Protest memorial for disappeared women in Juárez, Chihuahua (January 28, 2022) | David Peinado Romero / Shutterstock
This July, two of the three party-backed candidates in the Mexican presidential elections were women. Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate of the ruling left-wing party, MORENA (an acronym for “Movement for National Regeneration”) won with between 58.3 and 60.7 percent of the vote, the highest percentage in Mexico’s democratic history. As Adriana Piatti-Crocker has recently argued in this forum, her triumph is not a fluke but the result of gender parity constitutional reforms implemented in the last decades. However, a paradox marks this historical triumph: while more than 52 million Mexicans voted for their first woman president, on average, 10 girls and women are murdered in Mexico every day.
How to reconcile these coexisting realities? On the one hand stand the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of the federal and state governments, and on the other, the many unwritten rules and values that shape Mexican society and regulate everyday life. An enduring characteristic of these informal institutions in Mexico is a misogynist bias that manifests daily in the form of femicide, rape, wage disparity, sexual harassment, and other forms of gender violence. This violence has been pervasive and resistant to legal reforms such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), adopted in 1979 by the United Nations, and the legally binding Belém do Pará Convention for the Eradication of All Forms of Violence Against Women, which Mexico signed in 1994, a year after the murder of working-class women in the border maquila city Juárez.
But femicides continued in Ciudad Juárez; in 2005, Amnesty International reported that more than 370 women were murdered in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua City in the intervening decade (from 1994 to 2005).
In an attempt to establish data on the scale of the problem, Mexican legislators signed the General Law for Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence in 2007, establishing femicide as a federal concern. In 2009, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found Mexico guilty of failing to uphold the human rights of Claudia Ivette González, Esmeralda Herrera Monreal, and Laura Berenice Ramos Monárrez, three young women whose mutilated bodies were found in the cotton fields of Ciudad Juárez in 2001. The court noted:
This judicial ineffectiveness when dealing with individual cases of violence against women encourages an environment of impunity that facilitates and promotes the repetition of acts of violence in general and sends a message that violence against women is tolerated and accepted as part of daily life.
Three years later, femicide became a criminal offense in federal law. These legal reforms, the result of decades of feminist advocacy, give Mexico the tools to combat gender-based violence. Yet they have proved insufficient.
Mexico has used legislation to achieve “gender parity in the federal legislature and in almost all of its 31 states,” as Piatti-Crocker writes. That similar legislation in Mexico has not achieved a decrease in gender violence brings me to the preliminary conclusion that the transformation of informal institutions has been minimal because there have not been specific policies to be enforced. Gender parity reforms are positive laws that create instructions for the transformation of the government. In contrast, the General National Law on Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence is presented as a negative freedom, drafted in the same period as Kofi Annan’s “In Larger Freedom: Decision Time at the UN” in 2005, in which the goals were to achieve a life free of poverty, fear, hunger, and so on.
Negative freedoms, in the form of rights, cannot be enforced as reforms to legislative bodies. Yet they are not useless. As legal scholar Julieta Lemaitre Ripoll shows in her book El derecho como conjuro: Fetichismo legal, violencia y movimientos sociales, the law serves a performative function, like a spell. “Freedom from” laws reflect the wishes and desires of a given society, and their enshrinement in formal institutions helps legitimize them as causes worth fighting for in informal institutions. The importance of the criminal typification of femicide may not be in its formal and legal dimensions but in its spell dimension, as something that crowds of women condemn.
During the last decade, large feminist protests have successfully fought for women’s rights to occupy a central space in the national agenda. Many of these protests took place during Sheinbaum’s term as mayor of the country’s capital. Her response was not always favorable to the numerous expressions of feminist autonomous movements. For example, feminist fronts of mothers of victims of femicide and forced disappearance occupied the Christopher Columbus roundabout in 2021, transforming it into la glorieta de las mujeres que luchan (roundabout of the women who fight), a space for mourning and memory in the most important avenue of the city, their protest was by Sheinbaum with the use of police force.
La glorieta stayed, and questions about Sheinbaum’s commitment to feminist causes did too. She inherits a country immersed in a crisis of violence. Lethal violence against women has risen alongside a dramatic increase in national militarization, spurred by the launch of the failed and illegal war against narcotraffic in 2006, which has resulted in more than 100,000 forcefully disappeared persons. Nevertheless, the popular will expressed through the elections has given President Sheinbaum the leverage and support to address this crisis. The transformation of informal institutions can be reinforced if she adopts a human rights agenda that centers human rights in Mexico’s formal institutions and shows compassion, solidarity, and care in her discourse and actions.
If President Sheinbaum is to be successful in protecting women’s freedom from violence, she needs to prioritize other basic rights that establish them as equal citizens—legally and culturally, if she is to meet the expectations of feminists. She needs to lead local governments in the efforts to implement free and safe access to abortion in all the entities of the Mexican Republic; even though abortions were decriminalized by the Mexican Supreme Court in 2023, thanks to the “green tide” campaign of Mexican feminists, abortions and contraceptives are not free and available to all throughout the country. The success of Mexican feminists in campaigning for this law now needs to be solidified by Sheinbaum’s government.
And she urgently needs to reestablish state-sponsored childcare support to single and working-class mothers and parents. This move would be contrary to the previous president’s policy of “republican austerity,” which defunded public daycare centers and exposed vulnerable children to abusive environments. Control over their fertility and childcare helps women gain access to education and the workplace, vital tools in gaining independence and social and political visibility. These simple steps would be a small but significant effort to address a feminist agenda; however, they need to be implemented hand in hand with the recommendations of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and activists on femicide. For instance, given the high levels of impunity in femicides, forcing authorities (attorneys, prosecutors, and the investigative police) to do their job, which is to follow and implement an investigation of femicides in an organized manner, and without leaking information to the press, would be an enormous step. In not just passing but enforcing such legislation, the country can arm women with the positive rights that give them the best chance of attaining the more intangible right to freedom from violence.
