Mexico’s Femicide
Fatima Aldrighetti, Ingrid Escamilla, Jazmín Millán Elenes, Jovana Sarahi Mendoza, Mariana Lima, and Yunuen López Sánchez. These five women are included in the 35,000 murders that occurred in Mexico in 2019. A new record.
While writing this piece, I knew that I wanted to mention the names of some of the victims, but upon my initial search I could only come up with two. The deaths of these women have been hidden so deeply that it’s possible their names may not even appear on a headstone. These women deserve justice for what happened and knowing that this won’t happen to anyone else will serve as freedom to their memories.
Though the details of their demise have disappeared, and the circumstances of their deaths genericized in order to contribute their deaths to a statistic, these people were not killed to be killed, and that is because their murderers considered them women before people.
Mexico has an epidemic of murder, and within the epidemic there is a plague: femicide; the intentional murder of women because they are women.
Women are already overlooked and undervalued, especially in machismo dominant cultures like Mexico’s, and now women are hunted solely for their gender.
Because femicide is such a sectional branch of killing, it indirectly differs from murder. Even as overall murder rates fall, the rates of femicide rise, meaning that even as most people are spared, women are brutalized further. In Mexico, 77% of women don’t feel safe. Possibly it’s knowing that one day their co-worker, their cab driver, their classmate might decide that their femininity is a motive, that their name might tacked on to the already long list, and that there is nothing they can do to stop a crime of gender. Of those women, 10 are killed everyday and the majority of them already know their attacker.
The only protection for these women is their determination to not be the next news headline, and on March 8, 2020, a national sisterhood of women took their determination to the streets. On International Women’s Day, millions of women went on strike in Mexico, dubbing it “The day without us”, and sparking the hashtag #UnaDíaSinNosotras to show what a society without women looks like. The women marched with signs reading “Ni Una Más”, the unofficial slogan and hashtag of the movement.
Despite the severity of the situation and the noise that these women were able to make, the movement is not getting the momentum it should, and the traction it has gotten has only slipped away.
After the “glitter revolution” (another woman’s rights protest), Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) agreed to make gender based crimes a priority and declared a gender violence alert. This action was later recanted by AMLO when he instituted a 75% budget cut for the federal women’s institute, which resulted in an increased rate of crimes against women.
AMLO seems indifferent and even unaware of the severity of the femicide issue. He claims that he’s not a feminist but a humanist; someone who believes in the goodness of humans and seeking ways to solve human problems. So this begs the question: if so many of the women included in his humanist philosophy are being killed, then why don’t we see him or his administration seeking a way to solve this human problem?
There was a small relief for women when, few days after AMLO’s election, the Senate voted for femicide to be its own felony, though this has been met with slow policy change. AMLO finds loopholes in order to protect this opinion; he blames past administrations for the “corrupted system” that he is now in charge of, which translates to his lack of compassion and affinity for uninspired excuses. If he’s getting so much backlash that he needs to make up excuses to mask his incompetence, why doesn’t he try to fix the corrupt system for which he is responsible?
Now, if AMLO’s deflection of the blame wasn’t enough gasoline on the fire, he goes on to accuse the family for the problems that he could have prevented, preaching that the real cause is the “loss of values.” One could interpret this so called “loss of values” as the slight disappearance of women’s gender roles in the family seeing as how AMLO is reported as wanting women to take caretaking roles in the family.
To retreat even further, AMLO is reported saying that 90% of domestic violence reports are false and that “Mexican women have never been as protected as now,” which I’m sure is easy for him to say seeing as how he’s not a woman nor does he have the eyesight to see the problems he enables.
The only credit available to give him is the validity of his claims of a corrupt system; Mexico is infamous for its impunity which has been prevalent for many decades before AMLO. But, as the director of the National Network of Shelters (Mexico), Wendy Figueroa indisputably states, “[AMLO’s] declarations reflect a perpetuation of the impunity that exists in Mexico. What’s also serious is that he’s doubting the word of women in situations of violence.” Many can agree that AMLO could be seen in a different light if he was attempting to dismantle the system that facilitates violence, but he’s not; he’s chosen the light that shines on him only to complain when it doesn’t favor his desired image.
More demonstrations, hashtags, and calls to action will be seen until progress is made to protect the women that society so obviously depends on. We will continue to see the absolute power of women, one that does not waver even in the middle of a battlefield, because we are carrying something more lethal than a gun: a will to live.
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