In February of 2020, south of Mexico City, seven-year-old Fatima Cecilia Aldrighetti was kidnapped from her school and later raped and murdered.
On February 11, in Tulyehuelaco, little Fatima waited for her mother outside the Enrique Rébsamen Elementary School. Within fifteen minutes of school ending, Magdalena Antón arrived, but Fatima was not there. Her daughter had been taken.
A closed-circuit camera system recorded the incident. The video shows a family acquaintance, Gladis Giovana Cruz Hernández, aka Giovana Cruz, leading Fatima by the hand down a narrow street behind the school, after covering the girl’s uniform in a green t-shirt and black pants. Cruz looked back over her shoulder several times as she led the child away. After piecing together fragments of multiple cctv recordings, police determined Cruz had brought her to a nearby white vehicle, then eventually into a house.
Four days later, the girl’s unclothed body was found in a plastic garbage bag in Tláhuac, roughly two kilometers from her school. She had been tortured, sexually assaulted and murdered by Cruz’s partner, Mario Alberto Reyes Nájera, aka Mario Reyes.
Reyes had asked Cruz to bring him a young girlfriend who would, “last a long time.” Since Reyes had previously threatened to sexually abuse Cruz’s two daughters and threatened to beat and burn her if she didn’t find him a girlfriend, she delivered Fatima to the executioner of her fate.
In her statement to police, Cruz said the girl cried a lot after the abuse, so they decided—Mario Reyes decided—to kill her. He initially had Cruz drown Fatima, but she wasn’t strong enough to finish the job so together they strangled her with belts.
In Mexico City, the Institute of Forensic Science revealed that prior to killing her, Reyes had shaved Fatima and painted her nails. As of this writing, both parties remain in prison awaiting a final adjudication.
That murder, along with two other prominent femicides, pushed thousands of Mexican women into the public square. They’d had enough.
On February 08, 2020, police found Érick Francisco on the street, covered in blood. When they asked what happened, Francisco exclaimed that he had murdered his twenty-five-year old wife, Ingrid Escamilla. He told police he had stabbed his partner after an argument about his drinking. Mexico’s El Universal reported that after Francisco killed her by stabbing her five times, “he flayed her, skinning her body from her face to her knees, then removed several organs.” He later said this was an attempt to hide the body because he was ashamed of killing his wife. Francisco killed her in front of his fifteen-year-old autistic son (from a previous relationship).
Executive Privilege
Abril Cecilia Pérez Sagaón moved from Mexico City to Monterrey with her three children after her husband attacked her with a baseball bat in her sleep, fracturing her skull and causing numerous other injuries. Juan Carlos Garcia, former CEO of Amazon México and an executive at Elektra, was arrested on charges of attempted murder. He was released from prison after only two months when a judge, presumably bribed, reviewed the case and determined that the attack was only a matter of domestic violence and not attempted murder and therefore, the bat was not a weapon. The judge was later suspended.
Eleven months later, Abril Pérez was murdered, shot in front of her lawyer and two of her children as they drove to the airport. Garcia is alleged to have hired two hitmen who shot her from a motorcycle as they passed her vehicle.
As of November 2020, the two gunmen under arrest had not implicated Garcia, who, according to El Universal, has fled, perhaps to the US, and is wanted by Interpol. To date, Interpol has not responded to my request to confirm Garcia’s Red Notice.
Those three femicides, the anemic response of Mexico’s President López Obrador, and the cavalier manner in which the Pérez case was handled by the courts, set off a wave of protests in Mexico, culminating in a national women’s strike on March 09, 2020, inspiring the hashtags, #UnDiaSinNosostros, a day without us, and #UnDiaSinMujeres, a day without women.
The Grim Numbers
In Mexico only 7% of crimes against women are investigated. Mexican journalist Alexis Ortiz wrote that crimes against women in Mexico “don’t matter,” calling the country, “una máquina de impunidad,” an impunity machine. In the April before the women’s strike, 267 women were murdered. Impunity is no longer the province of gangsters and politicians. It has infected the culture.
Mexico’s homicide rate has more than doubled in the last twenty years to nearly 35,000 annually. On average, ten women per day are murdered in Mexico. Not all murders of women are femicides, defined as the killing of a woman because of her gender. Femicide is often the final act in a continuum of violence against the victim, including sexual slavery, assault, rape and other forms of ongoing physical and demeaning psychological abuse.
A report issued by the CSIS, the Center for Strategic & International Studies, stated, “More than 40 percent of femicide victims in Mexico knew their killer, and femicides are particularly brutal crimes: women are more likely than men to be killed by strangulation, drowning, suffocation, and stabbing.” In addition, the CSIS study found, “Mexico’s impunity rate has reached an astounding level; 93 percent of crimes were either not reported or not investigated in 2018, and investigation and prosecution of femicides follows that trend.”
Mexico is not the only culture stagnant with disdain for the lives of women, but in recent years, exacerbated by a host of factors, Mexico, Brazil and other Latin American countries have seen a swift rise in femicides. Among all countries in a World Bank data set of homicides of women per 100,000, there are eight Latin American nations in the top twenty.1 The United States is number eighteen. Puerto Rico is also in the top twenty. However, although it is a territory of the US, it is defined by the World Bank as an economy that reports separately.
As horrific as these numbers are, they correlate generally with overall crime in Mexico. Human Rights Watch reported in 2020, “…the special rapporteur on human rights defenders declared that about 98 percent of crimes committed in Mexico remained unsolved. Causes of failure include corruption, inadequate training and resources, and complicity of prosecutors and public defenders with criminals and abusive officials.”
Women suffer disproportionately under conditions of rising economic inequality and violent crime, particularly in cultures where an attitude exists among the macho ruling class that domestic violence is merely a natural consequence of conjugal passion.
The economic devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has been well-documented. It’s been more difficult to tease out the various causes of the rise in violent domestic crimes, but the lockdowns have certainly been a factor in numerous abuses, i.e. child, partner, spousal, drug and alcohol. The Journal of Medical Internet Research published a study of over one million tweets reporting violent acts and concluded, in part, “In many countries, the reported cases of and service needs related to family violence dramatically increased since quarantine measures came into effect.” Calls to domestic violence hotlines increased 10-25% in the first months of the lockdown.2
Matar Mujeres
“…although human trafficking and people disappearance is widespread in Mexico, it takes different modalities, depending on the place. For example, in the north of the country and in areas clearly controlled by organized crime, the abduction of persons from the street is not uncommon (what the Mexican media calls “levantones”, or “liftings”) but they generally—including human trafficking—are usually performed by hooking the victims, playing tricks, through a less violent method—at least at start, while the “liftings” in this area [along the Rio de los Remedios] had typically taken place within a few kilometers using extreme violence.” - Lydiette Carrión: at the Cambridge University Mexican Society
I spoke with Lydiette Carrión, a journalist from Mexico and author of the book, La Fosa de Agua, The Water Pit, about the phenomenon of femicide in her country. Her book chronicles the deaths of dozens of women whose remains were dredged from the Rio de los Remedios, the River of Remedies, a 15km tributary that runs near Mexico City. After decades of neglect, it’s more a polluted canal than anything healing—a dump site for victims of innumerable homicides.
I asked Ms. Carrión what drove her to make the extra effort to memorialize these events in a book and what she had hoped to accomplish from publishing it. She spent six years covering the murders of women for a tabloid newspaper, trying to confer a personal story upon the faceless victims. She wanted to “honor their lives by getting their names out of the crime section of the newspaper.”
Ms. Carrión had written those stories about women from all over Mexico but was eventually drawn into the human and political drama unfolding in Mexico City around the multiple victims discovered in this mostly shallow waterway in 2014.3
Note: I lightly edited our on-line conversation for clarity. I asked if much has changed in the country since last year’s Day Without Women strike.
“Violence against women is definitely seen more in the mainstream (media). It has a lot to do with movements like #MeToo. Young women in México and some other parts of Latin America have made a very strong feminist movement. And yes, it has had a lot of impact on media. However, femicides haven’t stopped, or decreased. With [the] pandemic, some crimes decreased in number... homicides, violent crimes, etc. but femicide didn´t decrease. On the contrary—and this happened all around the world—family violence and femicides increased. The quarantines applied enormous pressure on many families. It also increased sexual child abuse and child pornography, according to some notes [reports].”
Hefferon: What would you like to see change in Mexico, in terms of the attitude toward femicides?
Carrión: The laws in Mexico are quite good, on paper. The problem is instrumentalization. In legal terms, femicide is recognized, and there are legal instruments. However, public ministries (prosecutors) are very deficient and suffer a lot of corruption. They also receive very low budgets and, in general, the investigating police do not perform well. Now this is not free. It has to do in general with a country of enormous inequalities. In Mexico there are some of the richest families in the world, and municipalities that are at the same levels of poverty as sub-Saharan Africa. Mexico City has neighborhoods that look like Paris, and three blocks later people who live in the city's garbage dumps. This enormous inequality generates constant social violence and in general, women, girls and boys bear the brunt.
Of the thousands of young people between the ages of 15 and 29 who neither study nor work, 70% are women. Also, among OECD countries, it has the first place for teenage pregnancies. Even in the Latin American region it is the country with the most teenage pregnancies. There were no public policies that kept girls in schools or provided sex education; This is also in the midst of a "war against drug trafficking" that destroyed the social fabric, leaving girls, boys and women extremely vulnerable.
Hefferon: The war on drugs is not only the wrong strategy, it has worsened the activity it was intended to stop.
Carrión: That is why the solution is not only about punishing the crime. Currently there are enormous margins of impunity, but the solution is not only that: it involves reducing economic and social inequality, and through a profound educational reform with public policies. The war on drug trafficking had nothing to do with fighting drug trafficking. It had to do with national and international political interests.
Hefferon: Most of the victims, except for a few notorious cases, are poor, correct?
Carrión: These victims are not just the poor, they are poor close to the metropolis. There are poor areas, but they also do not have social cohesion. Because I assure you, there may be small towns that have deficiencies and yet do not have those levels of violence. In 2004 I had to cover hurricanes in the indigenous communities of Chiapas, they were flooded, and the problem was very serious, but no community was robbed. Of course, poverty is a risk but there are other factors that turn certain communities into a red light.
The good news is that they are things that can be solved and that can be changed, to lower the levels of insecurity in a community. The bad news is that it requires a comprehensive vision, it requires money and profound changes.
Hefferon: You are asking for leadership that does not seem to be forthcoming.
Carrión: Public policy. Let’s forget about leadership. Public policies require long terms. It is sad, but there are amazing people who make big changes in their communities. We need to write about them too.
And so we are. Let’s hope this helps.
Follow Lydiette Carrión on Twitter @lydicar
World Bank. Intentional Homicides, female. 2018 data https://databank.worldbank.org/reports.aspx?source=2&series=VC.IHR.PSRC.FE.P5
JMIR Publications. The Hidden Pandemic of Family Violence During COVID-19: Unsupervised Learning of Tweets. November 2020 https://www.jmir.org/2020/11/e24361/
Vice. Bodies in Canal Stirs Outrage. October 17, 2014 https://www.vice.com/en/article/kz593n/word-of-bodies-in-canal-stirs-outrage-over-mexicos-mass-graves-and-missing