Impunity and Machismo Drives the Growing Femicide Epidemic in Mexico Gretel Kahn - McGill International Review
go to original October 7, 2017

Thousands protested violence against women in Mexico after a 19-year-old student, Mara Fernanda Castilla, was found dead after using ride-hailing service Cabify (Carbonated.TV)

On the night of Thursday September 8, 19-year-old political science student Mara Fernanda Castillo went out clubbing with her friends. A little after five in the morning, she ordered a cab home from the popular Latin American Uber-like app, Cabify. The vehicle arrived promptly, but after boarding it, however, she never arrived home.

Mara was found dead near a motel in Santa María Xonacatepec, a small Mexican town 15 kilometers from the city of Puebla where she lived. It is suspected that she was sexually assaulted and strangled by her driver, the only suspect. The prosecution labeled the crime as a femicide. Femicide is described as a deliberate killing of a woman-identifying person based on their gender. Femicides are considered hate crimes. As a direct backlash of Castilla’s murder, over the past couple of weeks, thousands of Mexicans have marched across the country demanding response and solutions from the government to the femicide epidemic that has been plaguing the country. Castilla’s death has once again cast a spotlight on machismo violence in Mexico and Latin America.



According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 12 women are murdered everyday in the region for the sole fact that they are women. Latin America is considered one of the worst regions in the world to be a woman: seven out of the ten countries with the highest rates of femicides are located in the area. Moreover, there is a higher-than-average level of domestic violence in the region. Mexico is by far one of the most affected with six women murdered everyday. According to Ana Guezmes from United Nations Women, “femicides are a pandemic in Mexico”.

The word “femicide” entered the Mexican vernacular in the 1990s where there was a wave of misogynistic violence in the border city of Juárez. Despite various governmental efforts and international attention, the femicide issue persists and it is bigger today than it ever was in Ciudad Juárez. While it is hard to establish a reliable figure, it is estimated that at least 1,530 women were murdered in the border city of Juarez from 1993 to 2014. Today, the number across the State of Mexico is around 500 more women during the years of 2005-2011.



The indifference of the authorities and the Mexican government to these cases of femicides make impunity very easy for the perpetrators. One of the most notable cases is the death of Mariana Lima Burendia whose parents are conviced was murdered by her then-husband after repeated death threats and domestic abuse. On the night of her death, she went to ask her then-husband, Julio César Hernández Ballinas, for a divorce. A couple of hours later, Ballinas called Burendia’s mother to tell her that Burendia had hanged herself. Ballinas was a judical police officer. The state subsequently ruled Burendia’s death as a suicide. Ballinas, the husband and alleged murdered, has since been promoted to unit chief in his town. Corruption and dysfunctional justice systems, as well as victim blaming make these cases almost impossible to prosecute.

According to the Council of Hemispheric Affairs, in Mexico, “of the almost 50,000 women killed, only about 2,500 resulted in convictions.” This means that Mexican femicide cases have an impunity rate near 95 percent. These impunity rates are not exclusive to Mexico. Most Latin American countries see similar impunity rates for femicide cases. In Honduras, for example, the impunity rate spikes to 96 per cent while in Colombia, the rate remains at an average-for-the-region 90 per cent. Thousands of families are still waiting for justice to be served, but in a country where the authorities and the government refuse to classify such offences as femicide, justice seems out of reach for femicide victims and their families.

The implications of using the word ‘femicide’ to label the crimes by authorities is very important. When authorities refuse to label the crimes as femicides, they demean the role that gender plays in the victim’s death. Refusing to use the term is in effect refusing to address the underlying problems of Mexico’s machismo society, as well as stripping the implications of the crime as a gender-based hate crime. Furthermore, it normalizes the notion of gender-based violence. It is important to understand that femicides are not isolated events but they are part of a society that has institutionalized violence against women.

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