Thousands of Mexican women strike to protest femicide – “Every day we have more evidence that they are killing us specifically for being women”

By Maya Averbuch
9 March 2020

MEXICO CITY (The Guardian) – As rush-hour began on Monday morning, there were no ticket-sellers in Mexico City subway stations.

Nor were there female tellers at many of the banks. Nail salons, massage parlors, and hairdressers closed. And in cities across the country, far fewer women were on the streets than on an ordinary day.

Countless thousands of women and girls across Mexico have joined a historic strike to protest against the country’s startling rates of gender-based violence – and the government’s failure to respond to the crisis in which more than ten women are murdered every day.

From factories along the Río Grande to businesses in the capital and offices in cities near the Guatemalan border, women and girls joined the unprecedented protest, billed as a Day Without Women.

The strike sent a clear message to Mexican society, said Sandra Reyes, 33, a biologist at the National Cancer Institute, who was one of at least 80,000 people who joined the country’s largest ever women’s march on Sunday.

“In some ways, it’s a taunt: if you do not want us out here in the streets, we’ll disappear,” she said. […]

“We used to be able to walk home from school alone, and leave open the door to your house. Not anymore,” said Arista González, 40, a law student and coffee shop employee. “We’ve become used to living in fear.”

But many protesters have reserved particular fury for the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office in December 2018 on a promise of sweeping change, but has shown little interest in the issue of violence against women.

The president, popularly known as Amlo, has attributed femicides to the “neoliberal policies” of previous governments and repeatedly suggested that the women’s protests are part of a rightwing plot against him. […]

Women’s strikes have been held previously in Argentina and Chile, as well as Poland and Spain. But Amneris Chaparro, a researcher at the gender studies center at the National Autonomous University, said Mexico had never before had a major women’s strike – despite its long tradition of labor and student activism.

But the spiraling death toll of women and girls targeted for their gender – and a horrific recent string of high-profile crimes – has inspired new passion in the country’s women’s movement.

“Every day we have more evidence that they are killing us specifically for being women,” said Maria de la Luz Estrada, the executive coordinator of the National Citizen Observatory on Femicide. [more]

‘We’ll disappear’: Thousands of Mexican women strike to protest femicide