LETTER FROM ECATEPEC 57ords kept are flawed and
incomplete. Nevertheless,
it is clear that the rate of
femicide has at least dou-
bled in Mexico over the
past four years, and has
risen even more precipi-
tously since 2017. One of
the most severely affected
states continues to be
Chihuahua, where Juárez
is located; the killings
there never really ended,
only leveled off. The car-
tel battleground states of
Nuevo León and Vera-
cruz are even more dan-
gerous, judging by the
official numbers. But no-
where is femicide more
common than in the
State of Mexico. Accord-
ing to the federal govern-
ment, there have been
368 cases in the past
three years, and that is
almost certainly an un-
dercount, as even the of-
ficials in charge of record
keeping admit. There’s
reason to believe that
the true number is closer
to four hundred or five
hundred a year. Ecatepec
today is an order of mag-
nitude deadlier for women than turn-
of-the-century Juárez.
Yet, a few days after visiting El Río
de los Remedios, I met a cabinet- level
official who told me straightforwardly
that the problem of femicide was over-
blown. “It’s statistically insignificant,”
he said. According to his records,
there were 33,753 homicides in Mexico
in 2018, an unprecedented number,
and 92 percent of the victims were
male. For the past thirteen years, Mex-
ico has been caught in an intermina-
ble meatgrinder of a dirty war, insti-
gated by the United States and fed by
American guns and money, that ranks
among the twenty-first century’s dead-
liest conflicts. The Mexican military
has recently disengaged to some de-
gree, but fighting among the cartels is
raging hotter than ever. In northern
Mexico, homicide is now the leading
cause of death for men under the age
of thirty. At a national level, then,
Mexico’s falling life expectancy looks
more like an androcide: the system-
atic killing of men and boys. “The
overall problem that’s happening is
sicarios and drug dealers fighting
among themselves,” the official said.
“That is the issue we have to address.”
His boss, Mexico’s new president,
the social democrat Andrés Manuel
López Obrador, was elected in 2018 on
a promise to demilitarize the narco
war, eradicate corruption in the gov-
ernment, and reform the army and
police, among other herculean tasks.
The administration has created a com-
mission on femicide, appointed experts
to study it, and issued a number of
“gender alerts”—a toothless protocol
similar to the United States’ terror
alert level—but violence against
women is a subject that López Obrador
rarely mentions in his famous ha-
rangues. When questioned about fem-
icide directly, he tends to pivot to the
more general theme of reestablishing
public secu rity.Mexico’s feminist movement is
broadly aligned with López Obrador,
but activists criticize the administra-
tion’s failure to take the problem of
femicide seriously. “López Obrador
doesn’t see femicide, only generalized
violence,” said María de la Luz Estrada,
director of the National Citizen Obser-
vatory on Femicide. “But one kind is
committed by men fighting for terri-
tory. Sexual violence is different.” Ac-
cording to her, the real reasons au-
thorities are reluctant to acknowledge
the epidemic are their unwillingness to
investigate organized crime and the
complicity of the military and police
in sex trafficking. The authorities in
places such as Ecatepec are wary of the
stigma that became attached to Ciu-
dad Juárez, so they deny or downplay
any comparison, though the similari-
ties are plain. “Of the ten murders of
women a day, five have characteristics
of femicide,” María said, citing the bod-
ies left in public places, deliberatelyThe clothes of a child murdered in Ciudad Juárez, 2005 © Maya Goded