Despite the decrease in femicides, according to official figures, Mexico is the second country in Latin America where more homicidal violence is committed against women. The latest scandal arose as a result of the case of Debanhi Escobar, an 18-year-old girl who disappeared on April 9 and whose body was found lifeless by authorities early Friday morning on the perimeter of a motel that had already been inspected in repeatedly in recent days.
Debanhi Escobar was 18 years old. On the night of April 8, she went to a party with her friends, but she never came home. On April 9, she reported her disappearance to her family and to authorities in the state of Nuevo León, northern Mexico, where she resided.
After 13 days of searching and numerous questions, her lifeless body was found at dawn this Friday four meters deep in a water tank outside the Nueva Castilla motel, near where she was last seen.
“My daughter is dead and I don’t know what to do, I’m upset because I was wrong, I believed in the Prosecutor’s Office, and they never gave me the volumes, I asked them for copies, it’s my right as a victim, I never had them in my possession, because they didn’t their work,” lamented Mario Escobar, father of the deceased girl, who criticized the work of the Prosecutor’s Office during the search for his daughter.
In an impromptu press conference outside the place where Debanhi’s body was found, the father also denounced the lack of transparency of the team that led the raids, since they had already combed the area up to four times before: “Four times they had searched , why does it appear on the fifth? Did they plant it? How did it get there?”, the parent asked.
A strange photo taken shortly before his disappearance
The last image that was taken of the young woman was a photograph taken, presumably, by the taxi driver of a private company, who left her at kilometer 15.5 of the highway from Monterrey to Nuevo Laredo, not at her home.
That photograph, widely disseminated on social networks during the last two weeks and where Debanhi Escobar is seen alone on the road, according to local Mexican media consulted by the newspaper ‘El País’, was taken by the taxi driver to prove that Escobar voluntarily got out of the car. cab.
However, according to the family’s account, after consulting videos held by the Prosecutor’s Office, Debanhi got out of the car because the driver was sexually harassing her, reaching out his arm to touch her breasts.
Despite the words of the girl’s father, who assumed the version of sexual harassment as one of the triggers of the young woman’s death, the Nuevo León Public Ministry stated that the driver’s attitude did not show any reprehensible behavior and that it was shown collaborative during the investigations: “He has collaborated a lot. There is absolutely nothing in the analysis,” confirmed the Prosecutor’s Office. In fact, the taxi driver is free.
The bodies of five other women were found in the investigation.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, during his daily morning press conference, conveyed condolences to the victim’s family and did not rule out the possibility that the Attorney General’s Office take over the investigation of Escobar’s case to the detriment of the state prosecutor’s office . However, the president did deny establishing an alert for femicides in the state of Nuevo León.
During the investigations on the ground, the authorities found the bodies of five other women reported missing in the same perimeter where Debanhi Escobar was being searched.
According to data provided by public institutions, so far this year in the state of Nuevo León alone, 322 complaints of disappearances of women were reported, of which 26 remain unresolved.
On the afternoon of this Friday, marches were registered to condemn the feminicide of the young woman.
#VIDEO | 🔴 The march began to demand justice for the case of #DebanhiEscobar in Nuevo Leon
Under the slogans “the new Nuevo León is femicide” and “It was not an accident”, feminist groups and civil society demand justice for the disappearances and femicides in the state pic.twitter.com/OqbgEizstK
— THE EIGHTH (@laoctavadigital) April 23, 2022
On April 20, the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System published the data on crime incidence during the first quarter of 2022, where it is reflected that Nuevo León is the second state, only behind the State of Mexico (39) and equaled with Veracruz (21) where more femicides have been committed.
Between January 1 and March 31, according to the same data, 215 cases have been classified as femicides. And there are another 426 deaths of women categorized as intentional homicide.
Decrease, with nuances, of femicides in the country
The word “feminicide” became popular in Mexico in the 1990s, after the scandal of the murder of women in Ciudad Juárez. Since then, the concept of gender-based homicide of women became part of the legal framework, but it was not until 2012 that the term was added to the Federal Penal Code.
Since then, the typification of femicides is not common to the 32 Mexican states. Besides, there are seven grounds that have to be given for it to be considered as such and not as a homicide: that there are signs of sexual violence, a history of violence, a relationship between the victim and the perpetrator, injuries or mutilations, threats or aggressions prior to the murder, solitary confinement of the victim or that the body has been exhibited in a public place.
Thus, the Mexican authorities reported that during the month of March there were 34.8% fewer femicides than during the peak month of records for this crimewhich was in August 2021, when public institutions reported 107 femicides, the highest figure recorded during López Obrador’s term.
#8M | In 2021, the records of femicides in Mexico resulted in chilling figures: between 2 and 3 women are murdered every day pic.twitter.com/RqMhW1EsFG
– Nation321 (@Nation321) March 8, 2022
Despite the optimistic perspectives of the Government due to the continued decline in femicides for four consecutive months, Mexican feminist groups denounce that the bias in the definition of the crime of femicide prevents the vast majority of murders against women from being investigated and prosecuted as such, which implies an underreporting in the statistics and an image far removed from reality.
The Government makes up the data”
In an interview with France 24, the lawyer and feminist activist Karen Quiroga stated that state prosecutors and prosecutors would be receiving orders to treat femicides as intentional or negligent homicides as a way to reduce statistics.
“The Government makes up the data,” Quiroga sentenced in relation to the downward data offered by the authorities. “There is a fence of the Judiciary” to investigate the femicides and a “fear” of “overflow” of the figures, according to the expert.
Along these same lines, the civil association Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity expressed itself, whose audit in 2019 reflected that a 46% of femicides are typified as “intentional homicides” to moderate the statistics.
Feminist groups in Mexico have requested on numerous occasions that all murders of women be treated in the first instance as femicides and that the causes be filtered afterwards. In this way, they could act with greater transparency regarding the real number of cases, they maintain.
In relation to the National Search Commission, the agency in charge of investigating disappeared persons, attorney Karen Quiroga pointed out that the institution “does not have financial funds” or “specialized personnel” to carry out these tasks effectively and that In most cases, it is the families “with their own resources” who have to bear the costs of these operations.
All of these ingredients ultimately favor impunity for the perpetrators, which according to reports prepared by different organizations, reaches between 97% and 99%.
The lukewarm commitments of the Government
Between 2015 and 2022, the rate of femicides in Mexico has increased by 121%, a figure that places the nation as the territory of the region of Latin America and the Caribbean where more femicides are perpetrated, only behind Brazil.
López Obrador maintains that they are “dealing with that.” In recent years, Mexico has promoted the Olympia Law, to classify digital violence as a crime; and the Ingrid Law, which condemns officials who spread information about the victims.
Deputies in Mexico approved the Ingrid Law, which punishes the dissemination of images of crime victims with up to 10 years in prison.
The law is based on the femicide of Ingrid Escamilla, whose images of her dismembered corpse were broadcast in the media. pic.twitter.com/wfiCSOVAHC
— AJ+Spanish (@ajplusespanol) March 24, 2022
In the federal elections of June 6, 2021, another law was approved that forced political parties to have joint candidacies on their lists.
However, the president does not recognize the feminist movement as an important social actor in the current scenario and went so far as to say that sexist violence is a matter of “neoliberalism.”
Even the attorney general Alejandro Gertz Maner even suggested in February 2020 the elimination of the criminal category of femicide to investigate it as aggravated homicide because it “uselessly complicated the prosecution.” A statement that he had to rectify.
The data reflects a lack of results in the eradication of violence against women.
In addition, during the last administration there have been more than 100,000 homicides in Mexico, a balance that clouds the optimism and proposals of López Obrador.
With information from EFE and local and international media.
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