The Beasts of Juarez

than at that moment. He wiped her wet eyes for her and then she nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I am.”
“Are they afraid to die, do you think?” he asked, looking not at her now, but at Maisie, Zoey, and Callie.
She turned around, cautious but desperate to face her children. She imagined the men holding the girls at gunpoint were low-level cartel members, maybe even some sort of street gang that got pushed out of the drug or weapons trades and was now resorting to kidnapping. But then she put her assumptions and her fears aside to instead focus on her three girls. They looked exhausted and afraid, their cheeks stained with tears, their eyes red-rimmed, swollen, and bloodshot. Just making that visual connection with them was everything to her, her only way now of bonding.
She fought to mask the fear she felt for she didn’t want her daughters to see her cracking lest they might fall apart as well. But then her eyes landed on little Maisie and everything inside of her came to a crashing halt. Her eight-year-old was so scared she had wet her pants.
To his men, Santiago said, “Take the two younger ones to the maquiladora and turn them into stars. I want them on the boards by tonight, tomorrow at the latest.”
“No, wait,” Sydney said, fresh panic shooting through her. “Where are you taking them? Where are you taking them?”
The men hauled both Zoey and Maisie away. Zoey kicked and fought her man, but Maisie simply walked to the van with the one who had taken her. In her defense, the fiend had a tight grip on Maisie’s hair. It seemed more like an insurance policy more than anything, but she couldn’t stop wanting to scream at the man to let her go.
Sydney fell into fits of wailing and swearing. She even tried to break away and go for them, but Santiago grabbed her and punched her in the kidneys so hard she felt her knees go weak. Right then her entire world collapsed. Sobbing on the ground, in more pain than ever, she had but one question for this heathen, this godforsaken monster: “What do you want with us?”
“What about the oldest one?” one of Santiago’s men asked about Callie. “There are better places than the textile mill for her.”
Santiago ignored Sydney’s question. Instead, he walked over to Callie and looked her over as though she were a piece of merchandise. Sydney got to her feet despite the pain. She could only watch as this creep sniffed around Callie’s neck like he was a dog. Then he stopped and seemed to think about the smell of her. What is he doing? Undecided, he leaned in and sniffed her one more time.
“This one is almost a woman,” he announced as he stood up straight. “She’s too old for Arturo, but Guillermo…Guillermo is going to love her. When does the auction start?”
“Tomorrow,” a very large man said in English.
“Please,” Sydney pleaded, her body giving in, her mind terrified despite her will to keep her family together.
“You beg like what you want even matters to me. Do you think you’re human beings down here in Juárez?” Santiago turned and asked her. Before she could answer, the godless prick said, “You are but a dollar figure to me, a way to fund this life. Something to import and export as your country figures out what to do about your ridiculous border.”
The car with Zoey and Maisie started up and then drove off. Sydney felt like her heart was going to explode. Mewling noises formed in the back of her throat at the sight of her girls being torn from her. Entire parts of her brain—those parts in charge of her sanity—were sparking, flailing, short-circuiting.
“Please don’t take them all,” she cried.
Behind her, one of the men mocked her, and the others laughed. She didn’t care. Her girls were being separated like cattle to be taken off to market, except the market was not central to any one location. This was a human market and it was everywhere that there was an internet connection. She knew this because Camden knew this. What she didn’t know was what kind of auction Santiago and his men were talking about. What were these boards on which they intended to put Maisie and Zoey? Who was Guillermo and why would he want Callie? Would she ever see her children again?
“I can see the wheels turning in your pretty head,” Santiago mused.
The brute stepped forward and ripped open her blouse, the buttons jumping this way and that as their threads snapped. He looked at her, a broken woman who was too terrified to give even an ounce of concentration to her appearance. As if this wasn’t bad enough, he then snuck a peek inside one of the cups of her bra and smiled.
Standing there crying, feeling totally helpless both as a woman and as a mother, Sydney could hardly grasp the situation.
Santiago pulled her ruined shirt back over her chest and said, “You know what’s happening, don’t you? You know it but you can’t admit it to yourself because that would crush you, end you, put your purpose on this earth to rest.”
He was right. She knew what this was all along. Juárez had a reputation for being one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico, one of the most important drug hubs for the distribution of narcotics into the US, and a place where women and girls were not only trafficked but killed in what the locals called “femicide.”
When girls in Juárez went missing, they were seldom found. And if they were, it was not by police, it was by advocacy groups, men and women helping each other find