'Mamá Elvira', the woman who rescues victims of trafficking in Mexico

Elvira Madrid's glassy eyes show a tiredness accumulated for weeks.

Last night she could hardly sleep because a “companera” —as she calls women who work in prostitution— was murdered in Tapachula, Chiapas.

She received eight bullets for refusing to pay the extortion for the right of flat that the criminal organizations of the southern capital, known for the trafficking of women, demanded of her.

In parallel, she has been fighting all week with the authorities that certify schooling in Mexico so that they re-examine the compañeras whom she teaches to read and write in the red light district of the capital.

To top it off, she has a birthday party thrown at her office by Vero, a sex worker she has been helping for years and who has brought together the neighborhood prostitutes to eat cake, sing and dance.

The festive crowd of women who gather in this department of La Merced, the neighborhood known for prostitution, call her "Mama", despite the fact that many are older than her, who is 55 years old.

Among the guests is Gaby, who after running away from her pimp boyfriend and not being able to return to her town because of her stigma, found in the Madrid association the means to study Nursing and go to university.

One of those who organizes the banquet is Rosa, who finds time before or after working on her corner to come here and learn to read.

Dina, who still bears the marks of her husband's mistreatment on her face, does not stop thanking Elvira Madrid for helping her get her papers out.

All of them are the support that they do not find in the police or in the Government, they are their only protection network in the streets.

Between the walls of this office papered with educational sexual health posters and banners calling for the formation of a union, these women have found shelter, food, education, psychological and medical assistance, as well as legal advice.

La Brigada Callejera is the project that Madrid built more than 30 years ago together with her husband, Jaime Montejo, now deceased.

The two created a movement to ensure that women who engage in prostitution do so safely and freely.

Archive image of Elvira Madrid with a sex worker. Pedro Cote Baraibar

The first time that Elvira Madrid set foot in La Merced, she was 19 years old and was participating in sociological research with her university.

“We all saw the girls being taken away by the police,” she recalls.

It was 1986 and the practices of collecting flat rights by the authorities were frequent, much more so than now, according to testimonies from Madrid.

If the girls did not pay, they faced a fine of 1,500 pesos (just under $75).

At that time, most of them charged 50 pesos (two dollars) for service, so, unable to afford it, they spent several days in jail, while their children waited for them in the hotels where they lived with their mothers without knowing when they would return. see them.

Four students decided to stay: Madrid, her sister, and two classmates.

One of them was Jaime Montejo, a former M-19 guerrilla who took refuge in Mexico due to the government's reprisals after the peace process.

Together they co-founded a small initiative in the plaza of the parish of Santa Cruz and Nuestra Señora de la Soledad.

Father Héctor Tello allowed them to set up a community kitchen and dispense condoms.

“So they killed a girl a week here, the pimp himself ordered their murders if they wanted to escape.

We went to a lot of wakes in that church,” he recounts.

Shortly after, they built a small doctor's office and an office to work.

Then came psychological assistance and a teacher from the Government to start the process of teaching women to read and write.

In parallel,

Madrid reached agreements with a selection of clinics to ensure that they had access to operations and medicines, since they alone could not get care in hospitals, even though many were infected with AIDS.

“We sent them and they did not receive them or they treated them badly.

The appointments took time because she was not a priority and in the end they died, ”recalls Madrid.

When the Archdiocese closed that project in the church, they moved into an old, dark apartment that the sex workers found on Corregidora Street.

It was farther from the atmosphere of violence and drugs that poisons these streets in the heart of Mexico's capital, a few streets beyond where tourists stroll through the Zócalo.

Among the market alleys, whose colored awnings are so crowded that they block out the sunlight, some women stand like statues, heroically enduring the pain in their feet on the acrylic platforms.

Elvira Madrid moved by a speech by a sex worker who remembers her late husband, Jaime Montejo.Micaela Varela

In La Merced, they have become part of the landscape, but it is impossible to know who is there by choice and who, at the end of the very long days, gives all the money to a man, the pimp.

It is impossible for the outside eye, but not for Madrid.

To be present on the streets, he recruited several sex workers to become health promoters.

Women whom she trained with basic notions of sexual education so that they would encourage the use of condoms in the corners, but also with a watchful eye to detect sexual slaves.

“It's easy for them to recognize them.

They are women who do not talk to their partners in hotels, you will never see them laugh or smile and they look at the ground all the time, ”she describes Madrid.

When a promoter identifies one, she notifies the Brigade.

They are the ones who break their chains with the pimp, give them the opportunity to have another life and, in case they have children held hostage, go out looking for them with the help of media cameras.

Elvira Madrid, with her meter fifty of height,

he has lost count of the times he has stood in front of the pimps' houses with his hands on his hips and has not left until he has freed the women and children they held captive.

"That's why I don't have children, I know it would be the only way they would have to control me," adds Madrid.

When the pimps lose their main economic asset, they vow revenge.

The first time they threatened her was one of the most feared pimps in the neighborhood, the one who ran La Merced with the support of corrupt police officers.

Madrid had freed several women from his tentacles, so he was not surprised when several police vans without license plates returned to his house.

Pedro Cote, a friend of the couple who worked as a rapporteur for the United Nations and lived near her, arrived in time to see how the hooded policemen began to beat Elvira Madrid.

“Jaime tried to defend me, but there were too many.

They grabbed him between several and began to suffocate him, I got strength, I don't know where and I took the gun from a policeman, I pointed it at his head and told him 'either they let him go, or the fuck fucks them,'” says the sociologist.

Pedro Cote did not arrive in time to witness the scene, but he assures that nothing surprises him.

“They were a very special couple, they were together 24 hours a day, they only separated to go to the bathroom.

I see her fully capable of doing that.

For Jaime, anything,” says Cote.

Elvira Madrid on one of her tours of La Merced to distribute condoms while the sex workers tell her about their problems.Micaela Varela

Madrid received many blows that day.

Thanks to the presence of a United Nations worker, the episode did not escalate, as the operation had promised, when they yelled at her between blows that they were going to rape her so that she would always remember that.

After several years trying to obtain justice, they gave up.

"Even with the support of the United Nations, we were never able to continue the accusation," says Cote resignedly.

The threat of more beatings was always present for Elvira Madrid and Jaime Montejo, and continues years after that night.

Only now, Madrid is alone to deal with them.

Jaime died on May 3, 2020, when the covid crisis in Mexico had overwhelmed hospitals.

Jaime desperately carried the sick women in his arms, looking for a medical center where they would be treated.

Madrid assures that this is how her husband became infected.

“They didn't have anyone, we couldn't leave them at that time.

And that was the reason for her death.

I'm never going to forgive the government," condemns Madrid in tears.

Elvira Madrid continues her solo project and says that when she notices her husband's absence the most is when "there is danger", like when she was threatened at the end of the year for denouncing the presence of trafficking victims in La Merced.

“On one of my tours, it was three women who came to me asking for help.

They were immediately taken away.

What is the authority doing that is stupid? ”, She claims.

To alleviate her frustration, she continues to walk the streets of La Merced with sex education brochures to give away to prostitutes that include condoms from the brand she founded to cut costs.

Despite her struggle, she still receives criticism from the abolitionist wing of feminism, although she is not worried about it and downplays it by saying that it is a speech "from a privileged middle and upper class."

“We cannot choose for them,

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