The country saw more than 1,000 femicides last year — second only to Brazil in Latin America — and on average, 10 women or girls are killed daily in Mexico.
By FABIOLA SÁNCHEZ and FERNANDA PESCE
Women in Mexico state, which wraps around Mexico City on three sides, were already dying at a frightening pace. From January to November, there were 131 femicides — cases of women killed because of their gender. Díaz was the ninth apparent femicide during an 11-day spate of killings in and around Mexico City from late October to early November.
Three days after Díaz disappeared, Supreme Court President Arturo Zaldívar called for a national protocol for handling femicides and said all homicides of women should be investigated as such. The next day, in response to a question at his daily press conference, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he agreed — a nationally televised endorsement from the man who sets the country’s daily agenda.
“I saw the cases of femicides on television, and I always said: those poor women, their poor families, their poor children,” Massiel Olvera, Díaz’s older sister, said. “The horrible ways they violate their bodies, the atrocious ways they hurt them, how they leave them.” As a result of the commission’s work, the General Law for Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence was signed in 2007. It created the gender violence alerts. In 2010, lawmakers added femicide — defined as the killing of a woman for reasons of gender — to the federal criminal code.Despite the efforts in Mexico state and other jurisdictions, last year there were more than double the number of femicides in the country than in 2015, according to federal data.
Still, despite 15 years of recognition of the problem of femicides and efforts to address it, the violence “persists and there are no clear signs that it is declining,” the Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean, part of the United Nations, said in a recent report. “Violence against women is very complicated to tackle and very complex to eradicate,” she said. “The sociocultural patterns, those learned behaviors … inside private spaces generate and in many cases demand violence against women.”The prosecutor told them she was committed to finding Díaz, but raised the possibility she might not be alive. Later, it would be García who called Olvera to tell her they had found her sister’s body.
During the investigation, authorities lost her clothing, which could have been critical in the collection of genetic material to identify her killer. A judge would later order that her body be exhumed to look for the clothing, but it was never found. “We see that those workers are still there, doing bad work, and the relevant authorities don’t sanction them.”The bedroom community, population 1.8 million, has experienced tremendous growth and has one of Mexico’s highest concentrations of poverty. Many come from across the country looking for economic opportunities in the capital. Some areas lack municipal water. Traffic and flooding plague neighborhoods. There aren’t enough police to patrol the streets.
This year, Díaz met someone new at her gym. Jesús Alexis Álvarez Ortiz was an athletic 27-year-old who worked at a Mexico City hotel.
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