Ciudad Juarez, Mexico ? Members of Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission visited this border city Wednesday and presented a scathing report accusing state and local authorities of lacking the political will and investigative expertise to solve the killings of hundreds of women.

Speaking before relatives of victims, the commission’s president, Jose Luis Soberanes, warned that those crimes pose a challenge not just for the state, but for the country’s fragile justice system.

“As long as we don’t know who’s behind the homicides, there won’t be enough words to cure the pain; there won’t be enough promises to restore confidence in justice; there won’t be any commitment to restore hope to this city and region of the country,” Soberanes said. ” We will continue to carry the national shame that more than 300 women can be killed without authorities being able to identify the victims and sentence those responsible.”

State officials have said they remained committed to solving the crimes and noted they had spent $25 million to upgrade law enforcement.

In his remarks, Soberanes said the commission’s findings revealed that the investigations had been so shoddy that relatives of the slain women might never know who killed them and why. The report was first issued Monday in Mexico City.

Soberanes said that investigators had used falsified evidence, tortured suspects in at least 89 cases, and employed questionable investigative techniques. In addition, much of the evidence has been destroyed over the years.

Since 1993, the report said, 263 women have been killed — many of them poor teenagers who came to Juarez to work in the town’s foreign-owned factories.

Moreover, 4,587 women have been reported missing, although that figure was downplayed because Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, is known for heavy migration.

In a country whose leaders talk repeatedly about establishing a rule of law, Soberanes issued a dire warning: “If these cases are not taken as a warning of a growing cancer, in the future we can find ourselves in the terminal phase where there is no remedy for violence and impunity.”

The commission’s report is one of several highly critical reports issued by human rights organizations, but the commission’s findings may carry more clout in a country where many hope that public pressure will lead to institutional changes.

Oscar Maynes, the state’s former forensics chief who resigned in 2002, praised the report for its blunt criticism, but remarked, “We know about torture, kidnappings and planted evidence by the government, but will we ever punish the people who did this?”

Unsolved slayings of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, are the focus of demonstrations and a federal human rights commission investigation. Above, a relative marched Tuesday in a demonstration in Mexico City.