Ingrid. Fatima. Maria.
Women painted the names of victims in Zócalo Square in Mexico City on March 8. Some of the protesters on what was International Women’s Day became violent, smashing windows, vandalizing buildings, and throwing rocks at police. The following day, thousands of women, particularly in Mexico City, refused to go to school, work, or stores. The strike, dubbed Un Día Sin Mujeres or “A Day Without Women,” emptied streets, closed businesses, and left classrooms filled with only boys.
Two ghoulish deaths in February sparked the women’s protests last week. Ingrid Escamilla’s boyfriend allegedly killed, skinned, and disemboweled her. Two days later, a stranger abducted and killed a 7-year-old girl named Fatima. Police have arrested suspects in both of the killings, but activists said the murders of women too often go unprosecuted. Of the thousands of women and girls sexually assaulted and murdered in Mexico in the past year, government authorities classified more than 1,000 as “femicides,” or gender-based killings.
One striker, Lluvia Flores Gómez, said the protesters wanted to show “how valuable we women are, our contribution, and what would happen if one day we were not around. In all aspects: as homemakers, as workers, as consumers.” She stayed home, closing her bakery but paying her employees for the day.
Although the strike began as a fringe idea, it gained the support of actresses, writers, politicians, and even large companies: Walmart and others gave women the day off. Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo allowed 150,000 female government employees to take the day off without pay.
Mexico’s femicide rate rose by 137 percent in the past five years, according to Human Rights Watch. The organization linked the growing violence to “long-existing social problems,” including the media’s romanticization of intimate partner violence and authorities’ tendencies to take domestic abuse less seriously than other violent crimes. In addition to femicide, thousands of women have gone missing in recent years.
“Every day we have more evidence that they are killing us specifically for being women,” María de la Luz Estrada, the executive coordinator of the National Citizen Observatory on Femicide, told The Guardian. “If this government wants a transformation of this county, they have to face the problem.”
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