Women's activist wins Mexico national rights award

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MEXICO CITY (AP) - A women's rights activist who first drew attention to the slayings of young women in the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez today has been named the winner of Mexico's National Human Rights Award.

Activist Esther Chavez has been working with battered and mistreated women in Ciudad Juarez since the 1990s, when she launched a campaign to make the world pay attention to the deaths of mostly poor murder victims.

More than 100 mostly young women were strangled and their bodies dumped in the desert or vacant lots in Ciudad Juarez starting in 1993.

In 2005, the then-special prosecutor for the Ciudad Juarez killings, Claudia Velarde, said prosecutors had solved 80% of the killings.

Chavez says women continue to be murdered in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, and the city is now also in the grip of a wave of killings linked to the drug trade.