🇲🇽 Why is femicide in Mexico on the rise? | The Stream

The widely-reported discovery of a dead woman in northern Mexico has shocked people across the country and highlighted an ever-worsening national femicide crisis.

Debanhi Susana Escobar Bazaldúa, an 18-year-old law student, was laid to rest on April 23, two days after police found her body in a roadside hotel’s water tank in Monterrey, the largest city in the state of Nuevo Leon. Investigations into her death are continuing.

Meanwhile in Monterrey, several other women are still missing. They are among more than 24,000 women in Mexico currently reported to have disappeared. The United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances says recently there has been “a notable increase” in the number of missing women and girls in the country, and that victims and authorities have “reported disappearances for the purpose of trafficking and sexual exploitation.” Women’s rights advocates point out that 1,004 cases of femicide – when a woman is murdered due to her gender – were officially recorded in 2021, a 2.7% rise on the previous year’s toll.

In 2020 women’s groups led a wave of popular protest, calling for concerted and immediate action by authorities to better protect women and bring justice to those murdered and missing. But the femicide crisis is only deepening. The executive director of Amnesty International in Mexico points out that eleven women are killed in Mexico every day, and that federal and state authorities are not doing enough to find women who are missing.

Non-governmental organisations and activists say that a male-dominated culture of impunity is driving both femicides and the high rate of disappearances of women. And some women’s advocates are scathing about the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, saying his administration is not doing enough to tackle the rise in violence against women in Mexico. The president himself was widely criticised for saying “people shouldn’t worry” in the wake of the discovery of Escobar’s body, and that such cases “happen everywhere”.

In this episode of The Stream, we’ll look at the rise in cases of femicide in Mexico and what's needed to tackle and prevent gender-based violence.

#aljazeeraenglish
#ajstream
#mexico

[luciddreams]

Men won’t care until it effects them personally as usual.

[HoodsGlobal]

Set up "Safe houses" in strategic locations for young women or men in distress to access.

[luciddreams]

Seems womens safety is in peril and on the decline everywhere.

[marielng]

Wonderful panelists and respectful questions on the part of the interviewer. The interviewer, however, could improve his approach a bit in allowing each panelist to finish their sentence. I don't know how production works and I'm only assuming there is a time limit; I just hope the team behind the camera will find a way to improve these panel discussions because cutting off the panelists for the sake of time makes viewers, like me who are interested in the topic, very uncomfortable.

[rootwoman]

I would have liked to have had anybody else ask these questions. The host seems to be oblivious to when not to interrupt the guests at critical points, especially Estafania. I wonder what she would have said if she had been allowed to finish her thoughts?

[stevebeschakis]

Wait...you cited the rate of female homicide, but how does it compare with the male rate? It seems that you only have a "femicide" problem if the rate of female homicide is disproportionally growing. Isn't homicide a problem generally in Mexico? If people are being killed, that's a problem for Mexicans generally, not an exclusively female problem.

[zampieritto]

Same here in Bolivia too. Too much chauvinism

[bbegins]

Chantal made the point that state actors are complicit in perpetrating, not just in inaction which the host totally misunderstood. Read the novel 2666

[moneypolice]

The topic of "Femicide" is thought-provoking. In the US a female murder is classified as a homicide, likewise for men. Maybe the mass killing of innocent young women in Juarez led to this designation.

[ralphgreen]

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[understood]

Cant understand someone should have spoke were people can understand this a very tragic issue.

[ghostshirt]

Mexico is a beautiful country but I don't feel comfortable going there, which is why I chose Canada to vacation instead. Mexico seems like a challenge just to visit Mexico and you feel you have to watch your back instead of just happily enjoying Mexico.

[jesserodriguez]

What ever happened with the numerous women murdered in Juarez Mexico in the 90s and early 2000s and where else is this happening besides Nuevo Lion and Juarez?

[querch]

What do the updated stats say? From what I could quickly find, 10.7% of Mexico's homicide victims in 2013 were women. For reference, that same figure is 22.2% in the USA. Mexico's total homicide rate was an insane 21.5 victims per 100k people that year. That far eclipses that of the USA's 4.7 homicide victims per 100k, which is saying something.

Do not misinterpret what I say, though. This is a crisis of women too. Just not *only* a crisis of women.

[petergilbert]

The interviewer needs to stop interrupting. He needs to be fired

[jesserodriguez]

Plus you have all the Cartel Violence on top of all this

[samsonsoturian]

They aren't. Some idiot editor just found out about it is all.

[amyp.]

Where can I learn about all the victims so I can see if I can find a pattern

[Anton-V]

Me gustaría ver al presidente llamando "conservadores" y "vendidos" a Aljazeera

Aunque bueno por algo no hablan de la familia real Qatarí

[JasonPatrick-tjxj]

Time to learn self protection . There is a Libre Fighting chapter in Monterray