CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — In death, the children — 7-year-old Airis Estrella Enriquez Pando and 10-year-old Anahi Orozco — became everyone's daughters.
Both were savagely murdered last month. Airis Estrella was raped, killed by blows to the head, stuffed into a plastic barrel and covered with concrete. Anahi was raped, strangled and set on fire inside her own home.
The loss of two young children in a city where more than 350 women have been slain over the past decade is reawakening a population that had grown numb in the face of so much violence.
"They were innocent little girls who could have been anybody's daughters," said Norma Andrade, organizer of Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, a support group for mothers of victims, "and that's why we're angry, fuming mad."
In Ciudad Juarez, a gritty city of 1.5 million people, that anger has been expressed in almost daily protests — including one of 20,000 people May 27 — led by business leaders and parents who have taken over the city's main streets to denounce the crimes and what they say is an ineffective police response.
Children stand on street corners with signs denouncing the attacks. One sign reads: "Protect me. I'm just a child."
"There's too much insecurity, too much fear that someone can snatch your child away from your own arms in broad daylight," said Sylvia Pena, 24, a homemaker clutching her newborn while her husband pushed the stroller of their 2-year-old daughter.
Last week, amid mounting pressure, the government of President Vicente Fox replaced a special prosecutor for Juarez, Maria Lopez Urbina, with Mireille Roccatti, a law professor who as president of Mexico's National Human Rights Commission from 1997 to 1999 examined the Ciudad Juarez killings.
In May, the government launched its own version of the Amber Alert, known as Operation Alba — Operation Daybreak. The system is designed to trigger an immediate multiagency police search and to flood radio and television broadcasts with public announcements in cases of abduction of a child or a woman.
But skepticism abounds. This industrial border city has been grappling with these murders since 1993, with more than 100 of them fitting a pattern of young, slender women who were sexually assaulted, mutilated and murdered — their bodies dumped in ditches, vacant lots and the surrounding desert.
Despite worldwide condemnation, the killings have continued, and there's little trust that police will carry Operation Alba effectively.
"I just don't trust our government, our police," said Airis' mother, Rubi Pando. "They have no credibility. Too many disappeared women, too little justice."
And it doesn't help, critics say, that Fox himself appeared to minimize the issue last week. Fox, citing a prosecutor's report, said that most of the killings had been solved and suggested that the media had sensationalized the cases.
His comments ignited protests from human rights groups and victims' families, some of whom are demanding the release of jailed relatives, saying they were scapegoats tortured into confessing to crimes they didn't commit.
Chihuahua state authorities are expected soon to announce their review findings in the cases of two jailed suspects, David Meza Argueta and Victor Garcia Uribe, who say they were tortured into confessions.
During the funeral of Airis, Chihuahua Gov. Joe Reyes Baeza Terrazas promised to catch her killer, vowing. "We don't want to just catch some scapegoat."
Airis, a second grader, was last seen on May 2 when a 9-year-old neighbor reported that he saw Airis getting inside the vehicle of a stranger near her home in the outskirts of the city.
Within hours, the search was on on both sides of the border. Search teams hit the streets with fliers. State investigators theorized that the killer, or killers could have come from El Paso, a city of 560,000 with some 800 registered sex offenders.
Chihuahua state Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez called on the El Paso Police Department and the FBI for help. FBI spokesman Arturo Werge downplayed his agency's role, saying it would offer only forensics assistance and would play no active part in the investigation unless asked by both governments.
Two weeks after the girl disappeared, Airis' remains were found inside a barrel.
A day later the partially burned body of 10-year-old Anahi Orozco was discovered inside her home.
A neighbor, 22-year-old Antonio Ibanez Duran, was arrested and charged with Anahi's murder. Police said Ibanez was identified by his 3-year-old daughter, who, when asked who else was in the house with Anahi, uttered her father's name, "Tono." Ibanez says he was tortured into confessing to the killing.
For Pando, 30, and seven months pregnant, the reawakening of Juarez is of little comfort as she tries to cope with questions like the one posed by her 9-year-old daughter, Abril: "Mama, why was I born a girl, if only to be killed and raped?"