A 1995 novel by writer Julia Alvarez
retold the story of the three Mirabal sisters brutally assassinated by the
Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960. Decades later, the
date of the murders, Nov. 25, was declared the International Day for the
Elimination of Violence against Women by the United Nations.
In Mexico, more than 200 women's and human rights
activists kicked off a cross-country caravan in Ciudad Juarez to protest femicide
and ongoing violence in all its forms against women.
Initiating their action at the monument to murdered
women situated at the foot of the Santa Fe Bridge on the Mexico-U.S.
border, the women's activists embarked on a week-long journey to the state
of Chiapas on Mexico's southern border. Along the route, caravan
participants plan to meet with the widows of the Pasta de Concho miners
killed in 2006, as well as survivors of violent government crackdowns in
San Salvador Atenco and Oaxaca the same year. A meeting was also scheduled
with Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza.
For many, beginning the caravan in Ciudad Juarez, the
site of more than 600 women's murders since 1993, held both symbolic and
urgent meaning. Dr. Julia Monarrez Fragoso, a researcher with Colegio de la
Frontera Norte in Ciudad Juarez, said the rape-murders of young women in
Ciudad Juarez has become one element of a violent social storm that is now
claiming the lives of large numbers of men. Spawned by organized crime and
weak government, massive violence has rendered civil society "scared,
terrorized, and in need of truth and justice," said the women's rights
advocate.
"The number (of victims) is alarming and we
shouldn't say it's just a war between narcos," Monarrez said,
"because in the final analysis, they are human beings and there should
be a State that rules a city and takes care of the safety of its
inhabitants. That's why there are laws."
On Nov. 25, nearly 20 people, mostly men, were
reported murdered in Ciudad Juarez. The incidents included the apparent
firing-squad style execution of seven men whose bodies were found outside a
high school, and the slaying of a man and his son in front of hundreds of
middle school students. Local press accounts report the murders of more
than 1,400 people in Ciudad Juarez so far this year.
Even as activists prepared to launch the
Chihuahua-Chiapas caravan, the number of female homicide victims kept
mounting in Ciudad Juarez and other parts of the state of Chihuahua. For
instance, in a period of less than 24 hours Nov. 20-21, five women were
killed in Ciudad Juarez in gangland-style slayings.
Two other victims of violent death were recently
discovered outside Chihuahua City and near the north-central city of
Cuauhtemoc, respectively. In the first incident, an unidentified woman was
found dead on a highway where the bodies of previous femicide victims have
been recovered, and in the second case, 14-year-old Gabriela Ivonne
Valdiviezo Majalca was found naked with her throat slashed on Nov. 23.
Valdiviezo had last been seen alive at a dance party attended by her
parents and others.
In Ciudad Juarez, approximately 700 women have been
murdered since 1993, the first year large-scale killings of women came to
public light. Dozens of other women and young girls remain disappeared. Two
adolescents, 14-year-old Iveth Rocio Hernandez Cuellar and 17-year-old
Hortensia Areli Rojas Romo, are the latest publicly-known cases. Both
teenagers were reported missing from the same Ciudad Juarez neighborhood on
Nov.18.
Meanwhile, a new report by a Mexican network of
non-governmental activists dedicated to monitoring official responses to
violence against women, documented the killings of 1,014 women in 13
Mexican states from January 2007 to July 2008. With 206 slain women,
Chihuahua was ranked second in the overall number of women slain, behind
the much more populous state of Mexico. According to the study by the OCNF
network, 8,100 women were murdered in Mexico from the end of 2000 to the
mid-summer of 2008.
On the broader issue of gender and domestic violence,
the official Chihuahua Women's Institute reported attending 3,353 people
who sought professional help to escape violent situations between the
months of January and August of this year. Among the solicitants were 103
men.
In a statement prepared for the Nov. 25
commemoration, Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan credited
the UN Security Council as well as national governments for according increased
recognition to the problem of violence against women since the
international human rights group launched a global campaign around the
issue in 2003-2004. The Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City femicides were an
early part of Amnesty's campaign.
Still, gender violence in Mexico and many other parts
of the globe is "endemic," Khan contended, with issues of war,
economics, and social development all mixed into the package.
Khan wrote that, "Recent research in
Afghanistan, Armenia, Canada, Cote D'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Jamaica, Haiti, Liberia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Sierra Leone, South
Africa, Venezuela, and the USA has shown that this violence is not only a
human rights violation but also a key factor in obstructing the realization
of women's and girl's rights to security, adequate housing, health, food,
education, and participation. Millions of women find themselves locked in
cycles of poverty and violence, cycles which fuel and perpetuate one
another."
In a Nov. 25 communiqué, United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay condemned the systematic violence
against women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but noted
"violence continues being a huge problem suffered by thousands of
women in the whole world." The UN official urged governments to put
into practice international resolutions on gender equality that were
adopted at the 1995 Beijing Conference and by the 1979 Convention for the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
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