More than 80,000 protestors gathered in Mexico City on Sunday to proclaim femicide to be rampant in Mexico
Numbers of violence resulting in death against women in Mexico staggering
Protestors in Mexico City in front of Monument of the Revolution
March 12, 2020
A staggering 4,000 murdered women in 2019—a disillusioned population of the current president’s inactions to the crisis are why protests in Mexico City on Sunday escalated to around 80,000 protestors to take to the streets, making it the largest protest in Mexican history.
The violence against women by an intimate partner is known criminally as femicide and according to United Nations website, 1 in 3 women and girls experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, most frequently by an intimate partner.
This category of crime includes battering, psychological abuse and marital rape where “only 52% of women married or in a union freely make their own decisions about sexual relations, contraceptive use and health care,” so that makes it a high of 48% of women who are submitted to their intimate partner worldwide.
In Mexico, the wave of activism is correlated to the rise in femicides and the “anger at the sexual harassment that women face on public transportation and in the streets and the discrimination in school and the workplace.” The Los Angeles Times stated.
The almost daily reporting of murdered women and girls, like the recent case of a 25-year-old woman who was skinned and disembowelled by her husband, fueled the anger and frustrations of women who have lost a mother, sister, or friend.
Teresa Morales, 44, walked arm in arm with her two daughters. She held a pink sign that read “I march with my girls now so I don’t have to march for them later.”
“Mr President, don’t be indifferent,” they chanted, referring to Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. “They’re killing women in plain sight.”
There were a few groups of demonstrators who took destructive decisions towards monuments, government buildings and private business. However, the majority of demonstrators were peaceful protesting and criticized the destructive behavior and chanted, “They do not represent me.”
María de la Luz Estrada, an activist with a group that tracks femicides states that exemption from punishment or failure to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice itself constitutes a denial of the victims right to justice and redress.
“It’s not women killing women, it’s men killing women, and they are emboldened by Mexico’s culture of impunity,” Estrada said.
Lopez Obrador also known as AMLO supports the right to protest, even when criticized by many women because of his lack of action to further investigate abductions of murders related to possible femicides.
On Tuesday Amlo when asked by a reporter if he would consider a different approach to the problem—he replied “No – on the contrary, we are going to reinforce the same strategy of looking at the causes of violence,” he said. “finding ways to live in a better society … [making sure] that there is no unemployment, that there are good salaries, that family disintegration is avoided, that there are proper salaries, that values are strengthened.”
He has not used the word “femicide” but he did accuse “conservatives” of “putting on the mask of feminism and saying, ‘we’re going to get rid of the government.”
According to numbers released by the Executive Secretaria of the National Public Security System (SESNSP) on average, a woman was murdered every two hours and a half in Mexico during 2019.
In an article from El Universal dated in June of 2019 the numbers in the first quarter of that year were the most violent and deadly for Mexican woman in the country.
On average 10 women are murdered in Mexico every day.
In four years, the number of victims increased by 97%.
Lourdes Enriquez from the UNAM’s Gender Studies Research and Study Center (CIEG), stated that the increase is the result of impunity.
“The problem is that nothing happens, there is total impunity. It’s true that we live in a violent time but we can’t generalize that all these murders took place in public. In the worldview of those who deliver justice, if a woman was murdered it was because she asked for it.”
From January to April of 2019 girls between the ages of 0 and 17 were murdered, that is one murdered every day.
Information from the SESNSP shows that only 25% of the murders of women between the first quarter of 2019 were categorized as femicides.
