•  mexico city
• Thursday, April 14, 2011
• Inter Press Service

For the first time, Mexico has a female attorney general - the highest post ever reached by a woman in this country. But elation at this achievement is overshadowed by grief over the brutal murders of women police chiefs and activists, and the persecution endured by the family of another woman who was killed in 2010.

Forty-one-year-old lawyer Maricela Morales was confirmed on Apr. 7 by the Senate as attorney general, one of the most strategic posts in the government of conservative President Felipe Calderón.

Among the pending cases that have landed in her lap are two that have created shock waves in the last four months, in a society already accustomed to death: the killings of two women's rights defenders and the implacable persecution of the family of social activist Josefina Reyes.

'Women are not spoils of war. Stop the femicides (gender-based murders of women)!' read one of the placards carried at a march against violence Apr. 6 in Mexico City and a score of other cities in this Latin American country.

'The country is facing a crisis, the worst in 30 years or more, and the issue of public safety is sweeping everything else aside,' one of the country's best-known women's organisers, Emilienne de León, the head of the Simone de Beauvoir Leadership Institute, told IPS. She said the situation 'keeps invisible the areas where women are making headway, as well as those where they are definitely experiencing setbacks.'

The northern state of Chihuahua, whose main border city Ciudad Juárez has been notorious since 1994 for its hundreds of unsolved killings of young women, mainly factory workers, has again captured the world's attention for the violence unleashed by President Calderón's strategy against drug trafficking cartels, which has transformed the north of the country into a war zone.

The generalised slaughter had hidden gender-based violence, but last year this shot up again in the state with more virulence and hatred. The organisation Justicia para Nuestras Hijas (Justice for Our Daughters) has documented the disappearance of 36 women and 71 girls and teenagers, in Chihuahua in 2010.

'The number of murders has also increased,' Norma Ledezma, the head of the organisation, told IPS. 'The problem appears to be endless.' One case that shocked the country, and especially gender rights activists, was the Dec. 17, 2010 killing of Marisela Escobedo, in front of the Chihuahua state government palace. For two years, Escobedo had been protesting the release of her daughter Rubí's partner, who had confessed to her murder.

Then on Jan. 11, Susana Chávez, a 36-year-old poet and women's rights activist, was raped and murdered in Ciudad Juárez. In February the Reyes Salazar family lost three more members to attacks that began in January 2010, with the murder of Josefina Reyes, a human rights activist who had been demanding justice for the death of her son since 2008. The vendetta against her family has included the murders of two brothers and a sister-in-law, and the burning down of her mother's house, in the face of complete inaction on the part of the authorities.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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