Above Photo: Sign on right reads, “She Did Not Die, They Killed Her!” Sign on left reads, “It was not her fault: she was 7 years old, she was at school, and she was wearing her school uniform!”
Hundreds of thousands of men and women are in the streets demonstrating. Ten women are murdered every day.
Mexico is in shock. In the span of just a few days, the lifeless body of a seven-year-old girl, kidnapped after being abducted from school, was found. Then the body of another young girl, tortured and murdered, was discovered. The number of women murdered every day is 10. The news of these recent killings was like a bomb had been dropped. It placed President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in a political and social crisis, as he has always considered this issue to be secondary, refusing to respond to the demands of thousands of women who have been mobilized for more than a year against violence and murder.
It is urgent that those responsible be punished and that justice be done for the victims and their families: This is the cry of the Mexican people.
Obviously, this situation is not new and the responsibility cannot be placed solely on the shoulders of the new government — that is, the “left” government of López Obrador, which took office in December 2018.
In its stage of decay, the capitalist system aggravates violence against women and their exploitation. The survival of the capitalist regime relies every day more and more on the reduction of the cost of labor (which particularly affects women), but also on all kinds of parasitic activities that keep the capitalist economy afloat: drug trafficking, human trafficking, pornography, prostitution, organ trafficking. These are all motives for the crimes committed against women in Mexico.
In Mexico, the impunity enjoyed by the criminals, due to the close intertwining of the State, Big Business and organized crime, is what encourages the development of such violence. In Mexico, because the complaints lodged by women victims of aggression are not followed up, 90 percent of crimes go unpunished.
This impunity is only possible because of the open or disguised complicity of the decaying Mexican State. One example: In San Quintín, in the state of Baja California, there are countless reports of sexual harassment and rape of women farm workers. But they are simply ignored. The same is true for women workers in the maquiladoras — the factories relocated from the United States to Mexico where the workforce, often female, is overexploited.
President López Obrador’s movement, MORENA, has never been consistent on the issue of women’s rights, as it wants to preserve its alliances with evangelical groups at the local level.
López Obrador therefore has his share of responsibility: Since taking office, he has refused to purge the judicial institution, just as he refuses to respond to the demands of the millions of Mexican women and men who voted for him.
Activists gathered recently in front of the National Palace shouted, “You refuse to receive us, because we don’t have millions of pesos” — a reference to the dinner that López Obrador had organized with big bosses a few days earlier.
Participating in this movement of hundreds of thousands of women and men, the activists of the Internationalist Communist League of Mexico support the demands of women, and we call for the punishment of those responsible for the killings and justice for the victims and their families. For us, the answer cannot be a “struggle between the sexes” or to separate men and women — as some feminist groups propose. The women’s struggle against killings and for justice is, for us, linked to the struggle against the capitalist exploitation that is at the root of this barbarism.