Violence against indigenous women a lesson to us all

Last May in the city of Juárez, Mexico, seven-year-old Airis Estrella was kidnapped on her way to buy sweets at a small grocery store in her neighborhood. Immediately, her family and authorities began the search, only to find her body in a large garbage container filled with cement two weeks later in a shanty neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Her body showed signs of sexual abuse and head trauma. As large crowds gathered weeks later to denounce with indignation the murder of Airis Estrella and the security crisis of the city, killings of women and girls have become a common occurrence in the state of Chihuahua. For the past decade, more than 400 women have been murdered and more than 600 have been reported missing since 1993. The cities of Chihuahua and Juárez, located near the U.S.-Mexico border, have become the killing grounds for Mexican women and the perfect site for these crimes to persist without any justice in sight.

According to Amnesty International, evidence seems to indicate that the killers have a pattern of choice for women that are of low economic status and have no power in society. In fact, a large number of the victims worked in the maquiladora [sweatshops] sector of the city, where the labour force is mainly comprised of female Mexican workers. Despite the high levels of criminality, these sweatshops offer no protection to women, knowing that many of these workers take the night shift and are therefore obliged to walk alone long distances back home in isolated and unsafe roads, with no other means of transport in sight. It is under these conditions that many are kidnapped, murdered and later dumped in the desert. As a response, the maquiladora industry denies any connection between the murders and the women working under such unsafe conditions.

Since 1993, local and federal authorities have proven to be inefficient and incompetent in conducting adequate investigations to find the killers. There is speculation of the authorities' actual involvement or assistance in the crimes, due to the recurrent cover-ups made by police, through the mishandling of evidence or the wrongful accusations made to innocent civilians, using torture as a means of fabricating false declarations and witnesses. The murders have also been attributed to serial killers, drug cartels, organized crime, misogyny, as well as domestic violence.

Men have now used the desert itself as a verbal threat to women of what may happen to them if they do not obey. According to Esther Chávez Cano, director of Casa Amiga, an organization dedicated in assisting family members of the victims, "We have reached the breakage point that seems to have no answer to solve what we are currently living, [not only] the extreme violence of these homicides, but also the daily violence in the streets, in the houses of women, and it seems the government is lost without a concrete answer [to solve these problems]." She has also declared that the essence of this phenomenon of violence is impunity, official corruption and poverty, which reflect the inequalities in the city.

The case of the women of Juárez reflects just one dimension of the problem of gender violence that exists in Mexico. The systematic pattern of violence against women in the country is rooted in the inequality and discrimination that persists today, which is based on the historical and cultural context that structures Mexican patriarchal society.

The women of Juárez have not only captured national attention but international as well. Nonetheless, violence against women in Mexico may no longer be focalized to one region—so what about the rest of the country?

According to the Special Commission established by the Chamber of Deputies, which has investigated feminicide in Mexico, 1,500 women have been murdered in the last three years in the states of Chiapas and Veracruz alone. This number surpasses three times the murders in the city of Juárez since 1993. In Chiapas alone, 874 women have been murdered between 2002 and 2004. As in the case of Chiapas, the violence against women in Mexico has gone far beyond the city of Juárez.

The indigenous population in Chiapas has long been neglected by the government, bringing about the Zapatista rebellion of 1994. In response to the indigenous resistance, the government sent more than half the military in Mexico, in a campaign of violence and intimidation, which included the participation of paramilitary groups. As a result, indigenous women and their families have been displaced from their lands by the military and paramilitary groups, obliging them to live in communities surrounded by these forces and increasing their vulnerability to further abuses. As such, women and girls have been raped and forced into sexual slavery.

Nonetheless, it was from the emergence of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, or EZLN, that indigenous women began to raise their voices publicly, not only to support the demands of indigenous men, or to represent the interests and struggles of their communities, but also to demand the respect and dignity of their rights as women. The originality of the rebellion was partly due to indigenous women's development of the Revolutionary Women's Law, the first document of this kind to emerge in guerrilla agendas that incorporated gender issues. This document consisted of 10 specific demands of which expressed the right to a life free of sexual and domestic violence, a right to choose who to marry and a right to political participation, among others. These demands certainly ignited a whole new wave of organized women and united women's movements in Chiapas and Mexico as whole, as well as being a point of reference for many indigenous communities. Even though this law is not known in detail by all indigenous women, it has marked the possibilities that exist for women in general to have a better life with dignity and respect.

The states of Chihuahua and Chiapas have both been identified as focal points for violence against women. The indigenous women in Mexico, as in the case of Chiapas, are the most marginalized social sector, because most of them are denied access to public services, including education, medical assistance, police protection—factors that may prevent or even eradicate violence. Public services are, in fact, the perpetrators of violence against indigenous women since many of them that seek medical aid end up being sterilized involuntarily. Economic crisis and extreme poverty have obliged women to become the main providers for their families, as men continue to migrate to the cities or to the United States. For women in Mexico, not only has the inside of the workplace become an area for abuse, but the outside has also become a site of danger for women, as seen in the city of Juárez.

Violence against women in Mexico has become a national emergency—or at least it should be regarded as such by the government. It can no longer be relevant to one region. The Mexican government has an international obligation to protect women and guarantee their rights by protecting them against any act of violence and discrimination. "Not one more" has been the slogan of the campaign against the murders of women in Juárez, and through the help of other women's organizations, it has certainly brought forth, throughout the world, the struggle women face to deconstruct the patterns that lead to violence. The violence and discrimination that indigenous women in Chiapas and in the city of Juárez face have similarities with the rest of the country and the world. And so I say the same as a Mexican campaign towards the elimination of violence against women says el que golpea a una, nos golpea a todas—"You hit one, you hit us all."