Mexico: Increased femicide rate directly related to organized crime, experts say

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Lethal violence against women in Mexico has steadily increased in recent years, and experts believe that the phenomenon is directly related to Mexican militarization and organized crime, Global Citizen reports. According to data released by Mexico’s National Public Security System, 43,000 women were killed in the country between 2006 and 2021.

In an interview with InSight Crime, policy maker Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, a Mexico Institute Global Fellow at the Wilson Center and Assistant Professor of Latin American History at George Washington University, said women are more susceptible to violence as a result of Mexico’s criminal organizations and the military’s “war on drugs” strategies.

“Women have become more vulnerable as a result of confrontations between criminal organizations, and confrontations between state actors and non-state armed actors,” Kloppe-Santamaría said. “There has been a very important shift in terms of more overt involvement of state security forces, like police or military, in fighting organized crime that is putting women at risk. In the process of militarizing security, which is increasing the circulation of weapons, the lethality of violence against women has increased.”

“The biggest change is that homicides against women didn’t necessarily follow the same tendency as homicides against men,” Kloppe-Santamaría continued. “But with the war on drugs, especially starting in 2007-2008, recent studies suggest the graph of homicides against men and homicides against women has the same shape. That’s an indicator that the drivers behind the killings against women and the killings against men are becoming similar.”

Concerning action to be taken, Kloppe-Santamaría said: “Femicides and disappearances are strongly concentrated in certain municipalities. There is an opportunity there for targeted interventions, where investigative policing and prevention programs are strategically designed in order to work with high-risk communities.”

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