In the last 10 years almost 400 women have been murdered in the Mexican border city of Juarez. Life is cheap here, at least for women. Why?

Mexican factory worker Alma Brisa Molina never made it home on 24 July. When her body turned up on waste ground several days later, autopsies revealed she had been raped and strangled. According to estimates by Amnesty International she is the 374th woman to be murdered in the last 10 years in Ciudad Juarez.

Juarez sits on the northern frontier of Mexico near the US border. It is notorious for corruption, a conduit through which much of the cocaine and heroine for the American market is smuggled via El Paso, Texas. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect, Juarez has become the largest industrial zone in Mexico - a sprawling district of over 300 sweatshop factories (maquiladoras) assembling products for Mattel, Sony, Hyundai and other large multinational companies.

The majority of the factory workers are female and many have relocated to Juarez from remote villages and towns in the south of Mexico. This means many of the two million residents of Juarez have no immediate family or support networks. The shift work yields only about US$24 a week, and often requires women to travel long distances to or from work at night. The shanty-town living conditions offer little security in the case of emergency, with telephone access minimal and police protection questionable. Women are frightened to go out - reminded of the dangers by the pink crosses marking places where bodies were found.

The brutal murders have been generally attributed to serial killers, drug cartels and also domestic violence. More than one third of the victims were raped before their horrific deaths, and many were tortured and mutilated. The average age of the victims is 16 - virtually all of them were poor.

One Mexican-American journalist, Diana Washington Valdez, alleges much of the slaughter is down to a group of six businessmen who have grown wealthy on the back of the local drug trade. She says the motive of the killers is blood sport. Their wealth puts them above the law, as they are more powerful than the police or government.

In her book Harvest of Women, due out later this year, Washington says "the girls are carefully screened. They're always a safe bet. Disposable women. They are watched in advance for suitability - young and poor". Young women are chosen to lower the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, she says.

Investigations into the murders have been farcical. State authorities have lost, contaminated and even washed evidence, wrongly identified bodies, announced victims' names to the media before next of kin, forced confessions after torturing people with electric prods, and threatened and harassed family members of the victims. It is even alleged that authorities have colluded in the murders.

In early July the Mexican government released its first report on the 10-year spate of murders. Eighty-one Chihuahua officials (including 24 police officers, 17 forensic experts, 30 state investigators and three investigative supervisors) were harshly criticised for incompetence. But alarmingly, the report contained information on only 50 of the murders.

At the media launch of this report, Mexican president Vincente Fox vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice, penalise officers who mishandled investigations and ultimately end the violence against women in Juarez, saying "We have accepted the challenge, considering that it's our moral duty to clarify the circumstances that have given rise to the homicides and to punish the guilty parties."

A few weeks earlier, more than 250,000 people dressed in white and took part in an anti-crime march in Mexico City, the latest in a series of powerful and symbolic protests. It was intended to be a silent protest representing 80 groups, but the emotion couldn't be contained and demonstrators broke the silence with shouts of ni una mas (not one more) throughout the 4km march.

Recently, Mexico's second-largest television network, TV Azteca, began airing a five-part, soap-opera style drama called Tan Infinito Como el Desierto (As Infinite as the Desert). Shot on location in Juarez, the series dramatises a different type of murder each episode, suggesting women fell victim to snuff movies, satanic rituals and copycat murders inspired by serial killers. The executive producer Genoveva Martinez claims that the episodes are based on police investigations.

There is a fear that the murders could turn into a mass-media commodity and even worsen the situation, given the possibility that many of the murders are the work of copycats who kill because they can do so with impunity.

- By Pheona Donohoe