WAFE honours all women who work for removal of abuse of women and for recognition of their contribution to our advancement towards fully equal human rights. On January 13th, The Times reported the death of Esther Chavez, Mexican activist who worked with great courage against much official resistance to expose the appalling level of murder of women in her country. She drew the attention of the world to the murder of hundreds of women around Ciudad Juarez on Mexico's border with the US. Their bodies were dumped in the desert around the city, or left on patches of urban wasteland, in a series of killings that began in the early 1990s and for years were tyreated with indifference or denial by the authorities.
 
Chavez also founded Casa Amiga, Mexico's first rape crisis centre. There are now 50 or so such centres around the country. Many of the women who sought shelter were young, single migrants from the impoverished Mexican countryside. The women provide cheap labour for the factories. They had no families to support them and nobody to take an interest in their fate until Chavez began to speak out. Politicians were reluctant to do anything that might cause problems with the US and Japanese owned 'maqiladoras'.
 
After Chavez shamed them into taking action, the government of the state of Chihuahoa eventually appointed a special prosecutor to look into the killings and set up a unit to investigate sexual offences. They have had some success.
 
Esther Chavez was an accountant for an American food-processing company who moved to Juarez from her home town of Chihuahua. Ten years later she founded the 8 March organisation, an umbrella group for the campaigners defending women's rights in the frontier region. She gave the municipal and state authorities no peace, lobbying, organising and leading protest demonstrations. One of her theories was that many men, in a country that defines the term 'machismo', resented women gaining employment in the textile plants, which gave them an independent income. Other activists thought that the victims were simply killed to demonstrate that the gangs run the city.
 
Chavez also believed that Chihuahua state police, judicial officials and business leaders were themselves implicated in the murders. Local NGOs believe that about 150 women were killed in and around Juarez in 2009. Just before Chavez died, her denunciations were vindicated by a ruling of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
 
In 2008, Chavez was presented with Mexico's National Human Rights Award by President Calderon. A few months later she bitterly criticised the President for appointing a former Chihuahua special prosecutor, Arturo Chavez Chavez, as federal attorney-general.
 
Esther Chavez Cano was born on June 2 1933. She died of cancer on December 25 2009, aged 76.