I came across this story from 2002 online the other day and though I'd share it with the group. It peaked an interest in me so I did some research and I was frankly shocked at what I discovered.

First the article itself.

To Work and Die in Juarez

Early last fall, authorities in the gray-brown factory city of Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, were prepared to declare a triumph. For nine months, no women's bodies had been found dumped in a field or ditch or along the side of a road. Officials were ready to say that Ciudad Juarez's eight-year series of rape-murders was finally over.

And so Mexico's fourth-largest city retains its nickname as "the capital of murdered women." The city of 1.5 million, where an acrid haze of factory smoke and car exhaust hangs in the air, is known for having one of the highest crime rates in Mexico; in 2001 alone, drug traffickers were blamed for more than 60 execution-style murders. But Juarez is most notorious as a place that draws tens of thousands of young women from small, poor towns to take $55-a-week jobs in assembly plants, known as maquiladoras, operated by some of the wealthiest corporations in the world -- companies like General Electric, Alcoa, and DuPont. More than 60 percent of maquiladora workers are women and girls, many as young as 13 or 14.

As I said I was shocked, I had no idea this kind of injustice was going on not only right in our own backyard, but it is largely a result of American business.

It got me thinking, about the huge injustices we have imparted upon our southern neighbor. My position on the ongoing "War on Drugs" should be well known by now, and here we have American companies not only abandoning the workers of their home country, but taking rank advantage of the foreign workers they now employ in their international manufacturing centers. Many of these very same companies actively rig the tax system to their own benefit.

How have we abandoned the moral responsibility we once wore so well. Can we ever, as a people get it back?