Seeking to improve understanding, communication, and cooperation between Mexico and the United States by promoting original research, encouraging public discussion, and proposing policy options for enhancing the bilateral relationship.
09/21/2021
Source: The Guardian
At least 10 women and girls are murdered every day in Mexico, according to a new report that says victims’ families are often left to carry out their own homicide investigations.
The scathing report, released on Monday by Amnesty International, documents both the scale of the violence and the disturbing lack of interest on the part of Mexican authorities to prevent or solve the murders.
03/08/2021
The Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — Volatile protests engulfed Mexico’s capital on Monday as police clashed with thousands of feminist activists calling for an end to what they say is a crisis of violence against women here.
In Mexico City’s central square, known as the Zócalo, police tear-gassed protesters who defaced city office buildings and used crowbars and hammers to tear down parts of a 12-foot-tall steel barrier erected around the National Palace, the center of Mexico’s federal government and the home of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Authorities said at least 62 police officers and 19 civilians were injured.
03/07/2021
Source: The Hill
Women’s advocates on Saturday painted the names of female victims of violence on barriers that were erected in front of Mexico’s national palace ahead of a protest planned for International Women’s Day.
Activists displayed the words “Victims of Femicide” in Spanish on the metal barriers outside of the palace that holds the Mexican president’s offices and listed many women’s names below it, Reuters reported.
02/25/2021
Source: The Guardian
On the night of 30 October 2019, as many Mexicans were preparing to celebrate the Day of the Dead, the family of Jessica Jaramillo stood in the pouring rain watching two dozen police search a house on the outskirts of Toluca, the capital of Mexico State. At about 9pm, the authorities carried out a dead dog, followed by two live ones and a cat. Then they pulled out a woman’s body.
Jessi, a 23-year-old psychology student at a local university, had gone missing a week earlier. On 24 October, she hadn’t appeared at the spot where her parents usually picked her up after class. Within a few minutes, she called her mother to say she was going out, abruptly hung up, then texted to add, “Don’t worry, I’m with Óscar”.
10/06/2020
Source: Americas Quarterly
MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is an increasingly powerful man. At the helm of what he calls the country’s “Fourth Transformation,” he has dismantled checks and balances, weakened autonomous institutions, and seized discretionary control of the budget. AMLO, as the president is widely known, seems intent on pulling Mexico back to an era of single-party dominance, and in the absence of a cohesive opposition, his dream of centralized and unobstructed control may yet become reality. Thanks in part to the corruption and callousness of his predecessors, López Obrador remains popular despite mismanagement of COVID-19 and an expected decline in GDP this year of about 10%.
Yet there is one force that has caught López Obrador by surprise – and threatens to derail his plans and damage his reputation. Frustrated by the government’s lack of a response to a pandemic of violence against women that has only grown worse in recent years, Mexico’s feminists have become the one true thorn in AMLO’s side: a singular political movement that he does not seem to understand, cannot control and will be unable to suppress.
09/16/2020
Source: The Guardian
As Mexicans prepared to mark Independence Day celebrations on 15 September, a different kind of commemoration was held at the headquarters of the country’s human rights commission (CNDH).
Under a fluttering purple anarchy flag, women in black balaclavas lined the upstairs balconies of the 19th-century building – and speaker after speaker expressed their fury at the country’s crisis of violence against women.
09/07/2020
Source: Reuters
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Feminist activists and family members of the missing ramped up a protest at the main offices of Mexico’s human rights commission on Monday, after occupying the building last week to draw attention to kidnapped persons and attacks targeting women.
The activists, mostly masked women, defaced office signs with hammers, pinned up banners and painted slogans on walls late last week, angry with what they decry as insufficient government action to root out the crimes, most of which go either uninvestigated or unsolved by the country’s weak justice system.
4/25/2016 USA Today
Tourists found dead. Video cameras filming under skirts. An attempt to take off a woman’s underwear mid-stride. And a “pandemic” of femicide — all in Mexico.
For these reasons and many others, a group of women in Mexico organized a state-wide day of action against sexual violence.
Nos Queremos Vivas, “we want to stay alive,” set off a march through the State of Mexico on April 24. Several women’s rights groups signed on to the campaign, many via images shared on social media with the hashtag #24A or #NosQueremosVivas.
11/25/2015 The Guardian
Quintana Roo is Mexico’s sunshine state, a booming tourists’ playground which draws record numbers of holiday-makers to its golden beaches, coral reefs, Mayan ruins and all-inclusive package deals.
But in recent weeks, the Caribbean region has been badly shaken by a string of brutal murders of women – which authorities have seemed keen to downplay.
Within the space of three weeks, seven women have been murdered, bringing the total to 18 so far this year. At least two of the victims were strangled, and several had been sexually assaulted before their bodies were dumped in public places. All the women were Mexican.
This latest surge in murders has renewed tensions between activists against gender violence, and government officials who accuse them of trying to derail tourism and economic progress.
El Universal 2/14/2012
Las nueve entidades que registran una tendencia creciente de homicidios de mujeres son Chiapas, Chihuahua, Distrito Federal, Durango, Guerrero, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Sinaloa y Sonora, según un estudio presentado por la subsecretaria de Derechos Humanos de la Secretaría de Gobernación, Lía Limón, en el Senado de la República.
El estudio también analiza las particularidades de cada zona. En el noreste del país, por ejemplo, una mujer de 20 a 24 años tiene 39 veces más riesgo de morir por homicidio, que una mujer de la misma edad de la zona centro del país.
Mexico Institute 