Diana: Huntress of Bus Drivers

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The United States of America is a true historical aberration. In almost every place in the US, you can dial 911 and expect some altruistic somebody with a gun to show up who really does have your best interest at heart. The precious few exceptions tend to foment riots and violent cultural upheaval, but those are the outliers. It is enough to make most Americans believe that this is the way the world works. It isn’t.

Most of the rest of the planet remains quite red of tooth and claw. Over the past three millennia, the civilized world has seen a whopping 240 years of peace. It seems we all pretty much suck. Warlords, drug kingpins, or just garden-variety thugs can make life a living hell for good folks who just want to go about their business. One need look no further than our neighbors to the south to find some simply spectacular examples.

The Stupidity of Youth

The son of a friend and his college chum had a long weekend several years ago and decided to go exploring Juarez, Mexico. These two guys just struck out on foot. They randomly wandered about seeing the sights and soaking up the culture. Before long, they were hopelessly lost. 

These were the days before cell phones and GPS, and these two idiots lacked the foresight even to secure a map. Neither of them spoke Spanish, so asking directions became a challenge. In short order, they found themselves in a particularly sketchy part of a really sketchy town. The locals began eyeing them all hungry-like.

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The Sketchiness Gets Even Sketchier…

Rounding a corner, the two American teenagers spotted a pair of uniformed Mexican cops. They made a beeline for the two law officers, the look of unfettered relief no doubt obvious on their faces. The policemen fortuitously spoke English. These two kids explained their predicament and requested directions back to the World.

In response, one of the cops drew his weapon and demanded the two teens hand over their wallets and anything else of value they had on them. Dumbstruck, they wisely complied. When finally they made it out of Mexico, they had nothing but the clothes on their backs. Fortunately, these were the days when you could travel to Mexico and back without a passport. With the benefit of hindsight, it was likely a cheap lesson.  

The War Zone

In 2023, the murder rate in the United States was 5.7 per every 100,000 people. The historic peak of 10.2 was logged twice, once in 1980 and again in 1991. That’s all honestly pretty horrible. Human beings are animals at heart, and ours is a violent nature. However, step over our border to the south and things get massively worse.

In 2018, there were 33,341 murders in Mexico. Four years later, the murder rate in Mexico was 25 per 100,000 citizens. The year before, it had been 28. Those are big numbers, but they are not inconsistent with the murder rates in other large Latin American nations. Most of this carnage can be attributed to the drug cartels.

Bloody Battles

The Mexican government, with lots of help from us, has battled these monsters for literally decades. Killing and capturing drug kingpins is like some massive bloody game of Whack-A-Mole. As soon as one guy like Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera aka “El Chapo” ends up being retired to an American Supermax prison, half a dozen rise up to take his place. 

Wholesale earnings from the illicit drug trade in Mexico range between $13.6 and $49.4 billion per annum. That’s enough money to fund a modest nation-state. With narco-dollars moving across the border on that scale, folks will do some seriously bad things to keep that cash flowing. That violence spills over to many other facets of Mexican life.

While the massive force-on-force exchanges between cartel sicarios and the Mexican government involving heavy machine guns and antitank weapons reliably make the news, a low-grade enthusiasm for lawlessness pervades much of Mexican society. Murder, armed robbery, kidnapping, extortion, carjacking, and sexual assault are markedly more common down there than is the case north of the border. In aggregate, this all simply conspires to make life hard for normal Mexicans. In 2013, one woman in Ciudad Juarez had had about enough.

The Setting of Diana The Bus Huntress

Ciudad Juarez was once the most violent city in the world. In 2010, there were 3,500 murders for a population of around 2 million. It’s better now. However, back in 2013, Juarez was the Wild West.

Folks gotta work. In a poor place like Ciudad Juarez, that often means taking public transportation. Lots of people work in the maquiladoras–foreign assembly plants that make products intended predominantly for America. Back in the summer of 2013, that entailed riding in American-surplus yellow school buses repurposed into a relatively crude public transportation system. Working-class Mexicans would take these buses to and from work every day, just like working stiffs in much of the rest of the world. 

However, there was a recurrent problem. Late in the evening when young women would take these buses home alone, the bus drivers had earned a reputation for exacting more than just bus fare for the trip. Sexual assault is depressingly common the world over, and it often goes unreported for a variety of reasons. Such crimes are notoriously hard to prosecute, particularly in places like Mexico where the integrity of Law Enforcement and the judiciary is not all it could be. In this particular place at this particular time, young women getting raped on buses by bus drivers had become fairly commonplace. The pressure of living in such a world can eventually become suffocating. In August of 2013, one woman decided to do something about it.

The Killings

The first hit was on the No. 4 bus. This beat-up old Bluebird serviced the shopworn center of Ciudad Juarez and followed a route to some lower-middle-class suburbs. In so doing it made its way past rundown strip malls along ill-maintained roads strewn with rubbish. On that first fateful morning, a middle-aged woman with blonde hair boarded the No 4 bus and rode for some fifteen minutes. As the bus stopped and folks got off, she gradually moved forward until she occupied one of the front seats. At the following stop, this unidentified woman stood up, produced a revolver, and shot the bus driver in the back of the head. She then calmly walked off the bus and melted into the crowd. 

Blonde-Haired Diana

Most native Mexicans have black or brown hair. Authorities presume this woman’s blonde locks were the result of either hair dye or a wig. As there were no surveillance cameras on the bus, there were no reliable photographs of the shooter. Witnesses assisted police sketch artists in coming up with a crude composite, but you know how that goes. Those pictures could typically pass for a quarter of the human species.

The cold-blooded murder of this bus driver shocked a place already inured to a great deal of violence. And then the following morning, the same thing happened again to a second driver on another bus. As she blew the second bus driver away, the woman reportedly said, “You guys think you’re bad, don’t you?”

Soon thereafter, several local news agencies received the same anonymous email explaining that these two killings were revenge for years of abuse perpetrated by bus drivers on young otherwise-defenseless women. The email was signed, “Diana, Huntress of Bus Drivers.”

What Motivated Diana

Kill One and Control a Thousand. That statement is considered the First Pillar of Terrorism. Bus drivers in this sordid place had already been subject to a great deal of random violence simply because they interacted with the public. However, this was different. These were meticulously targeted killings. They had the desired effect.

The email purportedly said, in part, “I’m an instrument that will avenge [the attacks against] several women. We seem weak to society, but we’re truly not. We’re courageous and, if they don’t show respect to us, we will make them respect us by our own means. We women of Juarez are strong.”

One bus driver named Rodrigo said during an interview afterwards, “We’re terrified. We’re frightened of our own shadows.”

He went on to say that he had a constant headache from the strain of checking over each passenger and keeping an eye out for suspicious behavior. 

Controversy

Response to the killings was polarized. As one might imagine, the bus drivers were none too keen. However, many of the women who used these buses expressed a great deal of support and even admiration for the shooter. One woman said, “They must have done something terrible to her. With the police doing nothing and a society that doesn’t care, it is understandable that she took justice into her own hands.”

Another opined, “I’m not sure what she did is justified, but you’ve got to admit that that woman has guts.”

Grand Scheme

Between 1993 and 2005, some 370 young women and girls were murdered in Ciudad Juarez. Oftentimes their bodies just showed up abused and mangled on the side of the road or in shallow graves in the surrounding desert. The vast majority of those killings remain unsolved today.

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Vengeance is a recurring theme in human culture. The Stone Age nutjobs we’re fighting in the Middle East have raised institutional retribution to an art form. Our movies are awash in it. Batman is the archetype.

Diana Drawing to an End

Out here in the Real World, however, revenge as a profession doesn’t have much of a retirement plan. I’m told that the actual act is not nearly as satisfying as Hollywood makes it out to be. In this case, it was undeniably effective. In the weeks following the murders, half of the bus drivers in Ciudad Juarez refused to work. That caused its own problems, but it made an incontrovertible point. 

In Roman mythology, Diana is the virgin goddess of the hunt. She is also the neo-pagan goddess of witches. Her Greek equivalent is Artemis. While Ciudad Juarez is a long way from Rome, Diana nonetheless still wields a great deal of power thereabouts.

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