
Title: “We are tired of being told it is not a big deal”: Institutional Machismo in Mexico
While violence impacts the lives of both men and women in Mexico, women are the ones who suffer from Mexicoโs dominant male chauvinist ideology, legitimized and exacerbated by President Lรณpez Obradorโs administrationโs lack of interest in and limited resources for addressing gender-based violence. Institutionalized and normalized male chauvinism is what I refer to as โinstitutional machismo.โ Within politics, the issue of feminicide is drowned out by the โwar on drugs,โ while the judicial system and the police deliberately criminalize feminist activists for mobilizing protestors against the government. Adequate and consistent financial support for preventive and protective programs for victims of gender-based violence, and the active participation of women in politics as co-producers of solutions, are critical to improving the position of women in Mexico.
On March 8th, 2022, 3,000 policewomen surrounded tens of thousands of feminist activists at the International Womenโs Day march in Mexico City, which government officials, including President Andrรฉs Manuel Lรณpez Obrador and Secretary of the Government of Mexico City Martรญ Batres, warned would be โviolent.โ Instead of โgenerat[ing] violenceโ as the politicians anticipated, members of civil society organizations carried scarves, flags, and musical instruments as they sought to bring visibility to the phenomenon of gender-based violence and the urgent need for justice for its victims. Arussi Unda, one of the most influential feminist activists in Mexico, argued that women protested not just femicide, but also everyday violence against women and girls and the lack of governmental support.ย At another International Womenโs Day march in Guadalajara, Jalisco, activists stated that ย โwe are tired of being told it is not a big deal.โ
While multi-modal violence threatens all of Mexican society, women are particularly affected by gender-based violence. In 2021, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) reported that 70.3 percent of women feel at risk in their daily lives, and that 10.8 percent of the reported crimes against women are sexual. Under COVID-19 confinement measures, more women reported that they faced violence in the family environment compared to pre-lockdown statistics. Women continue to outnumber men in experiencing different types of domestic violence, including insults or humiliation, and threatened or actual expulsion from their home. Regarding criminal violence, 23.2 percent of female homicides occur in the home.
Feminicide and Mexican Impunity
In 2020, the State of Mexico Attorney Generalโs Office reported 3,723 killings of women (at least 10 women killed every day), of which the police investigated only 940 cases as related to gender. These are known as โfeminicides:โ the killing of women both because they are females and because the state fails to investigate and punish perpetrators. Feminicide, rather than femicide, refers to the full set of facts that characterize the crimes against women to which the response of relevant authorities is one of silence and a failure to act to prevent and eradicate these crimes. Feminicide speaks to a fracture in the rule of law that favors impunityโthe abandonment of cases due to a lack of resources, clear protocols, or personnel that results in the failure of prosecutors to investigate cases or identify perpetrators. According to a University of Puebla report, Mexico ranks fourth for the highest levels of impunity worldwide and is first in the Americas.
Each federal entity in Mexico has its own standard for what it considers feminicide. For example, Article 325 of the Federal Criminal Code of Mexico identifies gender-based violence as including the victim showing signs of sexual violence and the body of the victim being publicly exposed or exhibited. Many cases, however, are not counted as gender-based violence, but are instead associated with the endemic violence related to the ongoing armed conflict between state forces and organized criminals throughout the country, also known as the โwar on drugs.โ The government frequently presents the killing of women as a consequence of this conflict, which legitimizes the power of the male-led police, military, and judicial system over women.
This male chauvinist ideology, which is a form of institutional machismo, devalues women in society, intentionally ignores critical womenโs issues (like gender-based violence), silences discussions on the authoritiesโ inefficient management of cases of violence against women, and justifies violent police protocols against feminist marches. It additionally exacerbates existing machista ideology that promotes negative stereotypes about women as sexual objects and cheap labor from which men should benefit.
Lรณpez Obrador’s Government and Institutionalย Machismo
President Lรณpez Obrador took office in 2018 with the promise of eliminating entrenched corruption and leading a โFourth Transformation for Mexicoโ through constitutional reforms to challenge the advance of neoliberalism, structural poverty, and increasing violence. Specifically, Lรณpez Obradorโs government has invested in fighting drug trafficking organizations throughout the country through the โwar on drugs,โ initiated by President Felipe Calderรณn in 2006. While the government has had little success in limiting drug production, use, and trafficking throughout Mexico, violence continues in a major institutional and human rights crisis.
Institutional machismo manifests in recent cuts to the already deficient legal support provided to at-risk women and victims of violence. For instance, during COVID-19, the government cancelled the federal budget allocated to the emergency government action plan, Gender Violence Alert Against Women, in target states with the highest rates of violence against women: Mexico State, Veracruz, Nuevo Leรณn, Mexico City, Puebla, and Jalisco. The Gender Violence Alert previously enabled intervention from state authorities, like the police and the judicial system, in assaults and murders of women. This budget cut contradicts the principles of the Spotlight Initiative: an investment plan of $7 million from the United Nations and European Union for the creation of programs against feminicide and gender violence in Mexico, to which the Gender Violence Alert belonged.
This sudden change has been detrimental for organizations that depend on state funding to run national programs countering violence against women. In April 2021, Mexicoโs Housing for Indigenous and Afro-Descendant Women and National Network of Shelters for Women Victims of Violence denounced the suspension of state financial support. These organizations argued that, with these cuts, Lรณpez Obradorโs administration is attempting to silence the phenomenon of gender-based violence and dissuade women from denouncing male violence. This suspension is particularly dangerous considering the Mexican National Survey on the Dynamics of Relationships in Households reports that the majority of female victims of physical or sexual violence in Mexico do not take their cases to court โout of fear,โ โbecause they think it is not important,โ โbecause of their children,โ โbecause of shame,โ โbecause they did not know they could report,โ or โbecause they do not trust the authorities.โ
Institutional machismo also manifests in Lรณpez Obradorโs official statements on violence against women and the feminist movement. In May 2020, Lรณpez Obrador questioned his own cabinetโs announcement that Mexicoโs emergency call centers had processed more than 26,000 reports of violence against women in March 2020, the highest since the line was created, and suggested, with no evidence, that most of the calls from women to emergency call centers were fake. When activists rallied in September 2021, supporting the Supreme Court of Justiceโs ruling that it is unconstitutional to criminalize abortion and demanding substantial changes in the governmentโs approach towards sexual violence in the Global Day of Action for legal and safe abortion, Lรณpez Obrador referred to the feminist movement as a โconservativeโ movement that was created โtwo years agoโ to weaken his political project. Lรณpez Obradorโs comments show both the governmentโs contempt for women and a lack of knowledge of the issues that impact women the most.
Feminist Voices for Change
Feminists ย have become a leading โvoice of the oppositionโ against Lรณpez Obrador, claiming that the rule of law protecting women exists only on paper. They specifically protest the Presidentโs support for Salgado Macedonio, Morena Party candidate for governor of the state of Guerrero, who faces five accusations of sexual abuse. Several organizations, like Frente por la Libertad de Expresiรณn y Protesta Social and the Comisiรณn Mexicana de Defensa y Promociรณn de Derechos Humanos, have also denounced the Mexican government before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) for institutional machismo. These groups criticized Lรณpez Obradorโs support of a โpatriarchal and repressive regulatory frameworkโ that criminalizes and abuses women activists, who are subject to illegal detentions and physical and sexual abuse by the police. Activists decry government and police stigmatization of feminists as violent, the restriction of womenโs right of assembly, and the justification of threats and assaults against women. In short, feminists protest how institutional machismo, which rests in the lack of institutional engagement with womenโs issues, exacerbates the hostility against women and feminist activists on the streets.
Recommendations
In order to engage with women activists and change its culture of institutional machismo, the Mexican government must restore the Gender Violence Alert Against Women and increase funding for specific programs countering gender-based violence, like Housing for Indigenous and Afro-Descendant Women and the National Network of Shelters for Women Victims of Violence.
To effectively address the challenges that women face in Mexicoโs chauvinist and violent society, including the lack of engagement by local and national authorities with the issue of gender-based violence, it is also necessary to ensure womenโs direct participation in prevention and protection programs. At the local and community levels, dialogue between victims, victimsโ families, and other women is crucial to fostering solidarity and allowing victims to articulate their experiences so that they feel their testimonies are finally being heard and considered. At the national level, the testimonies and voices of women at risk, the victims of gender-based violence, and victimsโ families need to be amplified in the media through programs such as the Programa Prevenciรณn y Atenciรณn a la Violencia, developed by the National Center for Gender Equality and Reproductive Health.
Hearing the testimonies of women at risk as well as those of the family members of murdered and disappeared women through various media platforms is necessary to bring awareness to gender-based violence and to highlight Mexicoโs problem with feminicide and institutional machismo. Presenting these narratives would put pressure on Lรณpez Obradorโs government and relevant authorities to address violence against women in Mexico as a central issue, not merely as collateral to the ongoing โwar on drugs.โ Moving women and the issues that impact them most, like gender-based violence, to the frontline of policy debates is an important step in challenging Mexicoโs culture of impunity and institutional machismo and addressing Mexicoโs human rights crisis of gender-based violence.
…
Marรญa Lรณpez is a Reader in Sociology and Deputy Director of the Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre at London Metropolitan University. She is co-author of Gender Violence in Twenty-First-Century Latin American Womenโs Writing (Boydell and Brewer, 2022) and is currently researching gender-based violence in Mexico.
Image Credit: Thayne Tuason, CC BY-SA 4.0
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