‘Calm down my love’: Feminist civil society fights back against kidnapping in Mexico City metro stations

Mexico City—On the evening of January 15, 2019, Zúe Valenzuela, a 30-year-old lawyer and human rights defender in Mexico City, alighted from the train at Coyoacán metro station in the city’s south. She was heading home, just a few blocks away from the station.

After traveling up the escalator to the station’s exit, she noticed a man was very close behind her, so close that he was almost touching her. He asked her if he could ask her some questions—firstly, “Do you have the time?”—and she advised that she couldn’t tell him. She wasn’t wearing a watch, and her cellphone was in her backpack, she said. Ms. Valenzuela was alarmed by this over-familiar stranger but hoped that was the end of it.

Then, the man asked her to give him her cellphone and then her backpack. When she refused, he grabbed her arm and started dragging her toward a car parked outside the station, where two people were waiting. She screamed and struggled against his grip, ending up on the ground yelling for help, when a young man approached and asked her if she knew the man. Valenzuela, in a state of shock and fear, said, “I don’t know him, he’s trying to rob me.” The man then pretended to be her boyfriend, saying, “Calm down my love, you’re having a tantrum.” Fortunately, Valenzuela’s young interlocutor was not convinced and started to ask for help from other passersby, causing the aggressor to finally retreat and leave in the car.

The next day, Valenzuela filed a police report. “They told me that, because he tried to rob my backpack, it would be registered as an attempted robbery, not an attempted kidnapping,” Valenzuela told Women Under Siege. Upon further investigation, they revised the incident as having been an “attempted deprivation of liberty,” a lesser charge than kidnapping.

Angry that her case had not been given the grave attention it deserved, Valenzuela publicized what had happened to her on her Facebook page so that she could at least alert her women friends. She soon found herself overwhelmed with responses. “All these stories from other women started to come out. Women were contacting me saying it had happened to them, too,” said Valenzuela. Within her immediate Facebook network, she said, 23 women related similar stories of attempted kidnappings in metro stations. Her post was shared more than a thousand times, and her story began to gain media coverage, along with those of the other women inspired to tell theirs.

Among the responses, one 23-year-old woman reported that, in October 2018, she hailed a cab at Eduardo Molina metro station in Mexico City's east. Once in the car and on the road, the taxi driver threatened her with a gun. When the car stopped at traffic lights, the woman shouted out the window for help. At one point, she managed to grab the attention of some police officers standing on a corner, but when they came to ask the driver what was happening, they concluded that this was, “a couple’s matter.” She only managed to escape after flagging down help from passersby, and with no thanks to those in uniform, whom she might have expected to protect her.  

Following the flood of stories, the Mexican edition of the Spanish newspaper El País conducted an investigation of Mexico City justice department records and found that 153 people, most of them women, had been kidnapped via the metro system in the past four years.

Collective horror and outrage at the number of cases, as well as authorities’ seeming indifference to them, have inspired concrete strategies, led by civil society, to create more safety for women across the city. Feminist groups mobilized to organize a rally of women cyclists on February 1 and a street march through the center of the city on February 2, both of which were attended in the thousands. A coalition of human rights defenders have also re-upped their call for a gender violence alert, first made in 2017, to be issued across Mexico City and condemned the lack of local government action. Four women from Serendipia, a data journalism collective, have created an interactive map of attempted kidnappings across the metro system, while businesses, restaurants and public service organizations have established themselves as “safe places” for women escaping such confrontations, placing signs on their front doors as markers.

The Mexico City government, which gained its first woman mayor, Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum, in December, had taken some considerable measures in response to the cases highlighted by Valenzuela and the other women in January: the city’s justice department installed mobile help centers in key metro stations and have reviewed all reports of attempted kidnappings, including 10 that matched Valenzuela’s account, and have become known as the “Calm down my love” cases. The amount of lighting and surveillance cameras also increased across the network.  But the measures were short lived. Earlier this month, the city’s attorney-general, Ernestina Godoy, declared that no further cases of “Calm down my love” incidents have been reported, and that her department will therefore withdraw the mobile help centers placed in metro stations in response to the incidents.

The thing is, “authorities say sometimes that women don’t appear in the statistics about crime,” said Valenzuela. “That is [only] because so many do not report.” One might understand why this is, considering that, of all reported cases of sexual harassment on the metro system in 2017, an investigation was opened in only 32 percent of them, and 64 percent of those cases were abandoned, according to a 2017 Senate report. And the latest National Survey on Victimization and Perception of Public Security found that, in 2017, more than 93 percent of crimes in Mexico were either not reported or went uninvestigated. To be sure, the Mexico City metro authority, in response to testimonies like that of the 23-year-old woman, had said that they had received no reports at all of attempted kidnappings.

This is hardly a new fight. In 2000, the Mexico City government implemented some women-only public transport measures to combat widespread sexual harassment, creating train carriages for the exclusive use of women and children under 12 years on the metro system, as well as women-only buses. And yet, 18 years on, a 2018 poll conducted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and supported by Uber found that “about three in every four women in Mexico City were not confident about using the transport system without the risk of sexual harassment and abuse or sexual violence.” The same 2017 Senate report estimated that there are between 300 and 350 incidents of sexual aggression against women on the metro every day. Further, in November 2018, UN Women estimated that nine women are murdered in Mexico every day. The agency also noted that six out of 10 women have experienced violence and 41.3 percent have experienced sexual violence.

Ultimately, Valenzuela said, crime and human rights authorities in Mexico must be better equipped to thoroughly investigate reports of violence against women. “We need more people to do the investigations. We also need authorities to use a gender perspective to understand what makes women safer.” Pink train carriages and extra police are not enough, she added. 

The scale of the problem, and the impunity that has enabled it, suggests that these measures can’t be more than a very tentative beginning. Corruption is widespread in Mexican institutions, and Mexico City transportation systems are no exception. An entrenched culture of male dominance—evidenced, for example, in the strategy of the “Calm down my love” kidnappers, who relied on a sexist trope of the hysterical woman or girlfriend to convince passersby that they were known to the victim and not trying to take them by force—doesn’t help either.

“The first step for authorities is recognizing that this problem is happening,” said Valenzuela. They cannot say the problem does not exist while she and the other women—real women attesting to their painful experiences—have spoken up, she added. She and the thousands who marched in the streets, met with decision-makers, shared stories in the media, and developed grassroots strategies for preventing and mitigating further violence, will at least ensure the issue is hard to ignore. Still, justice remains elusive: no perpetrators of January’s attempted kidnappings have been located or punished.

The new administration, in both the federal and Mexico City governments, has promised greater security for women, but the real test will be in how they continue to respond when women raise their voices against the daily reality of violence against them in public.