Today I want to share some of my most recent experiences with what could be called “gender justice” in our country. Over the last few years, Mexico has experienced a series of legal transformations derived from the progress of women in a vast number of areas, which has materialized that today we have at our disposal instances and procedures to assert our human rights and to obtain their protection from the authorities. However, that justice is far from being what women need and is limited to being a justice of mere discourse, a justice that is in the laws, but that cannot be felt in our daily reality.
There can be no talk of justice for women when the action of the authority is not preventive, but reactive. Nor can we assume that the task of the authority is effective and timely, because its comprehensive effect does not generate a decrease in the rates of violence, which entails a total absence of strategy.
Today, we know the same from the media, that a mother of a family is burned alive, that a young woman from the beginning gets lost and then turns up dead in a cistern, or that after several expert reports, the conclusion is finally reached that they killed her
Today, gender justice, which must have a perspective, is just nowhere to be found. I share some adventures that I have experienced in recent times. A few months ago my official account on the social network Facebook was stolen from me by unknown people and probably in bad faith. After trying to access it, and noticing that it was being used for purposes that I did not authorize, I went to the State Attorney General’s Office in order to file the corresponding complaint, opening an investigation folder from that moment. To date, I have not recovered my account nor has an investigation been carried out that could identify the person or group of people behind this crime. The system sleeps while I’m suffering from the effects of identity theft. My name in the Prosecutor’s Office is limited to appearing as a complainant, it is limited to a file without investigation, and therefore, without data that identifies the criminals.
On the other hand, in April I made a series of posts on my Twitter social network account, which I continued to use normally despite not being able to do the same on Facebook. In the publications I exercised my human right of freedom of expression in political and electoral matters, since through them I expressed my position on the federal process of revocation of mandate. In a photograph I spread a T-shirt with a legend alluding to a form of participation: active abstention. Twenty-four hours later, some of my followers alerted me that an influencer, who publicly claims to be the director of one of the most viral meme and political satire websites on the internet, had used that photograph associating me with conduct of a sexual nature. My body appeared in the photograph, my personal image was being used without my consent to misrepresent the original objective. Given the ability of this person to go viral, many other users took on the task of altering the image and spreading it with increasingly explicit textual captions and therefore denigrating my personal dignity and honor. Wow, even an expert in creating memes from the Latino community in the United States did the same and viralized a video using that same image as the cover on YouTube. The trend towards sexual, media, virtual, community violence, and others added to it, was taking on dimensions that were beyond me.
And since 2020, both our General Congress and the State Congress approved reforms in terms of procedures for political violence based on gender, where, among other measures, the types and modalities of gender violence provided for in the laws are sanctioned when for reason of the same affects a political right (such as freedom of expression in political matters), I decided to go to the Technical Unit for Electoral Contentious Matters of the INE so that it could undertake an investigation through a special sanctioning procedure to be resolved by the Specialized Regional Chamber of the Electoral Court of the Judicial Power of the Federation.
It is worth saying that this type of procedure has gained strength in recent months, with the particularity that it has focused on proving the existence of these types and modalities of violence when the victims are practicing public servants, pre-candidates, candidates for positions of popular election or members of the administrative or jurisdictional function in electoral matters. The resolutions suppose as antecedents procedures in which the diffusion of the contents on the Internet is suspended or eliminated, and if responsibility is proven, the author may be ordered to make a public apology, and even adopt appropriate measures for its non-repetition.
But this justice seems as if it were only in the law so that its recipients are only those who meet the qualities mentioned, it seems as if all the other women who are citizens or simply people (that, according to the Constitution, the person deserves a broad protection by the State) we were not allowed that same justice. It is a justice that due to “oversight” at the time of drafting the laws segregated, excluded the woman voter from the benefits of her guardianship.
Well, it turns out that the INE declared itself incompetent in my case. Despite the fact that I challenged this incompetence before the Superior Chamber of the Federal Electoral Court, I noticed an even greater evil in our justice system. Last Wednesday, July 27, a draft sentence was submitted to the Plenary of the Court in which they granted me precautionary measures against the publications of the influencer, his content company and other network users, proposing to revoke the incompetence of the INE and order it to finally start the investigation. But the sentence was not approved. A block of four magistrates rejected the project of the rapporteur magistrate, and as a consequence, the incompetence of the INE was confirmed.
The greatest evil is not that it was men who opposed granting me the right to start an investigation. The greatest evil continues to be, in our country, that the authorities make the pretext of not carrying out an investigation in the jurisdiction, a minimal role to which I think I am entitled, when in other cases (perhaps politically more convenient) the jurisdiction is not pretexted, it is justified ad nauseam for the sake of other topics being treated.
The same fate happened to me with the Electoral Institute of Sinaloa, in the face of another complaint against an influencer who used a video from my 2018 electoral campaign to try to link its content to verify illicit acts that have been attributed to other people. . Same behavior: sexualization of the role of women in politics, without any safeguard to dignity and honor. The reason for not starting the investigation: What do you think? Yes, lack of competition, the same as there is for other issues, although the law does not establish it.
These are a few more stories of that justice that in Mexico is designed for some people and is excluded for all the rest. My fate is cast and I continue to experience the detrimental effects, by a majority vote of officials who as a whole want to continue saying how justice should be for us. Meanwhile, for the Prosecutor’s Office I continue to be an investigation folder without an investigation, and for the INE, the Electoral Tribunal and even the IEES the same: a complaint without an investigation, since there is incompetence, perhaps of both. I wish the authority never need justice that, just like me, many women in our country are deprived of. Patriarchy may not have a face, but sometimes it shows itself in deeds. That maxim of the Constitution that imposes the duty on the authority to resolve the substance of matters without dwelling on mere formalities has been forgotten. That is the gender justice of my country, of my state, which revictimizes and lacerates more: a justice that is institutional violence. A gender justice that in the law reads very nicely, but that far from being real, authentic and effective, is limited to being what it really is for now: a paper justice.
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