Mexican musician finds refuge in saxophone after acid attack
MEXICO CITY >> María Elena Ríos has conflicting feelings about her saxophone: She once blamed the instrument for bringing her to the brink of death — but it also has been her salvation.
Ríos, 29, thought her career as a musician and her devotion to her saxophone was what led her former boyfriend — an influential politician — to hire the men who splashed acid onto her face and body, disfiguring her. Later, she learned he simply couldn’t accept that she had broken off their relationship.
Some of the attackers and the ex-boyfriend are in jail, but Ríos still had to come to terms with her instrument. Her love of the saxophone, in the end, is helping heal the psychological scars left by the terrifying attack.
“We are reconciling, little by little,” Ríos said of the musical instrument. “I hated it, because I thought it was responsible” for the 2019 attack in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca. She’s performed live since then, but still wears a mask covering her lower face.
“It bothered my attacker a lot that I was a musician,” Ríos recounts, “because he said we musicians were vagrants, poverty stricken, that we just took drugs and that when I went to concerts I probably participated in orgies.”
The ex-politician who allegedly ordered the attack is being held in jail while awaiting trial, as are two other men, but another remains at large.
Meanwhile, Ríos has joined a movement calling for greater punishments for acid attacks. and says the saxophone is her “sword” in that battle on behalf of victims.
Mexico City legislators have proposed a bill bearing her nickname, “Malena,” which would classify acid attacks as a distinct crime equivalent to attempted homicide. Currently they are treated as simple assault or bodily injury.
Acid attacks are most common in South Asia, but also have been documented in many other parts of the world, including Latin America.
The Carmen Sánchez Foundation, started in 2021 to highlight the issue in Mexico, says government health data from 2022 suggests more than 100 women were attacked by chemicals or some kind of corrosive agent, though only 28 were reported to authorities.
Ríos remembers having to choose, at age 9, between playing soccer and joining one of the musical bands that are a popular community activity in the rural villages in Oaxaca.
“I am not her anymore. I am not the beautiful young woman who played the saxophone anymore,” said Ríos. “Today I can say I have been forced to become a defender of my own rights, and a defender of the rights of other fellow women survivors.”
She was hospitalized for five months after the attack. She now attends musical classes in Mexico City, where she has taken refuge since the attack.