On a recent morning in the coastal village of Zipolite in Mexico’s Oaxaca State, I went for a jog on the beach with a fourteen-year-old — we’ll call her Alejandra — from Tapachula on the Mexican-Guatemalan border. Alejandra had come to Zipolite with her mother to work in a restaurant for the couple of months that constitute the high season here, and told me matter-of-factly that her older sister had traditionally accompanied her mom — but that her sister had recently been murdered by a jealous militar. Recounting how the man had beaten and strangled her sister in a Tapachula motel room, Alejandra went on to describe her mother’s barrio-permeating screams upon hearing the news. Her sister left behind a four-year-old son.
The killer, Alejandra told me, was ultimately tried and incarcerated — a relatively rare occurrence in a country where both femicides and impunity abound. An average of ten women are murdered each day in Mexico, with femicides skyrocketing 137 percent between 2015 and 2020. Given the underreporting of such crimes and the tendency to categorize femicides as ordinary homicides, the actual numbers are likely much higher. Last year, Mexico’s El Universal newspaper reported that between 2015 and 2018, a mere 7 percent of crimes against women had been investigated, and that only 5 to 7 percent of alleged criminals in these cases appeared before a judge. Nearly 80 percent of Mexican women report feeling unsafe.
The initial spike in femicides took place on the watch of right-wing president Enrique Peña Nieto, who governed Mexico from 2012 until 2018. However, the trend has continued under the left-wing rule of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who despite presiding over a gender-equal government and decrying machismo, has reacted to femicides and violence against women in a manner that is at best odd and at worst horrifying.
In February, shortly after twenty-five-year-old Ingrid Escamilla was stabbed, skinned, and disemboweled in her Mexico City apartment, AMLO expressed resentment during a press conference that the femicide issue should distract from the raffle of Mexico’s presidential airplane.
The same week, also in Mexico City, seven-year-old Fátima Aldrighett was abducted, tortured, sexually abused, and murdered. The moral of the story, according to AMLO, was that the neoliberalism of previous governments had triggered societal decay and a loss of values — and that growing feminist protests in Mexico were part of a right-wing plot against his administration.
There’s no denying that neoliberalism fosters violence and subordinates women. But telling aggrieved Mexican women that they can’t think for themselves and are simply victims of right-wing manipulation is no way to go about dismantling the patriarchy. (Nor, it bears mentioning, is AMLO’s anti-neoliberal rhetoric easily reconcilable with all of his actions, which have included celebrating with Donald Trump the new iteration of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which destroyed countless Mexican lives and was linked to a surge in lethal violence against women.) Similarly, AMLO’s condescending comments about minor acts of vandalism committed by feminist protesters implies that he’s more concerned about the destruction of private property than the destruction of women’s bodies. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.