International Women’s Day Protesters in Mexico Take Over Central Plaza to Honor Victims of Femicide

MEXICO CITY — Wiping her eyes as the sting from the tear gas receded, Aldonza* told Women Under Siege that she had joined the 8M International Women’s Day protest on March 8, 2021, because “every young woman I know has experienced sexual assault,” she said. “I fight so my little sister doesn’t have to have the same story.”

Moments before, the central plaza in Mexico City, where the protest was staged, was blanketed with gas that human rights defenders suspect came from city government police, which the police denies. The gas stung the eyes and faces of protesters like Aldonza; in others, the gas invoked nausea. There were also reports of people hit with rocks and paintball bullets, and others burned by flares.

Aldonza, 16, had attended the protest with her best friend, Sandra*, along with Sandra’s mother, Lupita*, and grandmother, Araceli*. Lupita arrived with a sign that read, “I am the mother who taught them to fight, not to be silent.”

“I grew up in a family of 14 men,” said Araceli as she splashed water into her eyes. “I was always at the bottom, because I was a girl. Women have to raise their voices, or they will get nowhere.”

Reasons to protest

Protests were held throughout Mexico with women, trans and non-binary people, male allies, and media gathering on city streets and in village squares to mark the day of global action and celebration.

Ostensibly due to fear of vandalism by protesters this year, the Mexico City government erected barricades around the National Palace of Government, which lines one side of the central plaza. A spokesperson for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly known by his initials as “AMLO”) said it was a "wall of peace" intended to protect the historic building.

To be sure, in Mexico, as in the US and elsewhere, women’s rights and feminism is a hot-button issue in the national conversation. In mainstream and social media, feminism and feminist public activism is often painted as a violent threat to society, and with the “wall of peace,” the AMLO administration appeared to politically align with that view.

Under the COVID-19 pandemic, not only have many women been forced to leave the workforce due to job cuts and an increase in unpaid duties at home, but violence against women has also increased — particularly at home.

And, as Aldonza noted, sexual violence is widespread. According to government figures from 2019, nine out of 10 victims of sexual violence are women, and a staggering 40 percent are under the age of 15. 70 percent of the cases happened in the house of the victim.

The most urgent is the issue of femicide — feminicidio is a legal category in Mexico that applies to the murder of a woman for reasons related to gender and a phenomenon of epidemic proportions in the country. At least 11 women are killed every day, most often by a partner or other family member.

Aldonza and Sandra have already lost a classmate to a suspected femicide and say they regularly fear for their lives. “A man could just come and take my life,” said Sandra.

Together with the scale of their occurrence, crimes against women are no exception to the national crisis of impunity, which occurs at a rate of around 90 percent overall; in fact, it is generally higher in cases of crimes against women.

With routine discrimination, sexualized violence, and serious threats to their lives — including and especially in their homes — Mexican women have much reason to protest. With around 100,000 participants, last year’s national International Women’s Day mobilization in Mexico City was one of the largest in the capital’s recent history and was followed by the country’s first women-only labor strike, in which tens of thousands forewent work to illustrate the crisis of women’s ongoing disappearance from society and to demand cultural and political action.

With the endemic occurrence of violence against women in Mexican homes, not to mention the endless horrific murders of women with almost complete impunity, feminists and their supporters believe that any symbolic damage that might have been done to buildings like the National Palace is still a poor comparison to the incomparably greater threat of violence posed against at least half the country’s population.

From ‘peace wall’ to femicide memorial

The wall built to shield the National Palace from projected gendered damage was quickly transformed by feminist activists into a memorial for victims of femicide. Overnight on Saturday, March 6, the barricade was painted over with the names of women who were killed in Mexico because they were women. The following afternoon, hundreds gathered to add more names and adorn the metal fencing with flowers. Many read the juxtaposition as an unmistakable metaphor: the actions of the state to protect its real estate from destruction was literally painted over by the deadly violence inflicted on untold numbers of women, whose names crowded the wall several hundred meters long.

When protesters gathered in the square on Monday, March 8, police deployed violent tactics for crowd control, including rubber bullets, rocks, and tear gas. In a TikTok video that went viral that evening, 22-year-old Lila Cizas is shown diving for a tear gas canister and throwing it back to police behind the barricade. The image of “La Reinota” (“The Mega-Queen”) — as she’s been dubbed on social media networks — has quickly become a symbol of the current feminist movement in Mexico, which emphasizes young women looking after each other over the police, themselves heavily implicated in the crisis of violence against women.

A high-charged moment

Feminist activists in Mexico have grown increasingly vocal in their outrage and demands for change in recent years, with huge demonstrations and large-scale creative acts of rebellion.

Powerful right-wing political interests in the country are increasingly seeking to co-opt the movement, which AMLO regularly cites as a reason to dismiss it entirely. In late February, he warned that “the right wing is involved” in feminist activism and were seeking to manipulate protesters. After defending the presence of the “peace wall” to fend off potential vandalism, the president also made a point of standing by Félix Salgado Macedonio, his party’s candidate for governor of the state of Guerrero, who has been accused of rape by at least two women.

There are more legitimate critiques of the movement: as activist Laurel Miranda has recently highlighted, there is a large presence of trans-exclusionary feminist discourse, which has created danger for trans women in the movement who find themselves banned from activities and openly insulted at events like this year’s 8M. In February and March, groups like the Brujas del Mar (Sea Witches), who are credited with organizing last year’s women’s strike and are regularly quoted in international media, successfully lobbied mainstream media outlet Milenio to have two articles written by Miranda removed from their website. They insist on a biologically essentialist definition of women and regularly spread trans-exclusionary messages on social media.

At the same time, these actions have compelled many within the movement to make their solidarity with trans women explicit, displaying a three-stripe flag designed for 8M on their protest signs and in social media posts. The flag uses purple, green and pink to represent the women’s movement, the movement for reproductive rights, and the movement for transgender rights.

For Aldonza and Sandra, it is solely a matter of keeping themselves and their peers alive, a cause for which tear gas and metal barricades are far from the worst things that can happen.

“I’ve been followed home by men in cars. I’ve been sexually assaulted. It’s horrible,” said Sandra. “So I join the fight, to change this system.”

*Names have been changed to protect their identities