Why are women and young girls being murdered in Mexico?

Feminist activist Susana Chávez Castillo from Ciudad Juárez — who was strangled to death in 2011 — coined the phrase: “Not one woman less, not one more death.”

But murders of women and girls in Mexico have continued unabated. In fact, they have been on the rise in recent years. The lion’s share of these women are Indigenous or mixed race, poor and unskilled labourers and migrant factory workers who are viewed as worthless, subhuman and, ultimately, disposable.

In May, 23 year-old Valeria Marquez, a noted Mexican influencer, was shot and killed while livestreaming on TikTok. Days later, Yesenia Lara Gutiérrez, a candidate for mayor in Veracruz state, was also fatally shot (along with three others) as she livestreamed a campaign event.

Not surprisingly, the Mexican government does a poor job of collecting data on the precise number of women murdered every year. An undated report by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography states that 22,482 women were murdered during the years of 2007-2016, which translates into a violent death of an adult woman or young girl every four hours.

In a 2021 Justice in Mexico special report, femicide cases increased by a staggering 129 per cent for the years 2015-2020, climbing from 400 annually to approximately 1,000 (a figure many activists maintain is still an underestimation). Lastly, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants claims that 3,400 Mexican women were killed in 2023 alone, marking an increase of roughly 50 per cent since 2015.

It is important to understand that the inexact nature of these figures is intimately connected to the fact that femicide is typically a crime that involves the deliberate disappearance of the victim, where the bodies are often not found (though some are disposed of in public places) so as to hide evidence and avoid legal accountability.

The Justice in Mexico study also explained that almost 94 per cent of crimes against women were never formally investigated by law enforcement authorities and thus perpetuates a sense of impunity for the perpetrators. And, more strikingly, of those cases that were diligently investigated, only two per cent actually ended with a conviction and a prison sentence.

While it is true that not all these women are victims of femicide, many of them are being killed for the simple reason that they are women. What they are not — notwithstanding what the Mexican government maintains and the media mostly accepts uncritically — are deaths that can be largely attributed to serial killers, sexual deviants and psychopaths.

That kind of explanation may work for the government and other parts of Mexican society, but it is demonstrably unsatisfactory. The real explanations or driving forces run much deeper, are more structural in nature and are clearly interconnected in many ways. That is, factors that would take into account individualistic variables, state-level determinants and overarching structural components.

Structurally speaking, the onset of Spanish colonialism in the early 1500s was the beginning of violence against those women with brown skin in Mexico. Indeed, Indigenous women were routinely raped, mutilated and murdered by their colonial masters for centuries.

And altering a deeply-rooted colonial mindset — as we see in Canada — requires a massive effort of both societal learning and even unlearning.

Scholars more knowledgeable than myself on this subject matter write about the rape, murder and disappearance of Mexican women as an expression of “macho” male power and control over their very life and death. The murders, then, are partly about a masculine show of power; a demonstration of defiance/terror and a flaunting of their ability to get away with them.

Mexico’s federal government even tries to downplay these murders, dismisses the root causes and responds with encouraging words rather than concrete actions.

Women in Mexico have come to believe that governmental authorities are not interested in confronting this societal crisis, safeguarding the lives of women and enforcing the country’s laws. Though Article 325 of Mexico’s Criminal Code contains provisions on femicide, federal prosecutors have consistently refrained from invoking it.

As for the policing agencies, Mexican investigations of these murders are frequently shoddy and careless, often shuffling these files to the bottom of the investigative pile and conducting themselves in unprofessional ways (such as exhibiting poor communication with the family members).

The unfortunate reality is that the killers know that they can continue to kill because the Mexican police are not committed to tracking them down.

Ciudad Juárez is a particular target region for killers seeking out the many women working in disgraceful conditions in so-called maquiladora factory jobs. These women are vulnerable because they are often Indigenous, lack adequate transportation and leave for work early in the morning.

They may as well be invisible, and few will care if they go missing under suspicious circumstances.

So, are the murders of women in Mexico going to stop?

If the past is prologue, I wouldn’t count on it.

Peter McKenna is professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.