This is the web version of Americanas, the EL PAÍS América newsletter in which it addresses news and ideas with a gender perspective. If you want to subscribe, you can do so. in this link.
The sequence of images is painful: a 26-year-old man hits a 52-year-old woman with his fists in the face. The setting is a public parking lot outside a shopping center on an avenue in Naucalpan (State of Mexico). There is viciousness, the attacker does not stop. He pushes until the victim loses his balance and just as he falls to the ground, a car speeds by inches away from him. On the asphalt, the young man kicks her, the woman turns as best she can to get out of the way of traffic. He crouches down and returns with his fists. When he finally stops, he walks away. The events were recorded by witnesses and the images were published on social networks.
Perhaps that is why the attention has focused on the aggressor and not the victim. She was just going to buy some ice pops for her family, but she ended up with a face full of blood, scared and in a state of shock. shock for a vehicle incident that could have ended in a settlement between insurance companies. What happened before was that the woman grazed the rearview mirror of the man's truck with her vehicle. She was trying to look for her insurance documents when she was attacked. She spent almost a month recovering from injuries from an act of sexist violence also carried out by a popular character on social networks, Rodolfo. Flabby Márquez, who is now imprisoned for the crime of attempted femicide.
This episode in the life of a country like Mexico, in which 11 women are murdered every day, is an everyday and seriously worrying scenario. In this country, gender violence—psychological, economic, patrimonial, physical, sexual or discrimination—has affected 70.1% of women aged 15 and over at some point in their lives, according to figures from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi) of 2021. In Latin America and the Caribbean, between 60% and 76% of women have been victims of gender-based violence in different areas of their lives, according to the Economic Commission for the Americas. Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). On average, one in four women in the region has been a victim or experiences physical and/or sexual violence by a perpetrator who was or is her partner, “which carries the risk of lethal violence.”
The mother's apology and the role of women
The case of Fofo Márquez has generated a wave of reactions on social networks driven by the popularity of the character, who has millions of followers on Instagram and TikTok, and thousands more on YouTube. The content creator has described himself as a “millionaire child” and has boasted that his wealth comes from the businesses of his father, Rodolfo Márquez Flores, who died in 2022. His mother, Sandra Alcaraz, has dedicated herself to the footwear industry, according to various media. After the arrest of influencer, she has apologized on behalf of her family and has assumed part of the responsibility for the events in a letter addressed to the victim: “I have made mistakes and I have failed in my responsibility as a mother (…) this is the hardest lesson that I have had to learn, a lesson that I, unfortunately, did not know how to teach him in time,” stated Alcaraz.
This position refers to a deeply rooted idea in Mexico and other Latin American countries about the role of the mother in the care and education of children. An excessive weight falls on her in these responsibilities, as if the father only had to provide and ignore the other tasks of parenting. The letter implicitly recognizes the son's inability to respond for her own actions, as if it were a prank at school or a fight between children.
The feminist collective The Sea Witches has issued a message through the social network She also reflects on the external factors that influence a person's actions. “We are all the result of multiple socializing agents and responsible for creating them. Raising within the family is only a small part (…) Sandra should not take responsibility for what her son, an adult man in full use of her faculties, decided to do. The feminist group reflects on a society that normalizes violence against women and at the same time questions the prevailing patriarchy: “Can the respect for women that a mother could instill against an entire enormous apparatus that is everywhere and that says otherwise?”.
For her part, Edith, Fofo Márquez's victim, has given various interviews to the media to narrate her experience. She has also questioned the authenticity of the letter; She doubts that Susana Alcaraz wrote it, and she has said that she is afraid of suffering retaliation for having reported the influencer, who has been linked to proceedings and could face a sentence of up to 46 years in prison. Edith has motivated other women to report, a brave action so that sexist violence does not go unpunished.
The multiform monster of violence
Four days after Fofo Márquez was arrested in Naucalpan, State of Mexico—adjacent to the Mexican capital—a message with a death threat and a human head appeared on a pedestrian bridge 2,700 kilometers away, in Tijuana (Baja California). ). They signed it on a piece of cardboard Those of the house, and it began: “You touch a woman again and this is going to happen to you.” Paradox at its finest. A criminal organization defended women from the violence of a man with another act of the same nature.
The facts, those responsible, are tangible, but the force that unites them is elusive and intangible, as if it were a hydra from Greek mythology or a monster multiform. Horror novelist Stephen King has attempted to name a beast similar that emerges, hides, takes on different forms, that hurts and kills. He has called her Item (That) and it has required 1,504 pages to describe it in a fictional story starring a clown, Pennywise. The film version caricatures it, but the book delves into its complexity. How many written pages does sexist violence require to be described in its real dimension?
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has reflected on the difficulty of addressing and understanding violence. He has drawn on an old story to illustrate this. He says that the security guards meticulously inspected the forklift he was pushing every day for a worker suspected of stealing, but they couldn't find anything. In the end they discovered that what was actually stealing the forklifts. “We encounter a similar paradox regarding violence. We are very aware that the constant signs of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, and international conflicts. But we should learn to distance ourselves, to distance ourselves from the fascinating lure of this violence subjective, directly visible (…) We need to distinguish the contours of the background that such outbursts generate,” the author states.
In an excerpt from Stephen King's novel, it is explained that beast [Eso] It was not only personified in its known forms, but also in the neighbors who saw how the clown took a child and remained silent. The silence to which women in Mexico and Latin America are subjected is even more deafening than all the noise of their abusers that does not stop and monopolizes everything.
These are our recommended articles of the week:
And to say goodbye, a suggestion:
📚 A book: Rootsby Carolina Rodríguez Mayo
By Noor Mahtani
This book of stories is written to tear apart, excite, move and explore. The author from Bogotá, Carolina Rodríguez Mayo, and also a columnist in EL PAÍS, narrates in her first anthology of stories pieces of life that are made to be read aloud and to look at an anti-racist and anti-patriarchal view of a world that hurts too much. The writer will be at the Bogotá Book Fair on April 26, breaking down her work a little more. Do not miss it!
Thank you very much for joining us and see you next Monday! (If you have been sent this newsletter and you want to subscribe to receive it in your email, you can do it here).
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Fofo #Márquez #noise #abusers #women #monopolizes