Two years have passed since the atrocious femicide of Ingrid Escamilla twice ended the young woman’s dignity. One when her murderer dismembered her; and the other when the Mexico City police released the images of her corpse and various media published the news on the front page. Since then, her case has focused on the dissemination of images of victims and efforts to prohibit the re-victimization of murdered women and their families. She also put society in front of the mirror of morbidity and the excessive consumption of extreme violence with which millions of people have breakfast every day. The dissemination of the images of Escamilla’s body generated such indignation that there were numerous feminist protests in front of some of the newspapers that used her image. Among them, Subway from Reform Group and the press. The Chamber of Deputies has approved this Wednesday a reform to the Penal Code to punish the distribution of these images with up to 10 years in prison.
Although the femicide of Escamilla is still stuck in the bowels of the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office due to lack of evidence, the decision of the Lower House to change article 225 of the Federal Penal Code represents progress by punishing public officials and citizens who ” photograph, disseminate, distribute, publish or market images, audios, documents or any type of personal information of the victim of a criminal investigation”, especially of a femicide. The change in federal legislation has been dubbed the Ingrid law, a measure that was already approved in the capital in 2021. The law sanctions the leaking of information from victims, a widespread practice among police and public officials, but it also penalizes citizens and the media that outside of the assumptions contained in the law use these images for their benefit.
Laura Imelda Pérez Segura, the deputy from the Morena party who presented the initiative, has pointed out that the Ingrid Law seeks to end the re-victimization and institutional violence suffered by women in Mexico. The sanctions proposed by the reform will be higher by 33% if the diffusion has to do with content of women, girls, boys, adolescents or people with disabilities. Pérez Segura has added that disseminating this material contributes to the increase in this type of crime against women, with more than 95% impunity. “It is essential to mark a before and after [del caso de Ingrid Escamilla]. That those behaviors that are intended to cause harm be typified and punished, especially against women who are victims of femicide”, said the deputy.
The measure represents one more step to guarantee women’s access to a life free of violence, however, the lag in justice and the impunity that stems from the investigations of crimes continue to weigh down sexist violence in Mexico. Every day 10 women are murdered in the country and the figure, far from being reduced, grows every year. More than 3,000 women were murdered in 2021. Of those homicides, about a third were classified as femicides. The case of Ingrid Escamilla, for example, has not yet reached the oral trial stage against her murderer and the hearings have been delayed due to the pandemic. The local Prosecutor’s Office investigated six agents at the time after the leak of the images and therefore prosecuted one of the first policemen who arrived at the scene of the crime: he was removed from his position and accused of the crime of illegal exercise of public service .
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