WOMEN TAKE TO STREETS IN TIJUANA TO PROTEST KILLINGS
Demonstrators speak out about government response to gender-based violence
A mostly peaceful, fourhour march protesting violence against women in Mexico ended Friday evening with no arrests or injuries.
About 100 women gathered in Tijuana’s Plaza Santa Cecilia around 2:30 p.m. Friday to protest what they described as government inaction against skyrocketing gender-based violence. The demonstrators said men are able to rape and kill with impunity in Baja California and across Mexico.
Similar protests have been staged across Mexico on a near-daily basis in response to the brutal murders this month of a young woman and a 7year-old girl.
In Mexico City, 25-year-old Ingrid Escamilla was stabbed, skinned and disemboweled, and the girl, Fátima Cecilia Aldrighett, was abducted from school and killed. Her body was found stuffed inside a plastic bag. Their deaths triggered widespread outrage and calls for change. Last week, about 1,000 women poured into the streets of Tijuana, demanding justice for them and the victims of hundreds of other killings.
Friday night’s protest was organized by various self-proclaimed feminist groups, different from the ones that protested last Saturday.
The women, who said they were alerted to the march through a Facebook group, attempted to march to the San Ysidro Port of Entry border crossing to close it, until unarmed female Tijuana police officers convinced them to take another route.
Police closed down two lanes of northbound border traffic to allow the group to peacefully protest in border lanes without a violent clash.
Federal police in anti-riot gear stood behind the Tijuana officers, blocking access to the vehicle booths.
Zucely Quiroz, one of the march’s participants, said she was nearly killed by her domestic partner, who escaped to San Diego and never faced any consequences for the violence.
“We are here because we are sick of the injustice. We are sick of the impunity. We have no response from the government. We’re sick and tired that
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Chanting, “ni una más; ni una más” — “not one more” — the women said they wanted to raise awareness not just about government-documented feminicidios, but to draw attention to the thousands of women missing across Mexico.
In 2019, the Mexican government recorded 1,006 incidents of femicide, the crime of killing women or girls because of their gender — a 10 percent increase from 2018.
The overall number of women who die violently in Mexico has also increased, rising to 10 killings per day in 2019 from seven per day in 2017, according to the Mexico office of U.N. Women.
In Tijuana, the slaying of a woman two weeks ago spurred last week’s protests.
Nearly 1,000 women in two simultaneous marches took to the streets last Saturday, painting the doors of the Attorney General’s Office with the names of murdered and missing women.
Dalilah Loza, 15, described how she and her younger brother witnessed their mother’s partner strangling her to death and how police never provided answers in the case.
“Nothing has been done. I have gone to ask about the case because I wanted to help, but on the contrary, they end up blaming me,” she said, breaking into tears.
Loza said after she asked for justice in her mother’s slaying, authorities put her into the custody of the DIF, which is similar to Child Welfare Services.
During Friday’s protest, women weaved in and out of southbound vehicle lanes near the border. One car tried to push through the protesters, prompting a scuffle.
A few of the participants were briefly involved in a shoving match with a couple of Tijuana police officers, but the dust-up was resolved with no injuries.
A few protesters sprayed mace at one man, who had repeatedly asked the women what group they belonged to and refused to move out of their path.
Tijuana state and federal police stood by while the marchers burned a sign they had painted with “Tijuana Feminicidios,” and while others spray-painted a wall underneath a bridge.
“We wanted to close the border to gain the attention of the authorities on both sides of the border, but we were not able to because of the obvious police oppression here,” said one protester, who declined to give her name.
With several of her fellow officers, Tijuana municipal police officer Sandra Cortez convinced the women to abandon their plan to close down the San Ysidro Port of Entry, offering the women a peaceful escort to some closed-down lanes instead. Speaking to the women through a closed gate in front of the El Chapparal pedestrian border crossing, she asked the group to remain calm.
“I just want to tell you we are unarmed and we need for this to stay peaceful. If I can have your word on that, we will let you through,” Cortez told some in the group.
“We are women too, so we understand, but we need everyone to stay calm,” she said later.
During the protest, the women yelled for male reporters to leave the area, and at one point surrounded a photographer from The San Diego Union-tribune.
Carrying signs that read, “It’s seen that killing is not a sin when the killer is the state,” and “I’m not hysterical or menstruating. I am screaming because they are killing us,” the group often blamed authorities for the violence, including police and local and state governments.
Protesters said the number of crimes against women that are reported are low because of how they are classified.
“We don’t disappear; they take us,” the women chanted during the march, saying there are thousands of missing women across Mexico who were likely killed as a result of gender-based violence.
The outcry over the disappearances and deaths has forced a reckoning in a country that has long wrestled with violence against women, analysts and activists say. The situation is also testing the leadership of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Speaking at one of his regular morning news conference last week, the president bristled at journalists’ questions about femicide, and tried to bring the conversation back to an announcement that the government had recovered more than $100 million in criminal assets and would be channeling it into poor communities.
“Look, I don’t want the topic to be only femicide,” he said. “This issue has been manipulated a lot in the media.”
On Tuesday, a coalition of representatives from several political parties issued a declaration condemning genderbased violence and demanding that all levels of government strengthen the fight against it.
“This is a national crisis,” Ana Patricia Peralta, a representative from Morena, López Obrador’s party, said in a speech. “What else needs to happen for us to accept that violence against women in our country is an epidemic that has extended to all social strata?”
At Friday’s march in Tijuana, Quiroz echoed the call for the government to act.
“The thing is, we have no representation,” said Quiroz, noting that she was talking about all levels of leadership from local to the president.
“The government gives zero (expletive) ...,” she said. “We need the government to give us some kind of response. The Mexican government, Baja California, Tijuana, Mexico; the government doesn’t care.”