Women Rights Defenders Struggle in Mexico Laura Carlsen - OpenDemocracy.net
go to original April 16, 2012

Some women had to be escorted into the city by court-appointed guards.

Others flew in from virtual war zones where they check Twitter to find out when it’s safe to leave the house.

Many spend their days searching for kidnapped relatives or friends, or seeking justice as the last act of caring for a murdered child.

Almost all live with fear and sorrow as constant companions.

It wasn’t easy to organise the International Dialogue on Violence Against Women in Mexico City earlier this year. To bring in seventy women from all over the country to tell their stories implied significant risks and sacrifices. The event, organised by the Nobel Women’s Initiative and Just Associates, proved an historic opportunity to share experiences and analyse the crisis in Mexico and its impact on women.

“Mexico has been converted into a sea of blood and tears,” concluded Maria Elena Herrera, through her own tears. She’s lost four sons who were forcibly disappeared over the past few years. With daily headlines featuring assassinations, kidnappings and mass graves, many people - even beyond those directly affected—have come to agree.

Since President Felipe Calderón launched the war on drugs Dec. 11, 2006, the death toll from drug-related violence soared from around 2,000 a year, to 2010’s toll of more than 15,000 and 12,000 in 2011. This, after sending out more than 45,000 soldiers into streets throughout the nation. Today drug cartels fight rival drug cartels, security forces fight the cartels, rampant complicity and corruption blur the lines between the two, and caught in the middle, is Mexican society.

“War on drugs is becoming a war on women”

Nobel Laureate Jody Williams listened intently to the testimonies of the Mexican women, alongside twenty delegates from the United States and Canada. After concluding a ten-day fact-finding mission in Mexico and Central America, she stated, “The war on drugs and increased militarization in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala is becoming a war on women. The governments’ efforts to improve ‘security’ in the region have directly resulted in insecurity for civilian populations—and most especially, for women.”

Blanca Martínez, director of the Juan de Larios Human Rights Center that works with cases of forced disappearance in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila put it even more bluntly. “This war was declared by Felipe Calderon in 2006 totally outside the constitutional framework and like any war the goal is to eliminate enemies however you can, but here the victims are usually from civil society - a society that has been left unprotected.”

Conflicts like Mexico’s pose new questions for people concerned with femicide and sexual violence in armed conflict, like those who attended the Mexico City forum. Understanding this new kind of conflict and its impact on women is a major theme for discussion on “Militarism, Violence and Conflict”, at the AWID Forum that takes place in Istanbul April 19th -22nd.

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