A couple years ago, my friend Michele asked about my recent trip to Ethiopia. I told her that, while Ethiopia was a lovely country with a fascinating history, I couldn’t calm down enough to enjoy it. I was robbed twice in my first week there, and spent the rest of my time looking over my shoulder. Opportunists constantly harassed me on the street. I never felt like I could let my guard down in public.
“All right,” Michele said dryly. “So you’ve gotten a little taste, then.”
“A little taste of what?”
“Of what it’s like to be a woman.”
Over 80,000 women took to the streets of Mexico City this March 8, International Women’s Day. On this day every year, millions of women all over the world march for workplace equity, a voice in the public square, greater reproductive rights. Here in Mexico, there was a much more urgent and immediate focus—women were marching for their lives.
Women in Mexico have experienced an epidemic of kidnappings, disappearances, and femicides: gender-based murders. Just last year, 2,825 women were murdered in Mexico. Of these victims, 1,006 were classified as femicides by law enforcement. The vast majority of these cases do not result in a conviction, and women have become increasingly vocal in expressing their outrage.
I attended the march in support, hanging at the back of the crowd and observing quietly. A sea of women filled the central Reforma Avenue, of all ages and social classes. They wore purple, a symbol of women’s power, a color that matched the freshly blooming jacaranda trees throughout the city. Outrage at the insecurity women face was ever-present, in the chants and on the signs carried by protesters:
It’s more likely that I’ll be killed by a man than by the coronavirus
I’d rather see my sisters get violent than get raped
We are the voice of those women who are no longer with us
One short phrase appeared everywhere: Nos están matando. They are killing us.
For the first time since the 1930s, Mexico has a center-left president: Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Morena Party. Some progressives fear that conservative groups seek to manipulate women’s protests in an anti-government direction.
“There are some key right-wing organizations involved this year that never participated in March 8 before,” according to María Teresa Lechuga, professor at the National Autonomous University and long-time activist. “Not only are they participating, but they are opportunistically jumping on board to push their agenda.”
I could see the presence of these groups at the protest. There was an affluent look to certain parts of the crowd: more designer clothes, brand name sunglasses and shoes.
“On the other hand,” Lechuga said, “you also have the participation of ultra-radical left wing groups. Some of them have openly said that men are not welcome at the march, and if male journalists are seen taking photographs, they’ll take their cameras away. These two political extremes have united over one shared interest: their hatred for López Obrador.”
President López Obrador echoed this sentiment in some of his statements two days before the march. “There are antagonistic groups out there on the street, and there could be confrontations ... but we aren’t going to use force against anyone.”
True to his word, the government patrolled the protest very cautiously. Las Ateneas, an all-women police unit, were in charge of providing security. The 2,760 officers had strict orders to not respond to any shouts or insults directed at them. “We were told to just stay quiet,” one officer told Milenio, “no matter what they do.” The police took action only when a cadre of masked radicals set a fire in the Zócalo central plaza. A far more common image on social media, however, was that of women from the march embracing the female officers.
It is true that right-wing groups have attempted to use this protest to their advantage, including conservative news outlets. On the day following the march, La Prensa focused its front page article on attacking the current administration. With progressive feminist language, the authors accused the government of not caring about women. The same issue of the paper contained its regular feature on page 35: a topless pinup girl.
A more sophisticated attack came from a leader of the right-wing PAN party, Juan Carlos Romero Hicks. “In fact, the Executive administration is conservative. We are the ones who are progressive on social matters…” (PAN responde: el Ejecutivo es dogmático; va a Presidencia fallida, La Jornada, March 12, 2020).
If there’s anything positive here, it’s the fact that the opposition feels the need to use feminist language to attack the president. They seem to have given up their tired old Cold War-era jargon, claiming that López Obrador would be a leftist firebrand and a Communist, the next Fidel Castro. Nowadays, they claim that he isn’t progressive enough.
Of course, the specter of foreign intervention always looms in the distance, as it has over any progressive government in Latin America over the past hundred years. Tellingly, in the wake of the March 8 protests, several foreign governments—the US, Canada, and six European countries—held a meeting behind closed doors in Mexico City, regarding their concerns about López Obrador’s energy policies. As world oil prices plummet and the global economy takes a hit from the Covid 19 crisis, the powerful are plotting.
It would be foolish, however, to try to reduce this mass movement to a few political interests. The concerns are so much broader—thousands of women in Mexico, millions of women, are sick and tired of fearing for their safety.
Frida Guerrera, activist and founder of Voces de la Ausencia (Voices of Those Who Are Missing), said this in no uncertain terms on the day of the march. “The idea of femicide is not just a fad, something we are using to attack the President. We have been crying out for justice for a long time now, demanding that these families be heard.”
A recent opinion piece in La Jornada echoes this sentiment. Federal Judge and academic Lilia Mónica López Benítez writes: “The absence of our sisters reminds us that the enemy is in our homes, on the street, or on public and private transportation. [...] It doesn’t matter what time of day it is or what clothes you are wearing—they kill you, rape you, beat you, for no reason other than that you were born a woman.” (Nos crecieron alas, La Jornada, March 17, 2020.)
This is an issue bigger than anyone’s partisan politics. The women of Mexico were marching for their very lives.
Following a day of ebullient demonstrations, March 9 was “A Day without Women”: a national women’s strike. Mexico City felt like a ghost town. Long before any of the Coronavirus quarantines took effect here, before schools went out of session and government offices officially closed, the city was eerily empty.
A funereal silence filled the streets. A trickle of people walked through major shopping centers, main avenues, and public markets. According to some estimates, the women who participated in the strike represented 40% of the economically active workforce.
It was a solemn reminder of those women whose lives were cruelly cut short, of all that a society loses when it marginalizes its own people. In these times of quarantines and travel bans, of empty streets and social distancing, let us reflect on that. Viruses are not the only thing that threaten our fellow humans. The violence that we inflict upon one another can be a far worse epidemic.
David J. Schmidt is an author, podcaster, multilingual translator, and homebrewer who splits his time between Mexico City and San Diego, California. He is a proponent of fair and alternative forms of trade. Schmidt has published a variety of books, essays, short stories, and articles in English and Spanish, and is the co-host of the podcast To Russia with Love. He speaks 12 languages and has been to 33 countries. He received his B.A. in psychology from Point Loma Nazarene University.See www.holyghoststories.com
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2020
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