Last week, a video surfaced showing a man groping the President of Mexico during a public appearance. The events took place last November 4th, and Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, later revealed she would be pressing charges against whom she described as a “completely drunk” man.
This incident reveals yet again how much society struggles (and frankly, flat out refuses) to believe women. It wasn’t long before social media got flooded with comments accusing the President of staging the situation as a way to diffuse the attention from other, more pressing matters, such as the recent assassination of an opposition politician in Michoacan, Mexico.
But is that a valid criticism or the perpetuation of the victim-blaming that pervades our society? Can we not push to maintain the attention on the very real violence problem that Mexico suffers while also acknowledging that misogyny and gender violence permeate Mexican culture, affecting even those in power?
Beyond the President
If we cannot believe the President, who do we believe? Valeria Marquez, a beauty influencer who was assassinated earlier this year while on a TikTok live in her beauty studio and in broad daylight, but whose death was quickly justified for alleged links to El Cartel? Or Kimberly Hilary Moya González, a 16-year-old girl who disappeared last month while walking home from printing her homework in a Cyber Café in Naucalpan, one of the most dangerous municipalities in the country?
Kimberly has been blamed for her own disappearance, questioned about her decision to walk in broad daylight, in her own neighbourhood, and within sight of anyone driving along one of the busiest roads in the locality.
. . .
“Maybe this is another one of those girls who ran away from home because she can’t her parents, and she doesn’t want to be the house servant anymore . . . Hopefully Kimberley will show her face soon because her parents are shattered with anguish.”
“[These girls] end up being servants in other people’s houses and married to some drug addict. They have lots of children, and they end up doing worse than before.”
“It takes hours to get one’s hair straightened… and [the mom] hasn’t stopped looking for her daughter?”
“She’s way too calm.
A mother would be utterly destroyed with crying; she wouldn’t even be able to speak.
I would be dead from how depressed I would be for my daughter.
This is too weird. I don’t believe this woman; she’s hiding something.”
. . .
We, as a society, might not believe the President, the one woman holding the most power in Mexico, but are we willing to accept that we don’t believe nor protect nor mourn women in general when the worst forms of gender-based violence are presented to us?
And, writing from Mexico, is this really an isolated case? Is our society uniquely misogynistic? Or is this form of violence, as upheld by patriarchy seemingly everywhere, on the rise across the world?
A Harsh History
Mexico’s problem with gender-based violence is far from being a new phenomenon. In the 1990s, Mexico received more than its fair share of international attention (and with due reason) when the news broke that dozens of women’s bodies had been found in Ciudad Juárez, a border town in the north of Chihuahua.
These women, and hundreds more that followed in the decades to come, were more infamously (and rather callously) called las Muertas de Juárez, or the Dead Women of Juárez. Many showed signs of rape, mutilation, and beatings. Despite the gruesomeness of what amounted to over 500 murders and many other disappearances, Mexican authorities did little to find justice for these women and prevent these crimes for well over a decade (1993-2011).
Growing up in Mexico at the turn of the century, it was almost impossible not to hear about these women. They became almost like a myth in the cultural imaginary: They were young women, either naive or rebellious, either uneducated factory workers from the maquiladora industry—which was booming by that time at the border, driving more and more women to enter the labour force—or sex workers selling their bodies to American foreigners.
Either way, they were known collectively, seldom by individual name—the stories of who they really were only half told. And whichever version you choose to believe from the above, it was meant to be a cautionary tale for women across the country: don’t go out at night, don’t get a job, stay away from boys, don’t flirt with gringos, don’t miss out on school, etc.
You almost never heard news anchors or government officials telling men not to kill us. “Almost” may be already too generous.
The Hard Data
After much national and international scrutiny, these murders finally led the authorities to take a series of actions to prevent them. The General Law for Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence, published in 2007, was one of such actions. It defined for the first time in Mexican law the crime of “femicide” as a specific type of violence committed against women because of their gender.
And while femicide is the most extreme form of gender based violence, this also presents itself in more insidious ways. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), 70% of women above 15 years of age have experienced some type of violence. Out of them, 49.7% report experiencing sexual violence, 52% psychological violence, and 34.7% physical violence.
On paper, the aforementioned General Law sanctions each and every type of violence against women, recognising that violence often escalates and, if left unchecked, it can result in femicide. In real life, almost 90% of gender-based crimes are left unpunished, many of them having never been investigated. In previous years, civil society organisations have suggested that state authorities tend to classify femicides as homicides or suicides to “artificially lower” the number of femicides recorded.
While organised crime is responsible for a significant number of femicides, 40% of the murdered women were killed by their current or former partners or even other male relatives. After the fact, what is told is a story as old as time: the perpetrators of these crimes are often not what we have been taught to recognise as “monsters” or social deviants. Rather, they can be our once-loving partners, our even our fathers, our friends, and our neighbours.
And their crimes are justified or brushed under the rug, all the way from public opinion to the high courts, because our society refuses to stop seeing women in general as men’s property. And murdered or otherwise violated women specifically? They must have done something wrong.
A Pervasive Culture
So what’s behind this? Why, even with specific laws in place, are women still left unprotected?
Machismo culture, prevalent in Mexico and other Latin American countries, can be described as a set of “beliefs and expectations regarding the role of men in society; it is a set of values, attitudes, and beliefs about masculinity, or what it is to be a man. Machismo encompasses positive and negative aspects of masculinity, including bravery, honour, dominance, aggression, sexism, sexual prowess, and reserved emotions, among others.” It is not difficult to see how, in a society in which such a culture is dominant, women can be the first to receive the brunt of its worst characteristics.
Before femicide entered the legal and everyday vocabulary in Mexico, the so-called crimenes de pasion (or “crimes of passion”) dominated the headlines. Characterised by an intimate relationship between the victim and the perpetrator, these crimes resulted in reduced sentences for honour and passion reasons, helping maintain and normalise violence against women, and the inefficient and biased justice system we still have to this day.
This has been replicated all the way from urban legends, local gossip, telenovelas, movies, and popular music. In 2023, the city of Chihuahua, in the same state as Ciudad Juárez, approved a measure to ban misogynistic songs that “promote violence against women” and moved towards fining non-compliant performers. The then City Mayor justified this decision, arguing that violence against women had reached pandemic levels, with almost 70% of emergency calls related to domestic violence, in particular against women.
This move didn’t come without major backlash and ridicule from those who argued feminists were just too sensitive.
Closing Thoughts
And what does all this have to do with the President of Mexico, the woman who started this discussion? Well, everything.
It is impossible to think about that incident without bringing to mind my own run-ins with misogyny in this country, or my own sister’s or my friends’ or even my grandmothers’ some twenty, thirty, or forty years ago. Ask any woman in this country, and perhaps the whole world, and they have a story to tell. But perhaps more worryingly, I hear the echoes of the men (and other women) saying we’re being too sensible, we can’t take a joke, and we must have wanted it or provoked it in some way, whatever it was.
In a country in which violence against women in all its forms goes unpunished, it is necessary to recognise that the harsh reality for the majority of women (7 in 10, not counting those who didn’t file a report) can also reach those in power. And when it does, this power shouldn’t be a deterrent for them to be believed in or empathised with. All types of gender-based violence should be taken seriously and prosecuted, and maybe then will authorities and society at large stop treating them as cautionary tales to keep women in check and more as a deterrent for men to keep committing these crimes.
Resources to Learn More
Las tres muertes de Marisela Escobedo (The Three Deaths of Marisela Escobedo, 2020)
This documentary follows Marisela Escobedo’s journey as she fights for justice against her daughter’s killer despite the government’s lack of support and growing enmity.
Olvidadas: Las muertas de Juárez (Forgotten: Women of Juárez)
A podcast tracing the events that occurred in Ciudad Juárrez, leading to the discovery of more than 500 murdered women in the span of a little bit over a decade.
Julia Didrikson (@juliadidri)
She is a feminist activist, gender studies graduate student, and social media content creator from Mexico. Her content focuses on feminist issues, exposing the latent misogyny in mass media, public life, and political discourses.
Women in Mexico Fight Femicide
DW Documentary that explores the “Ni una menos” movement in Mexico through the stories of the women behind it and their efforts to bring attention to this national issue.
Ruido (Noise, 2022)
Directed by Natalia Beristáin, this movie follows Julia, a mother searching for her disappeared daughter. In doing so, her story becomes intertwined with the stories of many other women navigating living in a country where women are constantly violated and victimised.
