When the man who was smoking a cigarette at the exit of the metro station grabbed her backpack, Zúe Valenzuela's first thought was that it was an attempt to rob her. But when he started to drag her by force to a car with two men in it, the 30-year-old lawyer really started to panic. “I threw myself to the ground and struggled and cried out,” she recalls. “A young man who was passing came up. Then my attacker said: 'I know her, she's just having a anger attack. Come on, we're going home!” Seeing the panic on my face the young man called doormen on the street for help and my attacker fled,” says Zúe Valenzuela.
The events took place on January 15th 2019 at around 10.30pm at the metro station at Coyoacán, a peaceful residential area in the south of Mexico City. The following month 48 people reported attempted kidnaps, several of which involved the same method and which become known in the Mexican media as the Calmate mi Amor (“Calm yourself my love”) kidnapping attempts.
This wave of complaints about attempted kidnapping in Mexico's capital city is just the latest manifestation of a security climate for women that has just carried on getting worse in Mexico. Government figures showed that nearly 3,600 women were killed in the country in 2018, a rise of 65% compared with 2015.
Yet the recognition of femicides – murders where women are killed because of their gender – remains patchy in Mexico. So in 2018, out of the total number women who were killed in the country, just 861 have been classified as femicides in the official statistics. That is still two women killed every day because they are a woman. However, civic groups have come up with their own alarming statistics: in a report in late 2017 the United Nations Women organisation says there are on average more than seven femicides a day in the country.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
One of the reasons for the gap between the figures is the floating interpretation of the legal concept of femicide in Mexico. Out of the 32 states in Mexico, 12 define the term in a less inclusive way than is the case at federal level and in two of them the crime of femicide is completely absent from the statute books.
Even in those areas that do recognise the crime, the protocols that stem from it are far from being applied systematically. When Zúe Valenzuela went to make a complaint after the attempt to kidnap her the authorities originally told her that “if nothing had been stolen and if I was safe and sound then there was nothing to report”.
Under pressure, the authorities eventually opened a file for “attempted theft”. “I didn't want to go there [to the authorities] because I knew very well how it would go,” says the young lawyer. “They were insistent about asking me how I was dressed and what time it was at the time of the events. I was alone in a waiting room with two of the suspects. During the physical examination the doctor gave her verdict without having touched me.”
Though by profession she is a human rights lawyer, Zúe Valenzuela does not now recommend a woman going to report such crimes. “There's no point, and it's extremely tough to go through,” she says. “You're the victim and it's you that they blame.”
Several women who have spoken about their experiences on social media have indeed not reported the incidents to the authorities. This initially allowed the city authorities to deny the existence of a problem, as they argued in certain cases that they had no knowledge of any formal complaints. “Mexico City is portrayed – wrongly – as a secure bubble in the middle of a violent country,” says Zúe Valenzuela. “I myself did not think I was someone to whom that could happen.” She says that Mexico City is in reality a “mirror of the country. If something isn't right in the capital it means the whole of Mexico has a problem.”
Indeed, Estado de México, the state which forms an industrial belt around the capital and which has a population of 16 million, has now taken over from Ciudad Juárez - where many women were killed in the 1990s – as the place where most femicides occur in the country. One town in particular, Ecatepec de Morelos, has been described in the local press as the “new capital of femicides”.
This giant dormitory town in the suburbs of Mexico City suffers from poverty, a loss of public services and, as a result, from an epidemic of violence. A recent survey suggests that 93.4% of locals do not feel safe.
'Thrown away like a piece of garbage'
In recent years several crime stories have dominated the news in the town, such as that of the dismembered bodies of women found at the bottom of a canal and the serial killer known as the 'Monster of Ecatepec' who was arrested in 2018 for the murder of at least ten women. “This type of case masks the real causes of the violence,” says feminist lawyer Andrea Medina. “It's easier to say that it all started with a serial killer and that once he is arrested the problem is solved.”
Mitzy González Solis and Belén Pérez Garcia have grown up in Ecatepec. Unlike the capital city, no woman living her starts from the premise that she is safe. Both soon 18, the two friends dream of being a medical forensics officer and a lawyer respectively. Sitting at one of the few cafés at the foot of a cable car designed to provide a link to this poorly-industrialised area of north Ecatepec, the two young women tell how they have come to terms with their surroundings. “No short skirts or close-fitting clothes, no headphones in the street, always check you're not followed, go around in groups, never go out after 8pm,” they say, listing their rules.
At their secondary school the pair take part in the “Women, art and politics” workshop run by their teacher Manuel Amador who through his questioning seeks to help them to overcome the everyday reality that surrounds them. This world where, as some put it , a woman is “everyone's property, that can be used and then thrown away like piece of garbage”.
The two students have learnt what a femicide is. “We've come across a word for a reality which has always surrounded us,” says Belén. “Before, I thought that if something happened to a woman it was because she was looking for it,” she admits. “Now I've learnt that we're all victims of a system of discrimination. Society made us believe it was our fault.” Karina Avilés, who has written a thesis on femicides in Ecatepec, says: “Here, the simple fact of being a woman exposes you to violence, including murder.”
A member of Parliament for the opposition Citizens' Movement party, Martha Tagle has been following the legislative aspect of the issue for several years, and accepts there has been a failure. “In 2007 Mexico adopted an innovative law which recognised violence against women as an entirely separate issue. Twelve years later, rather than decreasing the violence has increased. It's the time to stop and ask ourselves: what is it that hasn't worked?”
In 2009 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Mexican state responsible and sanctioned it in a case involving the femicides of three women. “By not doing prevention, by not investigating the existing cases, the state is responsible for having built up the risk that these women face,” says Andrea Medina. “The protocols that exist are not applied. Why are women kidnapped, raped, killed? Because it's possible.”
Faced with authorities who are overrun, indifferent or deliberately inactive, the families of victims often take over their role. Once such woman is Mayra González. She is sitting, straight-backed, in a small park in the east of Mexico City. On her belt is a pepper spray that she is never without. In front of her is a photo of her sister Sintia, who disappeared in August 2016 in the state of Puebla, an hour to the south of the capital city.
After her sister's disappearance, Mayra was repeatedly been told: “She left with her lover, she's going to come back.” Mayra González reached the point where could no longer rely on the authorities' investigation, one that was marred by numerous acts of negligence and omissions and mistakes. So she herself became an investigator, a lawyer, cop and forensic expert, learning on the job and trusting in her “good sense” to try to find her sister.
It was she who got hold of Sintia's phone records and she who organised searches. “The authorities want to show that they are looking but they don't really want to find those who have disappeared,” says Mayra. Thanks to her tenacity her murdered sister's body was found a year later. But Mayra González has still not given up and is now seeking justice for her sister in a country where only 5% of homicides end in a conviction.
Though women's groups and associations dreamt there might be changes in the official approach to femicides with the recent arrival in power of Mexico's new left-wing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, they have quickly become disenchanted. “It doesn't interest him and moreover he doesn't understand the issue,” says MP Martha Tagle. “When you speak about femicides his entourage reply that more men than women are murdered in Mexico.”
Three months after AMLO's arrival in power, a series of decisions have appeared to confirm that femicides are not the president's priority, focused entirely as he is on the fight against corruption, the major theme of his campaign. The latest disappointment came when, claiming the need for austerity, the president announced at the end of February that he was ending public funding for women's refuges run by various non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
In the face of protests the president backtracked, but is talking now of “giving the funds directly to the victims” and bypassing the NGOs. “Rather than fighting to move forward we are fighting to save what we've already got,” says Andrea Medina. “It's very serious.”
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter