Los Angeles Times

Over recent years, in the streets of México’s most important cities, the Mexican feminist movement has been growing and making important gains for women’s rights. Thanks to the movement’s demands, initiatives, and strength, Mexican women in 2008 won approval in México City for the decriminalization of abortion. And they kept on organizing for the right to decide, finally winning, last September, a huge victory when the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation unanimously ruled the criminalizing of abortion unconstitutional.

But we still must march. The struggle getting waged today in the streets is bringing women from different political perspectives together to denounce the violence against us.  Every day brings ten more murders of women in México. Last year saw the most femicides — murders of women because of their gender — in Mexican history, over 1,000 cases, and this total doesn’t count the more than 2,700 murders of women registered as ordinary “intentional homicides.” In addition, between 2006 and 2021, almost 22,000 women simply disappeared, with girls and adolescents the main victims.

Sexist and patriarchal violence has worsened in a México plagued by organized crime. The Narco-State governs large stretches of the country and treats women’s bodies as disposable property for sexual slavery.

This tragic picture has led thousands of women to see feminism as a means of self-defense, both because the movement generates relationships of care and sisterhood between women — “The police don't take care of me, my friends take care of me,” we shout — as well as for the cultural and political transformations against patriarchy the movement is pointing us toward. With the new organizing to recover our streets and public spaces, a new generation of young people is continuing the historic feminist struggle to make visible unequal and unjust social relations, be these relations at home, school, or work or in bed and political spaces. This new generation is bringing renewed dynamism, creativity, and strength to the women’s movement.

Without a doubt, México is experiencing a new stage in the vindication of women’s rights. The thousands of women in 32 Mexican states who marched last week make this new stage irrefutably clear.

Bloomberg