Text & Photography Karen Moe
Let’s turn the title into a question. What’s more important: an historical monument or the life of a woman? According to the majority of the citizens of Mexico City, to the government and to the media, the former. What should be in-you-face logic is far from obvious.
In Mexico City in July and August 2019, three women were raped by police officers: on July 10th, a 27-year-old homeless woman was raped by two police officers; on August 3rd, a 17-year-old woman was gang-raped by four policemen in a police car; on August 8th, a minor was assaulted by a police officer in Museo Archivo de la Fotografía in México City. And the thing is, this is nothing new. But what is new is that the women of Mexico aren’t remaining silent anymore.
On August 16th, 2019, for the first time in Mexican history, the women of Mexico City rose up en masse against not only these recent rapes by the police, but also the conservative estimate of 3835 femicides in Mexico in 2019 [1] with an average of 6 women murdered per day. To add to these horrifying statistics, it is estimated that only 10% of femicides are reported, resulting in numbers that are nothing short of a gender-cide.
Instead of taking the epidemic seriously, the most common practice is for the authorities to disregard the murders of women as narco-traffic reckonings or suicides, such accusatory presumptions serving to criminalize and silence the women all over again. Activist Paula Rosales told me that: “No president, governor or police department have ever talked about or addressed violence against women in Mexico effectively and responsibly.”
Irinea Buendía became a human rights defender fighting for justice for gender-killings after her daughter, Mariana Lima Buendía, was murdered in 2010 by her husband (again, a police officer). The husband, Julio César Hernández Ballinas, deployed the usual tactic of making Mariana’s murder look like a suicide. Not only did he have the good fortune of being born male in a machismo society, as a police officer he had the authorities on his side—even more than usual. The victim’s mother knew that the suicide claim was a lie and she fought back, took the case to Mexico’s Supreme Court and, after six years, her daughter’s murder was finally declared a femicide. On March 25th, 2015, a historic bill—the first ruling of the Mexican court related to the phenomenon of feminicide [2] —was issued. The United Nations Organization of Women explains how:
The order analyzed the proceedings undertaken by each public servant involved in the case, ad revealed how the absence of a gender-sensitive approach had led to human rights violations of the victim—both Mariana Lima, the deceased, and her surviving mother. The court also issued legal protection for Irinea Buendía. Eventually, Julio César Hernández Ballinas was arrested, and the case set a precedence for femicide investigations. [3]
After Lima’s murder was proclaimed a femicide, it was legislated that
[u]nder Mexican law, violent deaths of women must be investigated with due diligence and a coordinated effort by authorities to implement a gender perspective that avoids value judgements and re-victimization, by way of judicial irregularities and institutional violence of women victims of femicide and sexual violence. [4]
As the first acknowledgement by the Mexican government of gender-based crime, it has been expressed how “the bill constitutes a recognition of the right of women to a life free of violence and discrimination. The issuance of Mariana Lima Buendía's sentence symbolizes the opening of a path to access to justice in this and other cases.” [5] Sounds like a victory. Sounds like being the key term.
Despite this historic precedent for ‘the right of women to a life free of violence and discrimination,’ besides the thousands of femicides that are reported and ignored or not reported at all, in 2017 twenty-two-year-old university student Lesvy Berlin Rivera Osorio was murdered by her boyfriend on the campus of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM). Her body was found hung in a telephone booth; her boyfriend Jorge Luis Hernández González had hanged her to death with the telephone cord. [6]
Continuing the misogynist tradition of victim-blaming, Lesvy’s murder, like Mariana’s seven years before, was catalogued and filed away as a suicide. The real case was closed. In order to buttress their victim-blaming tradition of suicide, the Public Prosecutors Office of Mexico City took to social media with accusations like “Osorio was an alcoholic and a drug user who was no longer studying at UNAM, and had been living out of wedlock with her boyfriend.” [7] Authorities insisted on investigating the victim’s sex life and family relations in order to build evidence of promiscuousness and mental instability that would back up their fabrication of suicide. More effort was put into making up evidence than into investigating the crime.
Lesvy’s family began a lawsuit against the authorities and thousands marched at UNAM in support of Lesvy and condemning the ongoing femicides and the impunity for gender crimes in Mexico. With the enormity of public outcry, the authorities had no choice but to actually investigate the case—which ended up being a relatively straight-forward task. Taking the time and interest in the murder of a young woman, all that had to be done was view a CCTV video that clearly showed González beating Lesvy moments before wrapping the phone cord around her neck, strangling her, and even pulling on her legs for good measure. [8] This most obvious evidence that confirmed without a doubt that Lesvy’s death was a femicide wouldn’t have been considered if it hadn’t been for the pressure of the victim’s family and the public to investigate the case.
The murderer/ boyfriend, Jorge Luis González, was sentenced to 45 years in prison, the longest sentence for the murder of a woman in the history of Mexico and Lesvy’s family received the first public apology from the Mexico City government for the human rights violations of their daughter’s case. Despite these apparent victories, Socorro Damianscobar, a feminist lawyer at UNAM, expressed how “this case represents an impunity complicit with feminicidal violence. Despite laws and mandates that dictate the appropriate way to investigate violent deaths of women, these cases aren’t being investigated that way” [9] —the laws do not dictate the practice.
Like the token public apologies and impotent legislations, ‘Gender Alerts’ have been implemented in some of the country’s most violent states in an effort to educate the police and the judicial authorities when convicting gender based crimes; however, as Irinea Buendía reported in August 2019, still “in 99% of the cases, all the evidence is lost because it does not seem important that they killed a woman … [and that] what is needed is for the authorities to have the political will to resolve the cases.” [10] The need for public outcry that was necessary to get the prosecution to obey the precedent set by the Buendía case and to investigate Lesvy’s murder from a gender perspective is further proof that this is far from happening and, ironically, Julio César Hernández Ballinas, Mariana Lima Buendía's husband/murderer, has not as of yet been sentenced. [11]
If one spends a significant amount of time in Mexico, a word that keeps coming up is ‘impunity.’ This could have something to do with the fact that in 2016 it was estimated that only 9 out of every 100 crimes resulted in convictions and, 93.7 percent of crimes in 2015 were either not reported to the authorities, or went uninvestigated. 63 percent of citizens did not report a crime for reasons attributable to the authorities. 33 percent of citizens who did not report a crime stated that it was due to perceiving it as a waste of time, while 17 percent claimed it was the result of distrust in the authorities. Moreover, 50.4 percent of the citizens that did report a crime claimed that treatment by the authorities was ‘bad’ or ‘very bad.’ [12] In Mexico, the modus operandi is impunity and getting away with crime is the law.
"Enough of Impunity"
Another word that one encounters regularly is ‘chingón.’ Spanning from an extreme praise to an insult that could result in physical violence, this expression is not only one of the most ubiquitous, but also one of the most controversial in Mexico. The ultimate Mexican insults are ‘chinga tu madre’ (fuck your mother) and ‘hijo de la chingada’ (son of a whore). However, despite being central to these curses, the majority of Mexicans take the term as a positive, as a part of the national identity and I have been emphatically told that, regardless of the curse quotient, there is nothing negative at all about chingón. It is used to describe a great movie, an awesome gig, or an impressive theatre performance. It means ‘cool’ but also ‘street smart,’ which, from an English slang perspective, equates to ‘bad ass.’ In this usage of cool, if someone screws another person over for their own benefit and doesn’t get caught, it’s ‘chingón.’
This controversial term that virtually equates ‘cool’ with a person who takes advantage of others has its roots in the colonization of Mexico in the Sixteenth Century. Malitzin, or La Malinche, was a Nahua woman who was one of the female slaves of conquistador Herán Cortéz. She served as an interpreter, advisor and intermediary for the Spaniards and gave birth to Cortéz’s first son. La Malinche is regarded as the mother of the Mestizos, the people of mixed Indigenous and European heritage of whom the majority of Mexicans are today. Like the term chingón, La Malinche is composed of etymological conflicts between treachery, victimhood and as the new mother of the Mexican people. This founding myth of Mexico conflates a birth of a nation with a whore and some believe that the literal ‘hijo de la chinga’ (the son of a whore)—the son that the indigenous Malitzin had with the conquistador Cortéz—was the result of both a literal rape of a woman and the symbolic rape of a people.
La Chingada, the direct etymological source of the contemporary chingón, is the moment of transition from the Aztec mother Coatlique through La Malinche to the Virgin Guadalupe. It can be argued (most controversially) that the beloved, national Mexican saint is the fraudulent stand-in for the Virgin Mary who was, as opposed to the miracle of a Catholic goddess of colour who (conveniently) appeared to an Indigenous man, the last phase of converting the Indigenous to Catholicism and, with that, the finalization of their conquest. It has been explained to me by professor Arturo Ramirez that, in short, with La Chingada, the Mexican people lost their mother and their subservience to the European conquerors became both institutionalized and internalized. The term chingón, and its essence of impunity (and its resultant corruption), is the legacy of colonization and, as a part of the national identity, what it means to be cool is founded upon internalized oppression.
In the Twenty-First Century, they are the army of multi-national corporations who reap the benefits of La Chingada. In impeccable timing with the rise of neo-liberalism, impunity has become more and more a part of the Mexican constitution and this is based in what has been taken out rather than what was originally there. The original Mexican constitution of the Revolution of 1917 was special because it was the product of Latin America’s first modern revolution and the first in the world to grant citizens an array of social rights, giving it the character of the first modern socialist constitution …. But relentless revisions by politicians have culminated in an assault on the last vestiges of its progressive content by President Enrique Peña Nieto, leaving it all but moribund …. Since 1982, there have been 490 reforms (70 percent); and more than half of the reforms in that 35-year period have occurred under the last two presidents (Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto). [13]
In the 1980s with the rise of neoliberalism, the global corporations were particularly offended by “Article 123 of the Constitution [that] guaranteed a minimum wage, the right to strike and collective bargaining, an eight-hour day, employers’ liability and workers’ insurance, an end to child labor, equal pay regardless of sex, and maternity leave.” [14] From the perspective of 2020, it is virtually unbelievable that the Mexican people ever enjoyed such human rights.
It can be said that these excessive reforms of the 80s—that were really subtractions—paved the way for NAFTA, the North American Free Trade agreement of 1994 which, to this day, continues to serve international corporations and to do disservice to the majority of the people of Mexico—and, arguably, to the average workers in Canada and the US as well. The Mexican government, increasingly less concerned with promoting the quality of life for their citizens, gave foreign investors virtually free rein to do whatever they want in Mexico. An economic context of impunity is most attractive to international corporations because, like the street smart chingón being celebrated for getting away with personal gain regardless of the consequences, they have no obligation to take responsibility for their actions in Mexico. [15] In the Twenty-First Century, the multi-nationals reap the benefits of La Chingada.
To give one example, Canadian gold and silver mining corporations like Gold Core [16] are not required to clean up their mess and this lack of responsibility is bestowed upon them by the Mexican Federal government. [17] Naturally, a corporation, with its inherent greed, will not readily volunteer to cut their profit a bit for the sake of taking responsibility for their actions; the health of the bottom line is the religion of corporate capitalism. A Mexico City resident expressed to me how Mexico is a ‘Chingón Culture’ and that all of the country’s problems reside in this tradition of getting away with it—and this culture of impunity is most hospitably extended to foreign investors as well.
When accused of being dismissive about the immediate urgency of gender violence in Mexico, Obrador’s comment that the increase in femicides can be blamed on the neoliberal policies of his predecessors and how Mexican society fell into decline because there has been a process of progressive degradation that has to do with the neoliberal model is not without merit. [18] As is well known, neoliberalism is at the service of corporations and cares nothing at all about the people of any nation, especially countries like Mexico that have existed, since their colonization in the 16th Century, to be sites of First World exploitation. In patriarchy and, especially in a machismo society like Mexico, when men are disempowered, they take it out on the ones below them in the hierarchy, that is of course: women. Machismo, extreme objectification of women, economic emasculation, and the cultural legacy of La Chingada are a mix that guarantees a lethal level of violence against women.
The acceleration of femicides in Mexico has been particularly acute since the beginning of the war on drugs—another aspect of Mexican corruption that is directly connected to Canada and the US with their ravenous market of drug-addicted people. Mexico’s National Commission to Prevent and Eradicate Violence against Women reports that the number of femicides increased by 500 percent between 2001-2010. It goes without saying that, like corporations, criminals are the last people who are going to take responsibility for their actions and, with the cartels ruling the majority of the nation, impunity is the law of lawlessness. Any kind of exploitation, violence and abuse is fair game which, in a macho culture, particularly includes violence against women. They are the states with high levels of organized crime that have the highest levels of femicide.
However, even in Mexico City, which is the safest place to live in Mexico, there has been a rise in femicides; the increase in violence against women cannot be solely connected to narco-traffic reckonings’ where the victims are criminalized through their presumed involvement in organized crime and, therefore, the epidemic of violence against women only affects marginalized groups. As two Mexico City women confided, the rise of femicide extends well beyond women who are connected to criminal activity. It is all of us now. We all live in fear. Every Mexican woman is threatened. Housewife Mariana Lima Buendía and university student Lesvy Berlin Rivera Osorio are proof of that.
Of course, such rabid misogyny is not limited to Mexico. A study by Canadian journalist Victor Malarek in 2008, for example, delved into the minds of 110 Scottish johns and 10 percent admitted they would rape a woman—any woman—if they thought they wouldn’t get caught. [19] Many men in a UK case study by Julie Bindel claimed that, if there were not prostitutes to fulfill their male need, they would rape.[20]
As there are no medical resources at all for raped women to access after the assault (whenever I ask Mexican women about rape kits, the majority have no idea what I am talking about) and, if the sexual assaults are even reported, they are typically filed away, never investigated and the women re-assaulted by personal slander, and that only 1 in 10 cases of homicides of women result in a guilty verdict, [21] in Mexico, a man can get away with raping and murdering a woman. Very chingón and, most likely, the envy of men internationally who believe in their male entitlement to commit violence against women.
*
In July 2019, after the seventeen-year-old rape victim reported the gang rape by the four police officers, the police department filtered her personal data and the media, along with regular citizens, started harassing the victim by questioning her story, accusing her of lying and saying she had been personally responsible for the rape. The young woman and her family were also threatened and harassed by the police. True to this textbook misogynist strategy that is also deployed in order to undermine the validity of sexual assault allegations in Canada and the US, [22] because of the stress and pressure, she retracted her statement.
On August 12th, 2019, twelve feminists went to confront the Mexico City police about the gang rape. The Deputy Police Chief stated that he was not going to violate the presumption of innocence of the policemen (read impunity for men) and that the woman had retracted her statement so that was proof she had been lying. In response, the women threw pink glitter at the police officer’s face. Humorously, he said he was going to be blinded and that he could die if the glitter got into his lungs! To add to this laughable reaction to a bit of pink glitter, the feminists have been accused of being the real criminals because they tried to kill a police officer. The Governor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, backed up the accusations of the ‘glitter attack’ and announced that—with no commitment to pursuing the sexual assault cases—she was going to investigate and prosecute those responsible. If this wasn’t actually true, it would have the makings for a new genre of gender spoof.
The soon to be historic August 16th, 2019 march down Mexico City’s Reforma Avenue had been planned for four months as a peaceful women’s march like any other. After the July rapes and the glitter debacle of the 12th, however, the women were justifiably furious. In their anger and desperation, they vandalized stores, public transport, symbolically lit an abandoned police station on fire and spray painted the base of the historic Angel of Independence. Far from addressing the real issue of epidemic violence against women in the country, the activists were only accused of being violent.
In response to the Mexican government and the Mexico City police, Mexico City residents and activists Paula Rosales and Daniela Pascual state that, in unison with all of the women of Mexico: “we are not killing anyone. We are not raping anyone. Painting the monuments cannot be labelled violence. It’s a response to violence against women.” Even women who were not directly involved with the so-called violence against the monuments are protesting the criminalization of the women’s acts by proclaiming that they all did it. After the August 16th protest, a hash tag was created #fuimostodos (#wealldidit).
Pascual told me that 679 articles were written about the August 16th march and that, out of the 679, 557 condemned the women for painting the base of the Angel and only 122 were connected to the rapes and the feminicides—the direct causes of the purported ‘violence.’ Nevertheless, despite the backlash against the women protestors, Rosales explained how: “This is historic for Mexico. It’s the first time that women came to a monument and vandalized it and it’s the first time women came together and spoke about what’s happening in this country.” The women have taken to the streets shouting “I want to live!” and are fighting for the cause of #¡Ni Una Más! (Not One More!).
On November 25th, 2019, another protest march was held. It was estimated that this protest was composed of over 4000 people (male supporters included) and the more radical feminists vandalized every monument they passed. A Mexican flag—painted with the words ‘Mexico Feminicida’—was burnt at the Zocalo and tear gas was eventually used to break up the crowd. Still, despite photographs of murdered daughters, granddaughters, sisters and friends, posters of disappeared women, banners documenting the increase in femicides over the last ten years, and sign slogans like “No Nací Mujer Para Morir por Serlo” (I wasn’t born a woman to die for being), little acknowledgement is being made about the absolute neglect by the government of the rights and safety of Mexican women. Instead, they are the monuments that are the priority.
During our interview, Rosales, Pascual and myself commented that if the murders and rapes of women were addressed by the government, there would be no need to vandalize their precious historical monuments anymore. Simple as that. Ironically, they are the historical monuments of the conquistadores that are being valued over the lives of Mexican women: the ironicized celebrations of the success of La Chingada.
In 2020, the violence against women in Mexico City has escalated. On February 9th, 25-year-old Ingrid Escamilla was stabbed numerous times, skinned and disemboweled by her partner. To make matters worse, police leaked photos of Escamilla’s mutilated corpse to La Prensa and La Pasada, two newspapers that are known for their daily front page sensationalization to the point of making pornography out of the corpses of murder victims. La Pasada’s headline reflects the institutionalized indifference to and even jocular attitude towards the murders of Mexican Women: "It was cupid's fault." [23]
The women struck again. This time the target was the National Palace—the residence of President Obrador and his family. On February 14th, women threw red paint on the front door of the palace and labelled the home of their president: Estado Feminicida (Femicide State).
Obrador’s initial response was dismissive: “Look, I don’t want the topic to be only femicide,” he said. “This issue has been manipulated a lot in the media.” [24] ‘Only’ about femicide, as the rate of gender crime has increased to 10 women per day and citizens of Mexico who just happen to have been born female will not stop raging outside of his door. As reported by the New York Times on February 19th, Beatriz Belmont, a member of the Fourth Wave, a feminist student collective proclaimed:
“If trashing monuments makes authorities look at us and listen to our demands, then we will continue to do so.”
The graffiti and red paint of the November 25th, 2019 and the February 14th, 2020 demonstrations were immediately removed by city workers. And yet, the first graffiti from August 12th, 2019, on the base of the Angel of Independence, could very well remain—no one knows for sure. The base with its painted calls for justice was concealed by plywood the day after it appeared, the day after the women started to speak out. The city says that the plywood was erected because of the planned restoration for the monument due to the damage done during the earthquake of 2017. But the timing for this work to be started is far from a coincidence. As Paula Rosales remarked, the sudden decision to restore the Angel was more an act of hitting two birds with one stone: finally getting on a public safety project that has been pending for almost three years while concealing the demands for prioritizing the safety of Mexican women.
A Mexican family having a Sunday snack in front of the plywood that has surrounded the original graffiti on the base of the Angel of Independance since August 2019 and is now a memorial for the continued femicides. February 23rd, 2020.
Even though the first graffiti has been out of sight since its incurrence, it may still be there and this possibility is because of a group of women who are, ironically, the heritage restoration professionals, employed by the Mexican government and the ones responsible for restoring and protecting the historic monuments. Feminist artist and activist Mónica Mayer has called these women: “The guardians of the graffiti.”
Paula Rosales and Daniela Pascual—two of the cultural heritage professionals—told me how they had no involvement in women’s rights activism before the August 12th protest and its backlash. However, because of the public opinion of the prioritization of the monuments over the lives of women, they decided to take a very controversial stance in support of all Mexican women—themselves, of course, included. Rosales explains how the cultural heritage professionals (all women) "were invited to form a group by two restorers who are both survivors of gender violence. There were over one-hundred in the group when we decided to make a public pronouncement of our position, addressed to President Obrador and to Claudia Sheinbaum, the governor of Mexico City. This pronouncement states that the graffiti on the Angel of Independence is a valid expression that possess historical, cultural and social values that must be preserved by a punctual documentation, which must pursue the preservation of the memory of the women’s fight for their rights in our country. It also says women must not be criminalized by those acts, since it is a human right to claim for their rights. And that no monument is more valuable than a woman’s life."
During our interview, Rosales stated: “Violence is against something that lives. A monument can be restored, but the life of a woman cannot be restored. Or a woman who has been raped, you can’t restore that so easily.” Pascual told me “We are defending the same claim as every woman in this country. This is beyond everything because of the cause.”
In ironic reference to the pink glitter attack of August 2019, the group named themselves “Restauradoras Con Glitter” (Restorers With Glitter). Rosales continues:
When the document was officially delivered to Claudia Sheinbaum, there were about 400 women professionally related to cultural heritage who had signed it. After the pronouncement, we reached 700 women in the group, which is the actual amount of people inside it. [25]
In September 2019, Restauradoras Con Glitter were able to document and make a professional register of the graffiti. No one has been permitted to access the first graffiti since. Rosales told me that the ministry of culture gave Restauradoras Con Glitter (which is the restoration professionals of the city) an informal promise that the graffiti would remain until the restorations of the Angel were completed and, surprisingly, that if the epidemic against the women was not solved, the graffiti would remain on a more permanent basis. The women are not convinced; they believe these are merely words from the government to keep their employees complacent. Of course, the protectors of Mexican heritage would like the graffiti to be left permanently as a cultural memory. It is estimated that the restoration of the Angel will take three years to complete.
On February 15th, the day after the Valentine’s Day protest at the doorstep of the National Palace, 7-year-old Fátima Cecilia Aldrighett Antón’s corpse was found naked in a plastic bag. Through the murder of a female child, public and governmental opinion has changed. Completely. Claudia Sheinbaum finally called femicide “an absolutely condemnable crime” and stated definitively that “justice has to be done”; the Mexican Congress approved a penal code that the maximum prison sentence for femicide conviction would increase to 60-65 years; a coalition of representatives from several political parties issued a declaration condemning gender-based violence and demanding that all levels of government strengthen the fight against it; Ana Patricia Peralta, a representative from Morena, Mr. López Obrador’s party, acknowledged gender crimes as “a national crisis”; prominent businesses like Liverpool department stores and both public and private schools have given women employees International Women’s Day off with pay; and, even President Obrador himself took a radical turn from his bristling and belittling of the urgency of the femicide epidemic in favour of the women and went so far as to draw a parallel between the (so recently demonized) women protesters to the leaders of the 1917 Mexican Revolution. [26]
Not to undermine the atrocity of the murder of 7-year-old Fátima in any way, it is highly significant in terms of the patterns of misogyny and victim blaming that it has taken the murder of an innocent girl to deem the lives of thousands of women as valuable. Girls cannot be labelled sluts (yet), accused of lying and being responsible for the violence inflicted upon them. The crime against Fátima cannot be denied; the violence that has turned the tides in the public opinion for doing something about violence against women is the slaying of a child, and not of a sexually mature and, therefore, systemically fallible, woman.
Regardless of why or how, we will see how this recent spin to empathy and support for the women of Mexico will translate into practice. And, perhaps the proof for this sudden support will be if the beginnings of this revolution, the graffiti on the base of the Angel of Independence, will remain after the plywood comes down—and be allowed to remain, as a cultural memory, as a document that speaks to the Mexican revolution of today and symbolically initiates the beginning of the end of the femicide culture of La Chingada, impunity, and chingón.
At the end of our interview Pascual confided: “There are two pieces of graffiti on the base of the Angel of Independence that can express what I feel in this moment. One of them says: We want justice, not revenge. The other: You are not going to have the comfort of our silence anymore.” The graffiti that has begun the feminist revolution in Mexico is being true to its words.
"You are not going to have the comfort of our silence anymore." Photo courtesy of Restauradoras Con Glitter.
Thank you to Paula Rosales and Daniela Pascual of Restauradoras Con Glitter for their interview and for granting Vigilance use of their archived photographs of the first graffiti.
About the Writer:
Karen Moe is a writer, visual and performance artist and a feminist activist. Her work focuses on gender, systemic violence, justice and the unacknowledged. She has been published in such magazines as Border Crossings, ArtSpace, WhiteHot and Revista192. She is the editor and founder of the magazine “Vigilance: Fierce Feminisms.” Karen has exhibited and performed across Canada, in the US and in Mexico and has just finished her first book, Victim: a Manifesto. Karen lives and works in Vancouver, Canada and Mexico City.
Notes: [1] María Salguero tracks femicides in Mexico and she estimates that, in 2019, there were over 3000 in Mexico City alone. [2] http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-91932018000100143 [3] https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2017/11/feature-prosecuting-femicide-in-mexico [4] https://laperspectives.blogspot.com/2017/08/political-report-1268-justice-for-lesvy.html [5] http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-91932018000100143 [6] https://www.milenio.com/policia/lesvy-berlin-osorio-caso-feminicidio-joven-cronologia [7] http://www.coha.org/femicide-and-victim-blaming-in-mexico [8] https://www.milenio.com/policia/lesvy-berlin-osorio-caso-feminicidio-joven-cronologia [9] https://laperspectives.blogspot.com/2017/08/political-report-1268-justice-for-lesvy.htm [10] https://www.excelsior.com.mx/comunidad/protesta-de-mujeres-resultado-de-omision-de-autoridades-irinea-buendia/133134 [11] https://www.excelsior.com.mx/comunidad/protesta-de-mujeres-resultado-de-omision-de-autoridades-irinea-buendia/133134 [12] https://justiceinmexico.org/impunity-mexico-rising-concern/ [13] https://nacla.org/news/2017/03/08/constitution-corrupted [14] https://nacla.org/news/2017/03/08/constitution-corrupted [15] Since the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018, the Mexican government putting pressure on foreign mining corporations to exercise more environmental responsibility has been reported. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-new-mexican-ambassador-offers-warning-to-canadian-companies-in-mexico/ [16] Some Canadian mining corporations have names like Gun Point, Mammoth and Warrior. There is plenty of chingón going on in Corporate Canada is appears, especially when not in Canada; however, within a First World context, it is not oppression that is internalized, it is, rather, the right to exploit and the suzerainty of the bottom line. https://www.sgm.gob.mx/Web/SINEM/mining/mining_companies.html [17] According to Global Affairs Canada, roughly 70 percent of the foreign-owned mining companies that currently operate in Mexico are based in Canada. https://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/precious-metals-investing/gold-investing/mexico-timmins-argonaut-sierra-metals-gogold-smt-tmm-ggd-ar/ [18] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/world/americas/mexico-violence-women.html [19] Malarek, Victor The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy It. New York: Arcade Publishers, 2009: 87. [20] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/jan/15/why-men-use-prostitutes [21] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-02-14/in-mexico-case-of-murdered-women-inflames-debate-about-femicide [22] Robyn Doolittle Had It Coming: What’s Fair in the Age of #MeToo? Allen Lane: Penguin Random House Canada, 2019. [23] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/02/mexico-women-protest-gruesome-killing-ingrid-escamilla-200214200645471.html [24] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/world/americas/mexico-violence-women.html [25] Paula Rosales email correspondence January 22, 2020. [26] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/world/americas/mexico-violence-women.html