Six women murdered each day as femicide in Mexico nears a pandemic

According to the National Citizen Femicide Observatory, a coalition of 43 groups that document the crime, six women are assassinated every day. 

Yet only 24 percent of the 3,892 femicides the group identified in 2012 and 2013 were investigated by authorities. And only 1.6 percent led to sentencing.

“Femicides are a pandemic in Mexico,” asserts Ana Güezmes, the local representative of United Nations Women, the agency devoted to gender issues.

The word "feminicidio" first entered the vernacular in the 1990s, with explosive rates of disappearances and murders of women in the border town of Ciudad Juárez. In fact, more women have been killed in the state of Mexico, which surrounds the capital city of the same name. The number doubled from 2005 to 2011, when the current national president, Enrique Peña Nieto, was governor of the state. Today he has pledged to combat drug violence overall but has not spoken out against femicides.

Impunity is the main motor of the gender crime, Güezmes says, as well as social norms that allow the violence to be ignored or accepted as a normal part of life. She describes femicides as the extreme end of a society where 63 percent of women have suffered abuse by male hands. She estimates that maybe a third or half of the cases involved sexual partners. The balance — abductions, rapes and  discarding the bodies like garbage — are probably linked to the generalized drug violence that is tearing Mexico apart.

Güezmes says the government needs to put more effort toward prevention, and improve access to justice. “These are the biggest problems.”

To counter the lack of reliable government statistics, the Observatory trawls through press clips and conducts interviews door-to-door in marginalized neighborhoods, like this one on the edge of the capital city, where cases normally take place.

The group issues regular reports and provides pro bono lawyers to relatives seeking to prosecute killers. They also erect pink crosses at death scenes, but these rarely last more than a day before unidentified men take them down.

Most of these cases get lost in Mexico’s dysfunctional justice system, where police officers can’t be bothered to probe, or claim it’s the woman’s fault, or can be bought off by criminal gangs, says Maria de la Luz Estrada, head of the group. When the murders are investigated, incompetence and failure to follow due process often allow murderers to escape punishment.

Activists say the distinction of femicide in the law is important, because the sexual nature distinguishes the killings from ordinary homicide.

“Hate is what marks these crimes. The bodies show 20 or 30 blows,” de la Luz says. “They slice off breasts and faces and throw the fragments in the garbage. In a macho society like Mexico, authorities are always questioning what the women did. What was she wearing? Was she sexually active? This helps the impunity and lack of action.”

The victims are generally vulnerable young women, impoverished single mothers or teens. Attackers frequently seize victims on empty streets as they leave school or work, force them into cars, and then rape and torture them and dispose of the bodies.

Families in poor areas like this one generally lack the money or clout to seek legal action, says de la Luz. “The parents are scared to give photos and details to the police, because that can make them vulnerable to extortionists, who say, ‘We have her,’ when in fact they don’t. Corrupt authorities often say, ‘If you speak out, your case won’t advance.’”

Suárez Padilla is one of the few parents who have pressed charges, but he has had to confront misogynist cops, who implied that his daughter was responsible for her own death because her cell phone contained 200 nude photos taken by the killer.

He takes solace in the international pressure that convinced Mexican lawmakers in 2007 to approve new laws aimed at preventing violence against women. The law called for a data bank and gender violence alerts, to encourage national, state and local governments to catch perpetrators and prevent murders. Yet neither has been activated effectively.

The special prosecutor for violent crimes against women, Nelly Montealegre Diaz, admits that no femicides were prosecuted in 2014. She blames impunity and corruption, but says the government is addressing the problem in a gradual overhaul of the legal system.

Harder to combat, she says, is social acceptance of gender violence. “If a worker sees a [female] colleague with a black eye or the father hitting the mother, they think it is normal. Women are seen as objects.”