Why Rising Femicide in Mexico is a US Problem

By Ellen Gordon

Civil uprisings in Mexico in reaction to the horrific disappearance and supposed mass murder of 43 students of Ayotzinapa College in Iguala, Guerrero has spread across the world. Unfortunately the level of violence and corruption in Mexico goes far beyond this terrible case, with disappearances and mass murders forming a tragic piece of the country’s past and seemingly its present. Violence against women and femicide is a growing phenomenon, and has been declared a ‘global epidemic’ by a worldwide report compiling information from many organizations led by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. At a talk held by The Institute of the Americas and The Radical Americas Network at University College London, three activists and researchers laid down the facts and some solid conjectures about violence against women in Central America. Laura Carlsen from CIP Americas Carlsen’s analysis on the situation in Mexico made it difficult to ignore the key role that the U.S. plays in the region, and furthermore how U.S. influence can directly impact the levels of violence suffered by women across Central America, especially in Mexico.

Femicide is defined by Carlsen as ‘the murder of a woman because she is a woman’. It is categorized as different from other homicides as it often involves sexual crime and is specifically located in the role of a woman as a mother, relative, worker or increasingly in her role as community leader or activist. Throughout the recent uprisings in Mexico, and in other environmental or social  protests across Central America, women have been at the forefront, protesting for justice and seeking to stand up to corruption and to combat the violence that affects the whole society. The rise in femicide is directly related to the well-organised mobilization of women protesting for a whole range of issues, and also to the rise of military and arms presence in the country. Mexico has seen a 40% rise in femicide nationally since 2007, with a 300% rise in Ciudad Juarez according to figures collected by humanitarian organisations but the devastating phenomenon cannot be defined by quantitative data. Impunity and fear are key factors which contribute to the failure to report or resolve these crimes along with the larger backdrop of violence and crime which can make it easy to link and dissolve femicide as just another part of heavily generalised ‘gang’ violence.

In 1994 Canada, the U.S. and Mexico formed NAFTA (The North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement), which lowered trade tariffs between the countries, creating a trade bloc which, despite contrary promises, has actually slowed economic growth for Mexico and pushed down wages in the U.S. and Mexico. Already high-level Mexican economic dependence on the U.S. increased, and the presence of U.S. companies in Mexico has become more concentrated. Mexican products are available for trade in the U.S. at a lower price than before and vice versa, bringing some economic benefits, but also disadvantages such as lower salaries to both countries. In 2008 came the Merida Initiative, a motion which goes beyond trade and ventures into the realms of security interests, offering U.S. assistance to combat the flow of drug trafficking in Mexico consisting of a vast export of police, judiciary, communications and military personnel to ‘professionalize’ the Mexican forces. The first pillar of the initiative states that the initiative aims to ‘Diminish the power of Mexican organized criminal groups by systematically capturing and incarcerating their leaders and by reducing drug trade revenues by interdicting drugs, stopping money laundering, and diminishing production.’ 

Seven years on from the Merida Initiative, it seems that these efforts are failing. Ploughing arms and money into Mexico’s police forces and by deploying U.S. armed forces has, according to Carlsen, contributed to turning Mexico a country ‘under the gun’. Corruption within the Mexican state police forces is rife, with officers accepting a much higher wage to turn a blind eye or to co-operate and work with organized crime units. Arms dealers on both sides of the border benefit from the increase in weapons to create an even larger black market in both countries and in turn contribute to the use of arms by traffickers, the police and anyone wishing to defend themselves in the midst of a militarized society. By ‘capturing and incarcerating’ gang leaders, the U.S. and Mexican drug enforcement agency missions have splintered drug trafficking organizations, leaving the lower ranks to fight it out which has given way to turf wars and increased violence. It seems that little has been done to curb the enormous demand for drugs coming directly from the U.S., a market reported to be worth over $100 billion, which very much underpins the existence and perpetuation of illegal drug trafficking.

This militarism which has infiltrated Mexico creates an intensely patriarchal society, and maps the misogynist hierarchy of illegal trafficking organizations onto a wider Mexican society as well as normalizing the use of violence as a means to power or influence. The presence and violent use of arms, masked with disappearances and state cover-ups makes no allowance for redemption or reflection on the countless terrible acts committed in the war against drugs. The violence is perpetuated, normalized, and the victims become ever more dehumanized. Carlsen, along with Lorena Fuentes from Birkbeck College and Marylin Thompson from the Central American Women’s Network all make reference to the biased representation of violence in the media, where victims are immediately dismissed as gang members even when they may have little to no involvement in drug trafficking and the criminal networks. In the wide-reaching grasp of corruption, any small collaboration, forced or otherwise can be used to describe a victim as a ‘bad-apple’, when the barrel itself is disintegrating and spilling over. The violence against women specifically is often portrayed in a stereotypically hetero-normative, racially biased and domestic environment, where it can easily be interpreted as an isolated case, or a problem that only affects women of a certain class and in a certain kind of abusive relationship. This prevents examination of the root of the problem, and excludes victims from a normal human reaction to violence as they are labelled as a certain ‘type’ of person.

This is not to say that organised crime and gang violence is not a real problem in Mexico, but whilst the U.S. continues to fund and encourage the War on Drugs, and supplement the Mexican police force, it funds the creation of this militarized environment and further worsens the systems of corruption that link directly back to organised crime groups. Whilst the huge U.S. market for drugs exists just across the border, creating revenue for dealers on both sides, the production and sale of drugs will never be stopped. The impunity felt by citizens in the face of these problems is to be expected, but perhaps there is some hope. Drug legalisation campaigns across the U.S.A are coming into effect, which may reduce the huge demand and to some extent the criminalisation of the drugs trade. Academics and policy makers from a variety of disciplines are now speaking out about the failure of the War on Drugs, and women in Mexico continue to raise awareness and to demand justice for themselves and their families. Nevertheless, to fully tackle this problem and change the way that violence against women is treated in Mexico, a huge change in drugs strategy is needed from the U.S.