In Juarez, women just disappear

Two days after Christmas, Jazmin Salazar Ponce went downtown in Juarez, Mexico, to apply for a job. She never came home. "She was just 17. She wasn't a partier. She always came home until now," said Concepcion Ponce, Jazmin's mother, her lips quivering. "I went to the authorities and filed a police report. I put up posters, and called all her friends. My girl would only go to church and come home," Ponce said. The story of young women who simply disappear is all too common in this border city, but in the last two years, gendered violence has been drawn into the broader blood pool in Mexico's murder capital. A grisly drug war has claimed at least 7,800 lives in the city since 2008. But femicides, or targeted attacks on women represent something different from the killings affecting all residents, activists say.