During the COVID-19 lockdown, domestic violence is rampant in Mexico. According to a report from a national network of women's shelter, calls to see help increased by 60 percent last month. However, even prior to this global health crisis, reports have it that women in Mexico were already "feeling siege."

Considered as one of the most violent countries of the world, here, women are kidnapped, raped, and murdered and they happen frequently. More so, the frequency of such crimes is now an undeniably growing problem. In her article, Spanish professor Alejandra Marquez Guajardo said when she started teaching gender violence in Latin American Studies in 2018, "Mexico saw seven femicides."

"Femicides," she explained, is "the legal term for the murder of a woman - a day." The professor continued saying that this year, 10 Mexican women on the average are being killed every day.

Two Murders in One Week

Early this year, before the pandemic came, two separate gruesome murders in Mexico City happened days apart and these landed the national headlines. One incident was the murder of 25-year-old Ingrid Escamilla in mid-February. She was murdered, reports described, "skinned and partly disemboweled."

Escamilla's mutilated body turned out to be a public display after the authorities who responded at the crime scene leaked the photos which were reproduced by the media. A few days later, a seven-year-old girl was kidnapped while she was waiting for her mother who was supposed to pick her up from school. She, Fatima Aldrighette was later on found inside a plastic bag, naked.

According to the police who are investigating the case, they saw "signs of torture and sexual abuse." While the apprehension of the two suspects for the seven-year-old girl's case was led by a surveillance video, the murder of Escamilla remains unsolved. Cases remaining unsolved have been common results of investigations for murders in Mexico.

After the two horrifying murders in just a week, Mexico President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador reportedly accused violence against women on his right-wing predecessors' neoliberal policies and dismissed the growing feminist movement of Mexico, a plan, allegedly "orchestrated by his right-wing opposition."

The seemingly unconcerned response of the Mexican government to femicides ignited a powerful criticism from feminists. Then last month, the Lopez Obrador administration revealed a comprehensive plan for the protection of Mexican women.

The plan, according to reports, indicated the government's commitment to reopen domestic violence homes and daycare facilities which were funded by the government but were closed because of budget cuts in 2019. Also part of the commitment to the unveiled plan is the launch of a smartphone app that people can use so they can report street harassment.


A Call for the Protection of Women

Despite the said plan of the government, during the celebration of International Women's Day on March 8, an estimate from the official data of up to 120,000 women gathered and marched in Mexico City and the whole country. They rallied to demand the government's implementation of policies for the protection of women. They also demanded femicide investigations be taken seriously and bring the victims and families the justice they deserve.

The feminist rallies continued the following day, with a women's strike dubbed as, "A Day Without Us." In spite of some criticisms of the particular strike as what the critics described as an "elite initiative" that "only those who can afford to stay home from work" can access. Within a couple of weeks of back-to-back feminist rallies, Mexico was then, to start closing down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The attention of the nation would then understandably be diverted away from women's murders and toward public health from which, as of this writing, over 8,000 people in the country have already died of the virus.

However, Guajardo said, "Femicides are a major public health concern" for the country, too, and this one, she continued, will even stay longer the pandemic almost the entire world has now. Based on government data, more than 360 women were murdered between the middle of March and mid-April. This was the first month of the implementation of the social distancing measures. Last spring, according to reports, about 300 femicides took place each month.


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