Violence against women: Mexico City calls state of emergency

In Mexico City, a state of emergency has been declared because of violence against women. This will make the problem more visible, said the mayor of the Mexican capital, Claudia Sheinbaum, on Thursday in a statement. "Everybody in this city has to say STOP, FINAL." As part of the measure, she will submit, inter alia, a bill for the creation of a public list of sex offenders, it was said by Sheinbaum. She will do everything in her power to make women and girls feel free and secure.

According to official figures, more than 150 women were murdered in Mexico City in the first nine months of this year. Forty of these cases were femicides - the victims were killed because of their gender. There were also 527 emergency calls for rape by the end of September. The number of rape cases increased by ten percent between October 2018 and October 2019 - also because the city hired numerous lawyers to advise and assist women in advertising, sheinbaum said.

Hoy quiero informarles que he decidido decretar la Alerta por Violencia en Contra de las Mujeres.

Aquí doy la explicación de qué hemos hecho, qué hemos encontrado y de qué acciones va acompañada para protéger a nuestras niñas y mujeres. pic.twitter.com/zyauENS2iI

He decidido decretar la Alerta por Violencia en Contra de las Mujeres.

Aquí las razones y la acciones que la acompaña para proteger a las niñas, níños y mujeres. pic.twitter.com/rENOHlWshW

The 57-year-old environmental researcher has been the first woman to head Mexico City for almost a year. With around nine million inhabitants in the urban area and more than 20 million in the metropolitan area, the capital of the Latin American country is one of the largest cities in the world. In Mexico, which has been suffering from high levels of violence for years, 18 other city councils had already called a so-called gender alert since 2015.

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Drug War in Mexico Land of mass graves

Assaults on women are commonplace throughout Mexico, and most are without consequences. "In the past ten years, the murders of women have more than doubled, today 270 femicides are counted each month," said women's rights activist Julia Escalante De Haro recently in an interview with Die Zeit. "Sexual abuse charges on girls under five have more than tripled - and that's just the ads - every year, more than 11,000 girls between the ages of ten and 14 get pregnant after experiencing sexual violence."

As the cause of the violence, she sees the ubiquitous war of drug cartels against the government. Their analysis of the violence statistics: "Where the cartels fight particularly brutally, especially many women are murdered and women are the prey in this war."

Last Wednesday, the authorities also released the crime statistics for the first ten months of the year: So far, there have been 29,414 murders in Mexico - which have been recorded. This is another two percent more than last year, when the authorities registered 28,869 murders.