Pressure Builds on Mexican President Over Rising Violence Against Women

By Robbie Whelan (WSJ)

Updated Feb. 19, 2020 2:39 pm ET

Female protesters clash with police as gruesome killings of women shock country

MEXICO CITY—A fresh wave of protests by women’s rights activists is raising pressure on Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after a series of gruesome murders highlighted the growing problem of gender violence in the country.

Masked female protesters clashed with police over the last week and lit fires in the city’s central square. They also spray-painted slogans on the walls of the National Palace, the official residence and office of the president, including the names of women recently murdered and “AMLO Get Out,” referring to Mr. López Obrador´s initials.

The unrest builds on protests that began last year in response to allegations of kidnapping and rape by Mexico City police officers. Then, protesters vandalized police stations and prominent public monuments.

This time around, the protests focused on several recent, disturbing killings.

Ingrid Escamilla, age 25, was found murdered and dismembered in her home in Mexico City on Feb. 9. Police say that her husband confessed to killing her because she criticized his heavy drinking, then skinning her corpse and removing several organs to make her harder to identify.

Protesters marched on the offices of a tabloid newspaper that published leaked photos of her body and torched one of its delivery trucks.

Fátima Aldriguetti Antón, a 7-year-old girl from a poor neighborhood of southern Mexico City, went missing from school on Feb. 11 and was found dead a few days later, her body bearing signs of torture.

In a radio interview, Mexico City’s top prosecutor highlighted the fact that Fátima’s parents suffered from mental illness. City officials pointed out that the girl’s family had been investigated by social services in the past, suggesting that the family bore some responsibility for her death. Authorities say they are investigating two suspects, although no arrests have been made.

In November, Abril Pérez Sagaón was killed in her car in front of her children by a gunman after she accused her husband, a former executive at Amazon.com Inc., of attempted murder.

“Practically every day there’s news of an act of violence against a woman that is more serious than the day before, and the worst part is that there’s no empathy from the authorities, including the president,” said Regina Tamés, executive director of the Group for Information on Reproductive Choice, a Mexican feminist nonprofit. “The message he’s sending, from the very top, is that he doesn’t want to hear about it, and that there’s no plan to address the emergency.”

Mr. López Obrador has provoked outrage with his responses to the protests and to criticism that his government hasn’t done enough to clamp down on violence against women. During his daily morning press conference on Feb. 10, he told a female reporter who asked about what the government is doing to protect women from violence, “Look, I don’t want to talk anymore about femicide…because this issue has been very much manipulated in the media.”

He went on to say that the news media ought to focus instead on his administration’s prosecution of white-collar crime and how much money the government would save by raffling off the presidential airplane.

This week, in successive morning news conferences, Mr. López Obrador deflected blame onto the economic policies of his predecessors. On Monday, he told a reporter that the murder of 7-year-old Fátima was the result of “social decay produced by neoliberal policies,” an idea that was quickly echoed on social media by members of the president’s Morena party.

Tuesday morning, asked by a female reporter for a specific plan to address femicide in the short term, the president said his government is “addressing the causes” of gender violence by ensuring that society is “more just, more egalitarian, fraternal, with values in which individualism isn’t what prevails, but rather love of one another, so that there’s a lot of care, not hatred.”

Femicide, a legal term denoting that a woman was killed at least in part because of her gender, has become more common as violent crime in Mexico has risen. Reports of femicide rose by an average of 25% a year over the past half-decade. Mexico’s Interior Ministry classified 976 killings as femicides in 2019, up from 411 in 2015.

Over the same period, murder victims have risen by an average of 18% a year, to 34,582 in 2019, according to Interior Ministry estimates. Those figures are typically revised upward each year by Mexico’s National Statistics Institute. Women represent about 10% of murder victims in Mexico.

Sex crimes, including rape and harassment, have also risen dramatically. Last year, the Interior Ministry reported 51,146 such crimes, up 64% since 2015.

Last month, students and teaching aides at five departments at Mexico City’s National Autonomous University, the country’s largest learning institution, went on strike in protest of sexual harassment and assault on campus. Students have accused the university of simply moving professors accused of abuse to different positions within the institution.

This week, Martí Batres, a leading Mexican senator and one of the founders of the president’s Morena party, wrote on Twitter, “Femicide, as we know it today, is a product of neoliberalism,” citing a spate of killings of women who worked in the manufacturing plants of the border town of Ciudad Juárez in the early 2000s. “Female workers in border factories, far from their hometowns and families, without a network of social protection, were its first victims.”

The post caused an uproar among feminists and critics of Morena, who pointed out that the party recently celebrated the signing of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement, the free-trade deal that replaced the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement that greatly expanded low-wage manufacturing along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Femicide has been going on for many years before Juárez,” said Ms. Tamés, the head of the feminist group. “We can say that neoliberalism contributed to toxic masculinity and violence against women, that it’s part of the equation, but to arrive at the conclusion that this is the cause, and to avoid taking any responsibility, that’s what’s generating so much anger at the president.”

Write to Robbie Whelan at robbie.whelan@wsj.com