JUÁREZ, Mexico — Female homicide is nothing new to the City of Juárez in Mexico. Sadly, over the past couple of decades the State of Chihuahua in Mexico has been dealing with the issue of female homicide with little to no results.
In the early 1990’s, the City of Juárez began to see a striking increase in female homicide. It was believed at the time that these women were killed by one serial killer that police in the State of Chihuahua deemed the Despredador Principato, or in English, the Juárez Ripper. Ever since 2010, a second wave of female homicides has been taking place, and this time the devastation is far greater.
The toll of female homicides reached a record high for the first time in 2010, where 304 women were discovered dead, and hundreds of other women were suspected missing but presumed dead. Though the death tolls for 2013 are still not all accounted for, 2012 looks like the worst year for female homicides in the City of Juárez yet. It is being called by the State of Chihuahua the “femicide era.”
The people in the State of Chihuahua refuse to react to these murders because of “machismo culture.” Mexico is a patriarchal society in which women are bound to the cult of domesticity and must succumb to the wishes of their husbands. According to Gustavo de La Rosa, a human rights investigator for the Chihuahua State, the citizens of the State of Chihuahua “think it’s natural” for women to be murdered at this rate.
A lot of these murders are a result of many of these women’s involvement with drugs and gangs. Furthermore, it could be argued that machismo culture allows jealous men to murder their partners or wives, thus “jealousy” is also a major factor in these murders. Families of those murdered are devastated that their government will not support them in finding justice.
The mother of Idalí Juache, one of the first women to be found in the slew of female homicides, still does not trust officials that her daughter is indeed dead, even given the fact that “the police linked her DNA to cranial fragments in the valley’s grave outside the city.” Like Idalí Juache’s mother, many other victims’ families who believe that the government is not helping them do not trust the government either, so there are multiple layers of distrust.
The female homicides that are occurring in the City of Juárez prove to be a global mental health crisis. The abuse and the lack of agency that females face in the City of Juárez and in other parts of the world are both oppressive and embarrassing to those governments who allow this abuse to occur.
Sources: The New York Times 1, The New York Times 2, Examiner
Photo :The Wondrous Pics