Six Women Murdered Each Day as Femicide in Mexico Nears a Pandemic Judith Matloff - Al Jazeera
go to original January 5, 2015

Newspaper clippings related to the killing of Mariana Lima Buendia are kept by her mother. (Alicia Vera/Al Jazeera America)

According to the National Citizen Femicide Observatory, a coalition of 43 groups that document the crime, six women are assassinated every day.

Yet only 24 percent of the 3,892 femicides the group identified in 2012 and 2013 were investigated by authorities. And only 1.6 percent led to sentencing.

“Femicides are a pandemic in Mexico,” asserts Ana Güezmes, the local representative of United Nations Women, the agency devoted to gender issues.

The word "feminicidio" first entered the vernacular in the 1990s, with explosive rates of disappearances and murders of women in the border town of Ciudad Juárez. In fact, more women have been killed in the state of Mexico, which surrounds the capital city of the same name. The number doubled from 2005 to 2011, when the current national president, Enrique Peña Nieto, was governor of the state. Today he has pledged to combat drug violence overall but has not spoken out against femicides.

Impunity is the main motor of the gender crime, Güezmes says, as well as social norms that allow the violence to be ignored or accepted as a normal part of life. She describes femicides as the extreme end of a society where 63 percent of women have suffered abuse by male hands. She estimates that maybe a third or half of the cases involved sexual partners. The balance — abductions, rapes and discarding the bodies like garbage — are probably linked to the generalized drug violence that is tearing Mexico apart.

Güezmes says the government needs to put more effort toward prevention, and improve access to justice. “These are the biggest problems.”

Read the whole story at Al Jazeera

In Mexico State, the phenomena of women being murdered, known as femicide, is rising fast, yet authorities seek to downplay the crisis. (TeleSUR)

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