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Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso has played a decisive role in the study of the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, from the moment they were reported in 1993, and in understanding the context of impunity. She is also a major figure in the re-politicization of lethal gender-based violence: first in Mexico, and internationally, insofar as the border town of Ciudad Juárez was precisely the context in which the notion of feminicide was newly conceptualized. The Ciudad Juárez native and professor at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte coined the notion of systemic sexual feminicide in this context, based on a database initially populated through personal journalistic and activist sources.