Femicides in the times of López Obrador

Protest in Cancun for the death at the hands of the police of Victoria Salazar DPA via Europa Press / Europa Press

A few days ago, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that femicides were not previously considered femicides because they were homicides: “This classification begins practically with us, which is also why the increase in femicides, among other things, because before they murdered women and not it was considered femicide: they were homicides ”.

And a video of Marx Arriaga, director of Educational Materials of the Ministry of Public Education, circulated a year after he gave a speech in Hidalgo, still as general director of Libraries, in which he addresses women, in a way that we do not know. whether to laugh, cry, if recorded laughter enters or what when he says that if we seek to emancipate ourselves from our oppressors, let's not expect our freedom to come as a gift, because that's what, he says, books are for.

They will seem like notes from days ago, noise from last week, perhaps like Héctor Lavoe's sauce in

: "Sensational when it came out at dawn / At noon and news confirmed / And in the afternoon forgotten matter", but no.

Both went around, their validity is important and both speeches are very revealing of the problem today.

They will seem like two disconnected points, but they are not.

The line that unites them has a lot to tell us and it has to do with the participation of the State in the problem of femicides and violence against women.

The term femicide did not emerge with Q4, but femicides have increased in the last three years.

To understand why they have increased, and more importantly, to be able to do something about it, it is important to take a brief look at the history of the term to see how the total ignorance of the legal term and its history are part of the problem.

In 1976, three anarchist feminists defined the concept at the "First International Court of Crimes Against Women" in Belgium.

Diana Russell proposed a discussion on

(or "femicide").

But as the very nature of the feminist movement - made up of various feminisms - the struggles, as well as the definition of the terms, are also a collective history, since there is no struggle that has been won by a single woman, it is always, and necessarily, a collective policy.

In that academic conversation, they talked about cases in fiction as well as some taken in reality in the United States.

Later, in 1992, Diana Russell published

where she determines that “femicide” is the misogynistic murder of women by men and is a form of sexual violence.

Between 1993 and 2006, more than 400 women and girls were murdered in various violent ways in Ciudad Juárez (then the slogans “not one more”, “not one more dead” arose).

Faced with the then inexplicable crimes, the work of the writer and journalist Sergio González Rodríguez, from the journalistic chronicle, had an important role and that of Dr. Marcela Lagarde, an anthropologist and researcher, was essential both in naming him and in typifying him before the law.

• Feminists create memorial of victims on the fence of the National Palace

In her field work, Lagarde found that not all the murders were identical and that it was not an exclusive problem of Ciudad Juárez, the cases were connected to other murders in other municipalities: it was a bigger problem.

Around that time he read Russell's book and proposed adapting the term to the Mexican context, which was not the same for the United States or for other parts of the world, in addition to the fact that Russell's anarchism completely excluded the state as part of the problem.

In Mexico, the central particularity includes the State as part of hate crimes: a State that does not guarantee the human rights to life of women or a life free of femicidal violence.

In the words of Dr. Lagarde: “They always very kindly present me as the one who coined the word femicide.

And yes, it is true, I come here to say it.

But that word is the transformation of another word that was the one that served me as the key to enter femicide and that word is

, thus, smaller, and that word is from Russell and the colleagues that are compiled in two works that we produced in the Chamber of Deputies, allied with UNAM, to bring the debate on femicide to Mexico ”.

And so from the academic sphere, it passed to the legal sphere thanks to the term that was framed in the Mexican context and that was collectively promoted so that in 2012 Mexico was the first country in the world in which femicide was typified.

"I added things to it and that's why I added a syllable to it," Lagarde concludes.

One of the milestones this six-year term was the march on August 16, 2019 that named the center of Victoria Alada en Reforma the problem with black paint "Femicide Mexico", as it pointed to the public eye this central, urgent problem, also a of the three luminous pints that were projected on the National Palace on the night of this March 7.

Why would it be important for AMLO to know the history of the term and its legal details?

Not because of linguistic precision or because of knowledge of solely epistemological interest: to understand it thoroughly is to have a vision of the problem.

It is what allows taking actions in public policies so that they are eradicated (not that they reduce, no, that they stop completely) not only feminicides, but also violence against women.

To change the structure of inequality that allows men to commit these hate crimes.

Stop not only hate crimes, but also their causes.

Hence the seriousness of a misogynistic discourse like that of Marx Arriaga, since both the library network and the educational content should be articulated to end gender violence, not promote it.

Arriaga's speech is just as transparent as López Obrador's: the State makes visible the inequality that allows the different levels of violence against women.

The president does not realize it, Arriaga also does not realize that speeches like these are part of the problem from the state.

So we are not moving towards peace and tranquility as López Obrador says, nor towards freedom and emancipation from our oppressors as Arriaga says.

Why doesn't López Obrador invite Dr. Marcela Lagarde to a dialogue?

Why doesn't Arriaga read some of your research or of some other specialists?

Could it be that they do not care and that is transparent in their public speeches?

It is a State problem, it is not a women's problem.

Nor is it the demand of a few activists.

It is a social problem, it is a problem that concerns us all.

Nicole, seven, a victim of femicide, disappeared while playing outside the neighborhood where she lived in Hidalgo.

Wendy, 16, a victim of femicide, was found in a sewage canal and her friends gathered to carry her white coffin in the State of Mexico.

Maricela, 16, of Otomí origin, a victim of femicide, was found with brutal attacks on her face in Mexico City.

Ana Lilia, 16, a victim of femicide, was found strangled inside a cistern in Morelos.

Karla, 29, a victim of femicide, mother of a son, was found with her breasts severed and her taxi floating in the sea in Holbox.

Ivonne, 40, a victim of femicide, had a 10-year-old son, was seeking the municipal presidency and was shot to death on the way to a meeting in Oaxaca.

Estela, 42, of Mixtec and peasant origin, a victim of feminicide, was going to work her cultivation, they burned a part of her body and found her with her dogs taking care of her body, in Oaxaca.

Liliana Cristina, 46, a victim of femicide, was beaten to death by her ex-partner in Veracruz, whom she had already denounced.

Carmen, 80, a victim of femicide, died in the hospital as a result of the beatings and sexual assaults that occurred at her home in Veracruz.

There is no age or place of shelter.

Some cases come to light, such as these that occurred recently, but the vast majority do not reach us.

If the State is part of the problem, it must be part of the solution to the femicides in the times of López Obrador.