Feminicide in Mexico

Abstract

Feminicide finds tight roots in the Mexican context. We could not assess how defining and categorising the gender-related killing of women and girls has traversed, rippled, and developed across the globe without acknowledging the efforts Mexican activism has given to its naming and recognition. This chapter offers a journey into feminicide in Mexico. First, we provide a historical background using Ciudad Juárez and 1993 as the starting space and time compasses. We draw on the conceptual particularities of Marcela Lagarde’s “feminicidio” (feminicide) and Julia Monárrez Fragoso’s “systemic sexual feminicide,” which locate the state’s impunity at the forefront of these crimes against women. Second, we offer an overview of the country’s legal system and normative frameworks designed to attend to and sanction feminicide and feminicidal violence. The challenges inherent to the 32 states that comprise the Mexican federation are addressed given the wide variation of the criteria used to criminalise feminicide according to each state’s criminal code. The third section offers a statistical overview employing administrative data provided by the Mexican government. The efforts to quantify the intentional killing of women by the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEGI) and the Executive Secretariat of the National System for Public Security (SESNSP) are presented alongside an inquiry into who is rendered most marginalised and invisible in these data. Finally, we conclude by recalling what the global community concerned with this issue can learn from a country where “10 women die every day” (INEGI, 2022).