Peter Gabriel to pressure Mexico’s Calderon on Juarez’s dead women

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Musician and activist Peter Gabriel is to present Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon with a petition signed by more than 1,000 people asking him to act on the hundreds of unsolved murders of women in the Mexican border city Ciudad Juarez.

Gabriel is due to perform in Mexico City on March 27, and is expected to make his appeal to Calderon then, El Pais reports.

Peter Gabriel is a prominent human-rights activist, and in 1992 founded the nonprofit group Witness, which uses video and online technologies to bring human-rights violations to light.

He’s not the first celebrity to wade in on the issue of Ciudad Juarez’s dead women. Jane Fonda, Sally Field and Salma Hayek are just some of the Hollywood stars who have petitioned the Mexican government to bring to justice more of those responsible for the murders.

As we reported last October in connection with the documentary ‘Bajo Juarez’, although the situation in Ciudad Juarez has persisted for more than a decade, inspired numerous media and Hollywood movie projects, and become an international scandal for Mexican authorities, human-rights groups say that many of the cases remain unsolved.

Amnesty International also says that ‘those responsible for the systematic failure of investigations have not been held to account.’

— Deborah Bonello in Mexico City