Image: Angelica Alzona/GO Media
Paloma Escobar Ledezma went missing on a Saturday. She left her home in Mexico’s northern state of Chihuahua at 3:15 p.m. on March 2, 2002, to go to a weekend class downtown—a computer class she took between her long weekly shifts at a maquiladora. Her mother, Norma, expected her 16-year-old daughter home no later than 9 p.m., but Paloma never returned. “She didn’t come home,” Norma later said in a testimony. “She never came home.” Twenty-seven days after Paloma’s disappearance, her body was found near the Chihuahua-Ciudad Aldama highway with signs of sexual violence.
Though the governor of Chihuahua promised Norma that authorities would search for her daughter, they failed to uncover any clues. Instead, Norma says, the police called her days later and told her that Paloma was seen in the southern part of the city and that she was fine. “Lies, it was all lies,” Norma said in her testimony. Paloma’s murder is part of an epidemic of violence against women in Mexico, so common that’s it’s referred to as femicide, gender-based murder of women. According to the United Nations, roughly seven women are murdered every day in Mexico, and the rate of femicides in the country has risen significantly since 1985.
Even though Norma Ledezma lost her daughter, she refused to let her death become another statistic. Instead, she is a leader of the fight against femicides in both her home state of Chihuahua and across the country. With other activists, she founded the organization Justice for Our Daughters and worked on cases of women and girls who have either disappeared or been killed in Chihuahua. She did all of this despite multiple threats of violence. She even took Paloma’s case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which concluded that the Mexican state was responsible for violations of the rights to a fair trial and judicial protection, the rights of the child, and the right to equal protection of the law. The Mexican government offered a public apology to Ledezma and her family, and in 2012, the state of Chihuahua created the Special Prosecutor’s Unit for Female Victims of Gender-related Crimes, which currently serves only six out of the 67 municipalities, in compliance with the recommendations issued by the Commission.
“We did not start with the want to defend something. It is because [violence] affected us, because they took away our daughters, because we are victims,” Ledezma says.
But in August, the ground shifted for girls like Paloma and family members like Norma still seeking justice for their daughters. Mexican women took to the streets to demand justice on August 16, demanding an end to systemic gender violence. The countrywide protests were part of the “Glitter Revolution,” ignited after an activist doused Mexico City’s security minister, Jesús Orta Martínez, with pink glitter during an August 12 demonstration demanding justice for a 17-year-old girl allegedly raped by four police officers. Mexico City’s mayor Claudia Sheinbaum described the glitter bombing as “an act of provocation.”
“I see my daughter in each of them. I think she would also get up and scream for other women,” says Ledezma shedding happy tears. “These… young women with awareness, with knowledge, with commitment and even with the risks. We as families, or people who have lived through this situation, endorse these women.”
Mexican women marched, shouted, graffitied, chanted, danced, and courageously, pusieron sus cuerpos in a place where 10 women are killed daily, confronting decades of hearing, witnessing and facing violence, including its most extreme expression: femicide. Feminist collectives in more than half of the Mexican states called for protests, including Tamaulipas, the northeastern state just across from Texas—where women are constantly under threat from both domestic violence and organized crime—and which held its first feminist protest just days later. Though glitter quickly became a whimsical and visually striking symbol of Mexico’s feminist movements, its shine belied a decades-long collective scream, frustration with the disposability of women as well as the isolated struggle of thousands of families for whom justice is only the solidarity of the pueblo.
Carrying signs of “Ni una menos” and chanting the Latin American battle cry “Se va a caer, se va a caer, el patriarcado se va a caer” (It’s going down, it’s going down, the patriarchy is going down), protestors across the nation raised their fists against two cases of police abuse. They also raised their voices for Mara, a university student sexually assaulted and killed by the driver of a ride-hailing service; for Valeria, an 11-year-old girl who was kidnapped, raped and murdered on a minibus in the city of Neza in Southcentral Mexico; for all the girls and women who have become hashtags like #JUSTICIAPARA and #TODASSOMOS, and the other thousands who have disappeared, the crimes against them gone virtually unnoticed.
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