center of a four-city-block park dotted by grassy patches and a few benches. Teens gathered there to play ball and bus passengers waited there for connections; it was there that Silvia made her daily transfer from one bus to another. The Moraleses lived along the Route 30 line, which traveled between the downtown district and the Juárez Airport.
Standing alone on the dark, deserted road, Ramona watched as the nine fifteen bus came and left. So did the nine thirty and ten o'clock buses. With each passing bus, Ramona's heart raced a little faster. Wild thoughts were flashing through her mind as she tried to talk herself into staying calm. She didn't want to think about danger. She didn't want to think of the newspaper articles about the missing girls. She just wanted to see Silvia's face.
By 10:30 p.m., she was in a panic. Frozen with fear, she continued to stand at the bus stop. Silvia would show up, Ramona told herself.
At 1 a.m., the last bus for the night made its stop the final trip on the line. Silvia was not among the passengers descending the steps. Ramona watched helplessly as the driver shut the empty bus's doors and pulled away. She felt dizzy from the dust and diesel fumes; she couldn't seem to catch her breath as she raced home. Once there, she tried to wake her husband. But Angel was not well. Diagnosed with a tumor in his lung, he was growing increasingly weak and was not easily roused from sleep.
After pacing the bedroom for several minutes debating what to do, Ramona ran out the front door and down the street to a neighbor's home. Her friend Sandra lived a few houses away; she had a brother-in-law who was a captain in the Juárez Police Department.
Oblivious to the time, Ramona banged on Sandra's door. She had barely blurted out the words before Sandra was on the phone to the local hospitals and then the Red Cross. Next she dialed her brother-in-law, the police captain.
"Silvia Morales is missing," Ramona heard her friend speak into the receiver. Could he please mobilize some forces?
The captain knew Silvia from the neighborhood and from the popular shoe store where she worked. Believing he would take immediate action, Ramona returned home and nervously sat by the phone for hours thinking she would hear from the police. But no one called.
The official alerts were rarely given much attention by local officers, who seemed to place little value on the lives of the missing young women, in part because so many of them were not natives of the city but members of a transient population that had come to Juárez in search of work.
Another reason officers were so dismissive of the reports was that their pay was among the lowest of all municipal jobs and attracted some of the city's most undesirable candidates. Only an elementary school education was required to join the Juárez police force, which had no investigative powers and was strictly preventive in nature. It was widely believed that many officers accepted bribes to make ends meet or had taken the job to earn the extra side money assisting drug dealers and other unsavory criminals.
Those with an honest heart were often forced out or quit in frustration.
It was daylight and the sun was coming up over the mountains as Ramona paced the living room, remembering the morning Silvia left for school. The temperature had already climbed into the eighties when her daughter departed just after ten. Ramona recalled that Silvia had barely touched her breakfast: tortillas, beans, and diced tomatoes Ramona had prepared from the small vegetable garden she tended in the side yard. Perhaps Silvia had been nervous about the exam she was to take at school that morning.
Ramona couldn't stay idle another second. Determined to find her daughter, she began an amateurish investigation of her own. That morning she set out for the shoe store to find out if Silvia had reported for work the previous afternoon. In spite of his illness, her husband insisted on accompanying her downtown. Angel was deathly afraid for Silvia and could not stay at home and wait for answers. She was his only daughter. The couple arrived before the store was even open and stood on the sidewalk anxiously waiting for the shopkeeper to arrive.
The store manager told the couple that Silvia had been in but had asked permission to leave at 12:30 p.m. to take a second exam at school. Silvia said she would be back by three. But the teen never returned to the shoe store that day.
Confused, Ramona checked with school administrators and was told by the principal that there was no other exam scheduled for that afternoon. The story was not making sense. Silvia had never lied before. She was a good girl.
Ramona returned home to wait for her daughter, while Angel and her friend Sandra went to the police station to file a report.
It was Election Day in Juárez, and many of the local offices were closed. Police were of no assistance. They were busy dealing with voting logistics. Besides, authorities required a waiting period of seventy-two hours before taking a missing persons report. The officer behind the window at headquarters sneered at Angel and Sandra when they suggested that Silvia had met with foul play, telling them she had probably run off with a boyfriend and would eventually turn up.
Ramona was furious when she heard what police had told her husband. Undeterred, she continued with her own primitive investigation. Walking to two local nightclubs, La Cueva and El Barko, she talked to friends and neighbors to learn if anyone had seen Silvia. Her daughter had been to the dance clubs several times in the past with a woman in the neighborhood who took young girls dancing. The woman had three daughters of her own and encouraged other young girls to join them on evenings out. Silvia had also been to the local nightspots a few times with her brother Domingo. No one recalled seeing Silvia that night.
Ramona next questioned her daughter's friends in the neighborhood.
One young girl who lived on the same block as the Morales family remembered seeing Silvia that Tuesday afternoon at the monument of Benito Juárez, ready to take a bus. The neighbor was walking with a friend from class when she spotted Silvia standing a few feet away from the bus stop by a tree.
Silvia was not herself that day, the girl recalled. "She didn't greet me like she always did. I talked to her and she didn't talk back. She was very pensive, like distracted."
The girl reported that Silvia was standing next to a
chero,
a cowboy. Clothed all in black, he was speaking English. It was not unusual to see men in cowboy attire in Juárez. Many of the city's male population sported cowboy hats and pointed-toe boots, attire left over from the days when horses were a means of transportation. Now such clothing had become fashionable. What was unusual was to see a man dressed all in black in the middle of summer and speaking English.
"I wouldn't be able to tell you if he was really a friend," the teen told Ramona. "Or if he was with her, because, like I told you, she looked like she had a lot on her mind and she was very distant. She wasn't talking to me at all.
"But the man seemed to be speaking to Silvia," she said.
Ramona learned that another bus had arrived at the stop that afternoon not the one that Silvia normally took home but one that was marked Valle de Juárez, or Valley of Juárez. That bus took passengers out to Juárez Porvenir Highway, which ran through a much more prosperous residential area. The girl said Silvia got on it, and so did the man standing next to her.
* * *
The day after Silvia disappeared, Ramona's phone rang. Racing to answer it, she found no one on the other end of the line.
"Is it you, my daughter?" she spoke into the receiver. "If you left with a boy, we forgive you, just come back." There was no response.
It was July 14 when Ramona went to the
procuraduría
or state attorney general's office on Eje Vial Juan Gabriel to speak with officers about Silvia's disappearance. Her friend Sandra gave her a ride to the downtown headquarters, which also housed the State Police Department. Three days had passed and there had been no word. Her heart raced as she climbed the cement steps to the mirrored-glass building, which was just off a four-lane roadway and several miles from the downtown shopping district.
Since local police were not trained to conduct investigations of a criminal nature, all missing persons were to be reported to Chihuahua state police.
The overhead fluorescent lights in the lobby exaggerated the wrinkles of Ramona's tired, weatherworn complexion as she waited for someone to take her report. It was chaotic inside with people milling about or queued up in various lines waiting to be helped by the few uniformed officers standing behind walk-up windows and seated at tall wooden desks. The marble floors were a sickly green, and grimy from the continuous foot traffic in and out of the building. Dust from the desert collected on just about everything, including shoes, and made it difficult to keep buildings clean. Ramona was given a number and told to wait on one of the wooden benches.
The methodic ticking of the second hand, on the wall clock above, nearly sent her into hysterics as she listened for her turn. Finally her name was called.
