The two women from the LGTB+ community murdered in Ciudad Juárez, identified as Tania and Nohemí.RR.
H.H.
The last time the families spoke with Tania and Nohemí was Saturday. The morning of the next day, the bodies of the two young women, 28 years old, appeared dismembered and thrown in garbage bags on a highway in Valle de Juárez, in Chihuahua. The heinous crime has outraged a population that lives with the almost daily femicides of its women. On this occasion, the groups recognize, the fury is surprising. The girls were a sentimental couple and had three children, according to local media reports. The State is the second with the highest number of hate crimes against the LGTB + population in all of Mexico.
The Juárez-Porvenir highway is a violent place, historically controlled by drug cartels. But the discovery of two dismembered women whose remains were scattered on the asphalt, near the town of San Agustín, alerted the neighbors and later the women's defense organizations. “We are hurt by the brutality of what is happening in Ciudad Juárez: now the double femicide of a lesbian couple,” said David Adrián García, secretary of the Chihuahua Sexual Diversity Committee, which demands justice from the state government for the crime. .
The Chihuahua Prosecutor's Office has confirmed to EL PAÍS that the two girls were originally from Ciudad Juárez and lived there, although one of them had family in El Paso, Texas (USA). In addition, the State Attorney General, Roberto Javier Fierro, has ruled out that the murder of the girls is due to their sexual orientation: "We are very advanced in the investigation, there are various lines, but it is not a hate crime." The official has tried to place the motive for the crime in "the economic activity and the environment" of the two women.
However, the Ministry of the Interior (Segob) has appealed to the National Council to Prevent Discrimination and the National Commission to Eradicate Violence against Women to clarify the couple's murder. The Segob has also demanded that the government of the PAN member Maru Campos reinforce public policies to combat hate speech and lesbophobia. "Since she was a deputy, the now governor has spoken out against same-sex marriage, fueling a climate of rejection of the LGBT population, which does not help us to end violence," says the secretary of the Committee for Sexual Diversity.
Data from the Letra S organization places Chihuahua as the second state with the most hate crimes in Mexico, only behind Veracruz. In 2019, 20 members of LGBT+ groups were murdered. “We are already tired”, says García, “crimes happen all the time, we want to move freely and safely through the State”.
“We are very worried about the atrocious violence we are experiencing,” adds María Elena Ramos, director of the Compañeros Program and member of the Chihuahua women's movement. “That they have murdered some mothers of families, in this way, makes us react. It is up to us to point out what is happening to lesbian women and to all women in general”. The organizations have called a protest for this Thursday in front of the Prosecutor's Office and a march of several kilometers to the Women's Justice Center, so that they attract the case and investigate it with a gender perspective.
Ramos, who has been working against the ravages of violence in the state for more than 30 years, says that the situation is worsening in Ciudad Juárez. “We went back to what was happening between 2009 and 2012, when organized crime sent very bloody messages. They want to sow fear and pain, we are shocked because they have set fire to a store, to public transport... This situation is telling us that there is a state of tremendous defenselessness and little action by the Governments”, pointed out the director of the Compañeros Program .
In Mexico, 11 women are murdered every day, the impunity rate exceeds 95% and only 2% of cases end in conviction.
Between 2018 and last year alone, 11,602 women have been murdered in Mexico, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi).
In addition, the National Femicide Observatory adds to the portrait of overwhelmed authorities that younger women are being murdered with greater cruelty.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS Mexico newsletter
and receive all the informative keys of the news of this country