Mexico Is a Deathworld for Women

Pink crosses erected in memory of femicide victims in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico (Photo credit: Steev Hise / Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

Everyday, between 9 to 10 women are murdered in Mexico. Since 2001, 50,000 women have been killed, and the number is only growing. What is more, the impunity rate in Mexico exceeds 95 per cent and only two per cent of cases end in a criminal sentence.

Femicide is the intentional murder that exclusively targets women or girls because of their gender. Different from homicide, femicide is specifically driven by discrimination against women and girls, unequal power relations, gender stereotypes or harmful social norms. It is the most extreme and brutal manifestation of violence against women and girls.

While shocking, the statistics presented above do not even begin to accurately reflect the reality of femicides in Mexico. Focusing solely on representative data may plunge us into a void of averages, percentages and line graphs, causing us to lose sight of the terrifying humanity of femicide. This reduction of female victims to statistics is only one of the ways through which they are dehumanised, and through which the systems that perpetuate violence against Mexican women are upheld. What lies beneath this numerical abstraction is an even more chilling reality: a social order in which women are controlled through fear, vulnerability and disposability. 

In his book Necropolitics, political theorist Achille Mbembe offers valuable insight into how death is used to maintain certain systems of authority while weakening their subjects. Mbembe posits that the deployment of necropolitics leads to the creation of deathworlds – “unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead”. In the case of Mexico, it could be argued that femicides are a necropolitical statement, signalling to women that their lives are insignificant and fostering within them an immobilising sense of fear. In a world where the risk of becoming the next victim runs high, Mexican women are kept from living their lives freely and instead remain in a perpetual limbo of “the living dead”.

Causes of femicides: machismo and what happens when men lose control

Scholars have proposed countless explanations for this decades-long crisis, however all of them seem to point to one common denominator – the deeply-rooted machismo culture of Latin America. The concept of machismo is a set of values, attitudes, and beliefs about masculinity, or what it means to be a man. Tracing back to Spanish colonization and the consequent imposition of Catholic gender roles in Latin America, machismo culture is characterised by exaggerated masculine pride, strength, and dominance. It provides a very rigid view of men’s role in society, framing them as the dominant providers of the household. The equivalent construct is marianismo, which stipulates that women echo the Virgin Mary’s submissiveness, chastity and self-sacrifice. The result is a society that emphasizes the supremacy of men over women and normalizes male entitlement over female bodies. The examination of the usual victims of femicide supports this thesis. 

Up to a third of female murder victims in Mexico are killed by a partner or ex-partner, with some sources citing even higher figures. Intimate femicides most often stem from coercive control, or a form of domestic abuse in which a perpetrator subjects a partner to a sustained pattern of controlling, threatening, or humiliating behaviour. Another risk factor for intimate femicides is “sexual proprietariness” – an implicit belief that men own their female partner’s sexuality, which manifests itself in jealousy, possessiveness, and control when their ‘proprietorship’ is threatened. This means that certain situational triggers, such as separation, infidelity, or a general perceived loss of control, may lead to a lethal outcome.

A femicide which perfectly exhibits these features is the landmark case of Mariana Lima Buendía. The 29-year old law graduate was found dead in her Chimalhuacán home on June 29th, 2010. The investigation seemed perfunctory -- the crime scene was not preserved, evidence was not properly collected, and Mariana's husband (a policía ministerial officer) was present inside the investigative team. Her mother, Irinea Buendía, challenged the authorities' proceedings, citing the ongoing verbal, physical, economic, and sexual violence from her husband throughout their marriage, as well as Mariana's threat to leave her husband the day before her tragic death. Despite these objections, in 2011 the Ministerio Público ruled the death a suicide. However, Mariana’s close ones did not stop in their pursuit of justice. In 2015, the Mexican Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling—its first on femicide—finding that the investigation had been riddled with omissions, negligence, and even active obstruction. Not only did this ruling lead to the ,sentencing of Mariana's murderer, Julio César Hernández, it set an important legal precedent, obliging authorities to conduct investigations with a gender perspective in cases of violence against women.

Mariana’s mother, Irinea, has become an advocate for the rights of women and girls in Mexico, and continues to support other women and mothers who are also seeking justice. Another one of her daughters, Guadalupe, survived an assassination attempt, presumed to be motivated by her activism in her sister’s case. Mariana would be 44 this year. 

Irinea Buendía holding a portrait of her daughter (Photo credit: UN Women / Dzilam Méndez.)

Non-intimate femicides, on the other hand, are primarily committed by strangers and organized crime groups. According to a study by Lantia Intelligence, organized crime was responsible for 60% of femicides in Mexico in 2020. These heinous crimes are associated with extreme violence, rape, sexual mutilation, and the public exhibition of the, often nude, corpses. The bodies are frequently carelessly abandoned in areas such as deserts, garbage dumps, and sewage ditches. The humiliatory modus operandi of these femicides symbolises the necropolitical sovereignty of the culprits over their victims. Perpetrators evidently feel entitled to manipulate and degrade the female body to their most brutal desires. 

Cartels use women's bodies as signals in their feuds, murdering the opposition’s female mules and lookouts, as well as relatives. Organised crime groups turn attacks on women into “a tool of intimidation and a display of dominance”, warning the community not to defy them, and sending the tacit signal that the female members of Mexican communities are disposable.  

Often, the attacks by organised crime groups are not related to cartel feuds at all. Maquiladoras, or factory girls, are killed simply because they are mobile, underprivileged, and vulnerable working women, representing an easy target for cartel members. Otherwise, women are punished for being too visible or defiant of the order imposed by criminal groups. The victims include journalists, business owners and others who pose no military threat but represent a challenge to social control by in some way defying the cartels. One prominent example is Marisol Macías, a journalist who was killed in 2011 in Nuevo Laredo after exposing local gangs on the internet. She was decapitated and a handwritten sign was left beside her body saying she was killed in retaliation for her social media posts.

The living dead: the impacts of femicides in Mexico

The victimization of women affected by femicide extends far beyond the murder itself. In Mexico, 68.2% of women consider their city unsafe to live in. This level is substantially higher than the perception of men. Significantly, femicides are considered to be one of the most serious crimes in Mexico, rated second after drug trafficking.

“When walking at night, you always have to look behind you to make sure no one is following you. (...) Even in the daylight you can never walk and feel safe, it’s constantly being worried” – says Arely, a Mexican student at the Jagiellonian University.

Surrounded by the daily deaths of their friends, sisters and mothers, Mexican women could be said to live in a deathworld. The perpetual threat of imminent attack reduces them to the point of being on constant alertness, and the sovereignty of men over their bodies strips them of any agency over their lives. 

Corruption and impunity serve to further trivialize the issue of femicide and extend the suffering associated with it. In 2018, 93% of crimes in Mexico were not reported or not investigated. According to the research group Impunidad Cero, between 2016 and 2022, only 43% of femicides resulted in convictions. Additionally, only a minority of homicides of women were investigated through a gendered perspective. This impunity points to a structural failure: in cartel-dominated regions, state and criminal power often overlap, with collaboration between police, officials, and criminal groups, making true accountability almost impossible.

The lack of care and attention that femicide cases are treated with only exacerbates the problem, fading victims and their close ones into invisibility. Norma Andrade, the mother of femicide victim Lilia Alejandra, told UN News: “we are worth a peanut – which in other words means that a woman is just disposable (...) On one day, she was working in a factory, the next day she disappeared, the next she is found dead, while another person has already replaced her at work, so [her death] is only important to her family - not for society, not for the government, much less for the authorities or the company”.

Mexico, often recognised for its dazzling beaches, incredible cuisine and dynamic culture, is grappling with a deep-seated issue. Citizens are brutally murdered each day having committed no crime other than simply being a woman. Mexican women face the unrelenting threat of femicide from both close ones as well as strangers, their lives perpetually surrounded by death. Mexican men feel authorized to take the lives of women, empowered by systemic impunity and pervasive corruption. The crisis of femicides in Mexico reveals a necropolitical order in which women’s deaths are tolerated, and their lives consequently dismissed. The result is a deathworld for women, in which the boundaries between death, life and erasure are blurred.

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