Only 25% of violent deaths of women are investigated with femicide protocols; In the AMLO era, more than 3 thousand women are murdered every year.

Every year more than 3,000 women are murdered in Mexico, however, only 25 percent are investigated under femicide protocols; Even so, the country ranks as the second with the most victims for gender reasons in Latin America and in the five years of administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) there are already over 5 thousand victims.

According to the Latin American Map of Femicides 2023, a woman was murdered every two hours in the region; The report that focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean (without Mexico) counted 8,344 femicides between January 2021 and December 2023; However, more than half of these crimes (4,599) are only from last year.

Brazil is the country with the highest number of documented and investigated femicides with a total of 1,706; Below are the 832 cases from Mexico, according to official information; They are followed by Guatemala with 601, Colombia with 524, Honduras 402, Ecuador 317, Venezuela 201 and Peru with 176.

41.2 percent of femicides in Latin America and the Caribbean were committed by the partner or ex-partner of the victims, while in 451 of the cases the murdered women had already reported being victims of violence.

For this reason, drug traffickers are involved in the majority of femicides in Mexico (Infobae)

Femicides in the AMLO era

Until January 2024, the AMLO administration had 4,817 open investigation files for the crime of femicide, with the State of Mexico being the most violent entity for women with a total of 668 victims; Nuevo León is second on the list with 386 cases; They are followed by Veracruz (369), Mexico City (362) and Jalisco with 289 women murdered for reasons of gender.

In the annual context, 2021 was the year with the most documented cases in the AMLO era, it is the second year of confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic, femicides rose to 981; The least violent year was 2023 with its already mentioned 832 investigations folders.

Both in the international and national framework, one of the main questions raised by the authorities – in addition to stopping violence against women – has to do with how violent deaths of women are investigated, pointing out that prosecutors are passing off femicides as homicides so that the numbers “go down.”

File photograph in which a group of activists and mothers of victims of femicides were recorded, during an act in memory of the murdered women, at the Campo Algodonero Memorial, in Ciudad Juárez (Chihuahua state, Mexico). EFE/Luis Torres

“According to the government, the numbers have already gone down, according to them; It is not that they have already decreased, what happens is that since 2018 the prosecutor Alejandro Gertz Manero said at that time that the femicides were already going to be investigated as intentional homicides because it was difficult for his public ministries to be able to prove the gender reasons. ”, explained activist Irinea Buendía to Infobae México

Another worrying statistic for the current Mexican government is the one related to the number of child femicides documented by the organization Here We Are; According to data collected in the last five years, 341 girls have been murdered due to gender, 45 of them in 2023.

Among the members of their families is usually the person or persons responsible, while the causes of death range from beatings, stabbings, slit throats and gunshots; Some girls showed signs of rape and torture.

Regarding the states with the most child femicides, State of Mexico (7), Jalisco (6), Puebla (5), Chihuahua (5), Mexico City (4) and Oaxaca (4), concentrate the majority of cases. Most of the victims were between 10 and 17 years old.