Hundreds of women marched through downtown Mexico City and its suburbs on Sunday to protest the horrifying death of an 18-year-old in the northern city of Monterrey.
Protesters also marched in the rough suburb of Nezahualcoyotl, where two women were killed in the past week.
The demonstrators, mostly women, carried signs reading “No to Harrassment” and “Mexico is a mass grave.”
Photo: AP
In Mexico City, the march was largely peaceful, unlike many previous women’s rights demonstrations in the past few years.
The demonstrators did not spray-paint slogans on the Angel, a tall stone monumental shaft commemorating the country’s independence.
Instead, they taped small “missing” posters on it, each one describing the disappearance of a woman. Many of the posters depicted Debanhi Escobar, whose body was found on Thursday in a cistern at a motel in Monterrey, almost two weeks after she had gone missing.
Marchers chanted “Justice, justice,” and carried a banner reading “24,000 are missing,” referring to women who had disappeared.
The number of missing people of all genders in Mexico has risen to more than 100,000.
Activists say police and prosecutors have been slow and ineffective in investigating the cases. Those criticisms were reinforced when Escobar’s father said that authorities had searched the motel several times.
However, it was not until workers reported a foul odor coming from an underground water tank that investigators finally found her body. She had died from a blow to the head, apparently soon after she was last seen on April 8.
Her case shocked Mexico because the young woman was left on the side of a highway late at night, purportedly after a taxi driver tried to fondle her.
The case made headlines because of a haunting photograph taken by the driver, who was supposed to ensure that she arrived home that night.
The driver, who worked for a taxi app, took the photo to show that the 18-year-old got out of his car alive on the outskirts of Monterrey.
The photo showed a young woman standing alone at night on the side of a highway, wearing a skirt and high-top sneakers.
The image seemed to show the tremendous vulnerability and the desperation of the young woman.
Nobody saw her again until late on Thursday, when investigators managed to pull her body from the 4m-deep water tank near a pool at the roadside motel.
Critics are disturbed that even when authorities are spurred to act by public outcry, investigations are seldom timely or efficient.
Investigators said 200 personnel used drones, search dogs and reviews of security camera footage to look for Escobar, although her body was lying not far from where she exited the taxi.
Killings of women in Mexico have increased, rising from 977 in 2020 to 1,015 last year. Those were just cases classified as “feminicides” a legal term used in Mexico when women are killed because of their gender. Killings of women overall are much higher.
Disappearances of women remain high in Mexico, with about 1,600 females reported missing so far this year.
Officials have said that 829 of them are still listed as missing, and 16 were found dead.
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