Politics: Mexican authorities struggle to respond to the exponential rise in femicides, which are still vastly underreported

MEXICO - Report 14 Nov 2022 by Guillermo Valdes and Francisco González

Homicide statistics show that the number of women murder victims has been climbing since 2007, when a thousand such deaths were registered. That toll had climbed to around 4,000 by 2021, the most recent year for which data has been available from Inegi, the source of the most complete records. That increase has largely mirrored the rise in the murder rate for men, but the latter is mostly explained by infighting among and between organized crime groups.

Thanks to many years of efforts by feminists, who have pushed for murders of women to be reported and investigated from a gender perspective, Mexico is slowly attempting to better record and respond to murder and other types of violence against women, including specific instances of femicide. The most numerous and important national protests against violence against women began when thousands of Mexican women took to the streets for the “violet spring” protests of 2016. So far, some of the biggest protest demonstrations that have taken place during the López Obrador government have been those of feminists against gender violence, beginning with the “Glitter Revolution” that got underway with a march in Mexico City in August 2019 in response to reports of the alleged rape of a teenage girl by police officers.

The available statistics on femicides speak more to the process of building institutional investigative capacities by prosecutors than of the actual number of murders of women due to their sex. The institutional capacity to investigate femicides is still very low. Despite the under-reporting of problems resulting from the limited capacities of state prosecutor's offices to investigate cases, it is apparent that the problem is growing, very probably at greater magnitudes.

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