'The Patriarchy Is Going Down': Mexican Women Are Rising Up
Chantal Flores
Today 1:00pm
Paloma Ledezma went missing on a Saturday. She left her home in Mexico’s northern state of Chihuahua at 3:15 p.m. on March 2, 2002, to go to a weekend class downtown—a computer class she took between her long weekly shifts at a maquiladora. Her mother, Norma, expected her 16-year-old daughter home no later than 9 p.m., but Paloma never returned. “She didn’t come home,” Paloma later said in a testimony. “She never came home.” Twenty-seven days after Paloma’s disappearance, her body was found near the Chihuahua-Ciudad Aldama highway with signs of sexual violence.
Though the governor of Chihuahua promised Norma that authorities would search for her daughter, they failed to uncover any clues. Instead, Norma says, the police called her days later and told her that Paloma was seen in the southern part of the city and that she was fine. “Lies, it was all lies,” Norma said in her testimony. Paloma’s murder is part of an epidemic of violence against women in Mexico, so common that’s it’s referred to as femicide, gender-based murder of women. According to the United Nations, roughly seven women are murdered every day in Mexico, and the rate of femicides in the country has risen significantly since 1985.
Even though Norma Ledezma lost her daughter, she refused to let her death become another statistic. Instead, she is a leader of the fight against femicides in both her home state of Chihuahua and across the country. With other activists, she founded the organization Justice for Our Daughters and worked on cases of women and girls who have either disappeared or been killed in Chihuahua. She did all of this despite multiple threats of violence. She even took Paloma’s case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which concluded that the Mexican state was responsible for violations of the rights to a fair trial and judicial protection, the rights of the child, and the right to equal protection of the law. The Mexican government offered a public apology to Ledezma and her family, and in 2012, the state of Chihuahua created the Special Prosecutor’s Unit for Female Victims of Gender-related Crimes, which currently serves only six out of the 67 municipalities, in compliance with the recommendations issued by the Commission.
“We did not start with the want to defend something. It is because [violence] affected us, because they took away our daughters, because we are victims,” Ledezma says.
More:
https://jezebel.com/the-patriarchy-is-going-down-mexican-women-are-rising-1838358933
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