The campaign to curb violence against women is the first big social movement to form during AMLO's presidency
rooftop of an office block in Mexico City, Sonia Barroeta tells of a lifetime of small abuses. If she wears a skirt, men “won’t leave me in peace”, she says. She has been wearing black trousers for 30 years. She counts six occasions on which she used pepper spray on aggressive men. Now nearing 60, she plans to take part in a demonstration for the first time, a protest to be held on March 8th, International Women’s Day.
Feminist groups called the march and the strike after two brutal murders in February. Ingrid Escamilla, 25, was killed and skinned by her husband. Fátima, a seven-year-old, was abducted, sexually abused and murdered. The Women’s Day march is expected to be the biggest feminist mobilisation in Mexico’s history.
Although violence is the spur to protest, women are a smaller proportion of murder victims than in countries where they are generally better treated. In Switzerland, in 2018 the best of the 189 countries ranked in theDevelopment Programme’s genderinequality index, half of murder victims are female. In 74th-placed Mexico, which has many more murders, the proportion has been steady at 10-15% since the 1990s. That is because a typical murder involves one male gangster shooting another.
That has inspired a movement characterised by the youth of its adherents, their militancy and their use of social media to organise. After a teenager accused four policemen of rape last August, women rallied under the hashtag “They don’t take care of us, they rape us”. They smashed the glass doors of the prosecutor’s office in Mexico City, vandalised the Angel of Independence, the city’s best known monument, and clashed with all-women riot squads.
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