Back in the late 1990s, a journalist I was dating got an assignment to travel to the Mexican bordertown of Ciudad Juarez to interview the relatives of women who had been murdered with no apparent cause or motive. I insisted on accompanying her—I’m not sure what sort of protection I could have realistically offered but, despite the fact the magazine she was working for was going to hire a bodyguard, I still wasn’t going to let her go without me.

From 1993 to 1999, roughly 350 women in that town were killed and their bodies, often with signs of torture or sexual abuse, dumped. The story made headlines around the world and Jennifer Lopez even made a movie about it in 2006 titled Bordertown. The murders remain unsolved to this day, though because of the violent drug trafficking trade in Ciudad Juarez, many speculate the crimes were related to that.

I was reminded of this again because of a piece in today’s Los Angeles Times. Ciudad Juarez is once again in the news (read the full piece here). But this time, the women aren’t turning up dead, they’re simply vanishing. Since 2008 and the escalation of the drug war in that town which has already claimed 2,500 lives, at least a dozen young women, some as young as 13, have mysteriously vanished. Although there are no signs of foul play and the cases (once again) remain unsolved, investigators privately suspect the women were kidnapped as part of a prostitution ring.

Unlike the women who disappeared in the ‘90s who were mostly factory workers from poorer homes, the women disappearing now come from all classes and backgrounds. Other common traits—most of the women are dark-haired and attractive, most were last seen in the town’s seedy downtown area and four of the missing teens are named Brenda.

The four days I spent in Ciudad Juarez, tagging along with my girlfriend as she interviewed the families of slain women, were the first time I really experienced what a parents’ grief at the loss of a child must feel like. These were parents who lived in the worst conditions but had such a love for their daughters that you could physically feel their heartbreak. I don’t know how else to describe it, I’d walk into their modest homes and you could literally feel their pain hanging thick in the air. It was a sensation unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since.

And I’ll always be haunted by the look on the face of this one woman who had raised her now-deceased daughter alone; working 18-hour days to provide for her only child. She talked about how no one was going to do anything about this problem because the drug cartels were so powerful—the police and politicians were all under their control and they knew exactly what was going on, but were, at best, impotent to help, at worse, part of the corruption.

“Our daughters are being treated like farm animals,” she said. “They’re being raised just to be slaughtered. Everyone knows this, but no one is willing to do anything about it. Someone needs to help us. Tell the world that someone needs to help us.”

Over a decade later, that mother’s plea, the pleas of the good people of Ciudad Juarez, are still not being heard.