Women, trans, and nonbinary people in Mexico and farther south have chosen March 8, International Women’s Day, as a day to make their daily struggles and organizing legible, to take the streets and be visible.
Ongoing organizing led by women—focused on the reproduction of life, locating the disappeared, pushing state and private institutions to respect existing commitments to human rights, ending state and macho violence, and defending their territory and communities against capitalist encroachment—tends to be made invisible or portrayed as behind-the-scenes work that plays a supporting role in struggles led by men.
Taking the streets on March 8 directly challenges that: we move onto terrain that the patriarchy can ignore but that it cannot completely unsee. But more importantly, March 8 is a day when we see each other.
Mexico City’s 2022 march was the country’s largest International Women’s Day event—city officials estimated a turnout of over 75,000.1 Significant marches took place in urban areas throughout the country, especially in cities along the northern border, including Tijuana, Mexicali, Ciudad Juárez, Piedras Negras, Nuevo Laredo, and Reynosa, to Monterrey in Nuevo León, where demonstrators pushed in and later burned the door of the state congress.
In Puebla, the protest filled city block after city block. In Tlaxcala, riot police intervened, arresting three. In Guanajuato, currently among the most violent states in Mexico, March 8 marches took place in the state’s five largest cities. In Mérida, Yucatán, women defaced statues associated with colonialism and genocide. In Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, women lit torches as night fell.
Common across all the marches were purple flags and bandannas, and messaging against state, macho, and capitalist violence. Every once in a while, a green scarf would appear, recalling the ongoing struggle for safe, legal, and free abortion.2
The rapid rise of the feminist movement in Mexico has led to attempts to divide and demobilize feminists, and channel the movement toward political ends supporting the status quo.
This year, officials and supporters of the government in Mexico City promoted pro-police feminism, which they underscored by deploying and applauding a police force made up mostly of women to contain the march. Though a minority of women participated in pro-police actions on March 8, a discourse separating good feminists from bad feminists has taken root, promoted at least in part by the federal government and the government of Mexico City.
There have also been concerted efforts to dissuade trans-inclusive feminists from taking the streets by encouraging violent anti-transgender collectives operating with protection by police. The links between government officials and anti-trans women’s organizations are most visible in Mexico State, but there is reason to believe similar patterns exist elsewhere.
Violence against transgender people threatens the integrity and safety of transwomen in particular, as well as their participation in public life. The murder of trans activist Ximena Garcia and the stabbing of Natalia Lane in Mexico City in January are but two examples of reactionary violence against transwomen.3 Last year, at least eighty-one people were killed in Mexico because of their gender or sexual identity, half of whom were transwomen.4
As of May 19, 2022, fifty Mexican organizations have
This essay will explore the theoretical underpinnings of the feminist uprising in Latin America before moving on to a report-back from March 8 in Mexico City. It will then proceed to examine how pro-police feminism, as well as TERF activism, have been encouraged by governments, and end with a reflection on how women are pushing back.
“Feminism Is Revolution”
The movement led by women across Latin America on March 8 reveals not only a collective refusal of multiple violences but also a desire for social transformation.
The revolutionary character of women, trans , and nonbinary folks’ coming together to reject patriarchy may not be immediately apparent, due in part to the assumption that the end point of this struggle is demanding the state or the courts enshrine reforms, equality, or rights.
“Feminism isn’t a project of women’s rights, it’s a project of social transformation,” writes Bolivian feminist and activist María Galindo.6 Galindo’s writing and her political praxis make clear that freedom for women and dissidents won’t be delivered by political parties. It will be won through struggle, and that struggle is ongoing.
Year in, year out, feminist activists work within and outside of state, educational, and corporate institutions to push them to guarantee existing commitments to human rights. These include the rights of non-status migrants; rights of victims of violence and their kin; rights of workers; and collective rights to territory, housing, clean air and water, free accessible health care (including reproductive health), and free, secular public education.
These activities require the deployment of strategies of self-defense, territorial defense, and collective defense, which often play out vis-à-vis institutions founded in colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism. These activities can be understood as being constitute a practical horizon of feminist organizing and organizing by Indigenous women.7
Our coming together by the thousands on March 8, however, reveals a much deeper desire to change it all. The emancipatory horizon of feminist struggles in Latin America is expansive and revolutionary. Acknowledging the practical horizon of women’s organizing, but not confusing it with the emancipatory horizon that has been opened, helps avoid capture via reformist countermeasures.
“Feminism as we are practicing it now is revolution,” writes Mexican sociologist and activist Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar. She continues:
We are putting time in dispute. We are putting space in dispute. These are the two axes of our material dispute with the world, which we are working to undo so that we can remake it. … When we have time for ourselves [as women, nonbinary, and trans people] we can produce meaning. … [This meaning] is a common sense of dissidence that reinforces our willingness to continue to appropriate time and (re)build the world.8
Feminist organizing throughout Latin America has been on the upswing since 2015, when women in Argentina began holding massive demonstrations that would later be recast as women’s strikes beginning on March 8, 2017.
The women’s strike meant taking to the streets and abstaining from paid work, as well as from often unpaid labor caring for elders, babies, children, youth, partners, colleagues, and comrades wherever possible.
“[The strike] not only seeks the recognition of invisible labor. It is also a wager on its refusal,” according to writer Verónica Gago. “In the combination of the two, the very radicalization of what we are going to name as work is at stake.”9
Organizing in Mexico began to take off a few years later and has since ballooned, with violence against women and transwomen as a central concern.
March 8, 2022, in Mexico City
Tens of thousands of women, trans, and nonbinary folks marched from dozens of points in central Mexico City, as well from meeting points in other cities in the periphery of the metropolitan area.
The march was far too big to be able to see its beginning or its end, and most of the marchers were organized into contingents, the majority dressed in purple, visible as they held together with rope around the edges of their groups so as not to lose anyone. In previous years, women had been kettled when arriving to and leaving the march.
As we marched, women all in black climbed up on and graffitied statues of men along the sides of Reforma Avenue while the crowd called and cheered. Others spray-painted windows. Every bus shelter we passed was papered with posters featuring the faces of men accused of abuse. Here and there, men stood to the side and watched. The only policing I saw from within the march was of women asking men to stop filming marchers.
We walked and sang together. “The oppressive state is a macho rapist!” “The police don’t look after me, my friends do!” “Rapist dick, in the blender!” We stopped and jumped and yelled: “She who doesn’t jump is a macho!”
The hundreds of contingents present in Mexico City on March 8 represent ongoing organizing processes in their schools and places of work, as part of affinity groups or feminist organizations. Most were made up of women holding homemade signs, purple cardboard rectangles and squares with handwritten messages:
“We are the teachers of the girls you will never touch.” “If I don’t come home, hug my son.” “I’m not violent, Putin is violent.” “Goodbye, little leftist macho!” “It wasn’t sex, it was rape.” “We’re marching for those who are no longer with us.”
Pre-march messaging on the part of organizers involved dressing comfortably for a long walk, staying hydrated, and making sure no one left the march alone (the same way we do when our friends leave a gathering on any other day of the year, and we check on them to make sure they got home OK).
Independent Contingents, Freedom to Act
Only a handful of groups had signs or T-shirts denoting affiliation with political parties or other large organizations. Among them were women members of Morena, the political party of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
On March 31, one of two transgender women legislators elected on Morena’s slate left the party after her trans colleague was misgendered by a right-wing legislator from the National Action Party (PAN). Upon leaving the party, María Clemente Garcia said she felt vulnerable and unsupported by her colleagues in Morena.10
A Pan y Rosas contingent was also visible in the march. Pan y Rosas is a Trotskyist socialist-feminist organization connected to the Socialist Workers Movement, with organizations in fourteen countries and numerous states in Mexico. Pan y Rosas in Mexico City has hemorrhaged members following leadership’s protection of a male professor accused of sexually abusing a female student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 2017.11
The overwhelming mood in Mexico City on March 8 was a desire for change and a rejection of the violence experienced at home, in workplaces and at school, and in public transportation and on the street.
There was little police presence until we made it to Balderas Street, which marks the exit from the huge Reforma Avenue into the much narrower streets of downtown, which is where we first encountered lines of women police officers deployed by the government of Mexico City.
We squeezed into narrower streets and reached the Alameda Central Park. Some performed batucada drums and danced, others pushed bicycles. The mood became increasingly tense as we got closer to Moneda Street, which would have taken us directly to the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central plaza. It was blocked.
A massive crowd-control operation involving kilometers of temporary walls forced everyone into an even narrower passage, before opening again onto Soledad Street. At the north end of the bottleneck, hundreds more women officers congregated and, from there forward, lined the street to the Zócalo. Male police supervisors with walkie-talkies stood monitoring the march behind the all-women police lines.
We finally arrived at the Zócalo around 6:00 p.m., with thousands and thousands of women in front of and behind us, just as tear gas began to waft toward us. Turning back, we navigated through the march, as many kept advancing, determined to make it to the Zócalo, fumes and all.
As night fell, marchers continued to hang around downtown, with their friends, their signs, and their purple handkerchiefs. The city deployed a small army of cleaners, spraying paint thinner, furiously rubbing and scraping, seeking to erase the passage of the march from whatever part of the city’s walls and monuments that were exposed.
It was a rapid response from city officials that brought to mind another slogan peppered throughout the march: “I wish they cared for me as much as they care for the monuments.”
Purple Washing and Militarization
In the lead-up to March 8 this year, supporters of López Obrador and his likely successor, Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, initiated discussion about the importance of nonviolence, highlighting the role of women police officers as custodians of peace.
“In addition, and I think it’s important to say this here, the use of violence isn’t feminist, you can’t use violence to advance a cause; violence is, in essence, macho,” said Sheinbaum on March 8, 2022. “You cannot condemn war and violence in other places and celebrate it here; the demand for the rights of women and the eradication of violence against us will always be legitimate, but peaceful protests and proposals will always be the best path forward.”12
Sheinbaum went on to suggest that groups wishing to return Mexico City to elite control had attempted to appropriate women’s struggles. For his part, López Obrador has accused feminists of being middle-class conservatives opposed to his “fourth transformation” on more than one occasion.13
Although AMLO made overtures to anti-war voters during his election campaign, to date his presidency has been one in which the military has been granted increased power and resources.14 Soldiers have been deployed on patrol in record numbers since he took office, and the National Guard is fully under military control (recent reporting shows it is likely to stay that way despite promises it would eventually be under civilian leadership).15
The deepening militarization of Mexico is alarming for various reasons, one of which is its effect on the lives and safety of women. In a 2016 study carried out by the Mexican government, nearly one hundred thousand women reported that they had their rights violated by soldiers.16 Some of these violations are extremely serious: soldiers and marines have been accused of disappearing, torturing, violating, and murdering women.
Women are also leading searches for the over one hundred thousand people who are disappeared in Mexico, most of them since 2006. And it is women who shoulder the heaviest burden in guaranteeing housing, education, and food security for the hundreds of thousands of Mexican families that have lost a caregiver due to violence connected to the so-called war on drugs.
Police violence, and in particular sexual violence, against women and girls in Mexico is also a constant. Perhaps the most well-known case is that of Atenco, Mexico State, where nearly 2,500 state and municipal police killed two men and arrested 217 people defending their right to sell flowers outside of a market in 2006. Police sexually tortured the 47 women among the detained.17 Less than two dozen police were tried and all were released shortly after.
Observers were shocked when marines were deployed to protect Mexico City’s Zócalo on March 8, which they did alongside thousands of women police officers. “Long live Mexico City’s women police officers!” said Mayor Sheinbaum days before the march.18 Supporters of López Obrador’s “fourth transformation” convened a specifically pacifist contingent in Mexico City, to which women were invited to bring flowers.
During the march, participants in this contingent gave their flowers to lady cops, and one woman officer marched, fist raised, with the crowds. The media—even independent media—locked in on the narrative that women officers are women first and police second and jubilantly celebrated gestures of conciliation from marchers toward police.19
These actions not only reinforce the age-old dichotomy between good and bad protestors; they also purple wash the role of state forces in violence against women, trans, and nonbinary people in Mexico. Much of this violence flows from state security forces and is maintained by the federal- and state-level justice systems.
We’ve seen the hyper-focus on unruly women play out before, and we’ve also seen how it has been effectively contested by a critical mass of feminists. The women who threw glitter at Mexico City’s secretary of citizen security and painted graffiti in August 2019 to protest the rape of a teenage girl by four police officers received more attention and scrutiny in the press than the officers themselves.
The response on social media was to say fuimos todas—we all did it, we all spray-painted, we all threw the glitter, it was all of us. All of us are angry, we are outraged, we cannot accept violence and the impunity that inevitably follows.
This year, feminists close to the government worked to dismantle the spirit of fuimos todas by distancing themselves from women who engage in property damage and antagonizing police officers. Their message is that they are the proper, pacifist feminists; and the suggestion is that women who participate in acts of vandalism are deserving of sanctions from the same authorities that violate women in multiple ways on a regular basis.
But from the streets of Mexico City on March 8, the pacifist, pro-police contingent was one among hundreds, their flowers to cops contrasted with masked demonstrators spray-painting the police shields, buttressed by thousands of marchers.
The Specter of Reactionary Feminism
The word on everybody’s lips on March 8 was violence. From the signs to the chants, it was clear that violence in Mexico, which ratcheted up following the election of Felipe Calderón of the PAN party in 2006, has become the number one issue women are rallying against.
In addition to over one hundred thousand people disappeared, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the so-called war on drugs since 2006. The deployment of state forces and the corresponding paramilitary presence that drive the war have also fueled an increase in attacks and killings of women and transgender people.
As elsewhere, anti-trans violence in Mexico doesn’t just originate with male aggressors. Over the past years, attacks and threats against transgender people by high-profile trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) have become a central concern among grassroots organizers.
TERFs believe being born with a uterus is the exclusive marker of belonging to the category “woman.” They have shown a predisposition to use violence to enforce the gender binary that is at the center of their political identity.
Not only does TERF activism in Mexico put the lives and the well-being of trans people at risk, but it also threatens to drive a wedge into the vibrant, growing movement for liberation sweeping the region. Nowhere is this truer than in Mexico State, a bastion of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) on the outskirts of the national capital.
This year, in Toluca, capital of Mexico State, many thousands turned up for a trans-inclusive march on March 8. But in a much smaller action in González Arratia plaza, a trans flag was burned, and women belonging to a group called La Resistencia Radical EdoMéx encouraged children to hit at a piñata made to look like a trans flag.
“The struggle of radical feminists is no longer against the patriarchy, now it’s against trans women,” wrote Ever Aceves a few days later.20
In order to understand the penetration of TERFs in Mexico State I spoke with Daniela, who has been accompanying women seeking abortion in Mexico State for the past five years.21 She talked about the “boom” in Mexican feminism in 2018 and 2019 and about how she experienced the euphoria of mass-movement feminist organizing while she was a student at the UNAM.
Daniela told me anti-rape protests in the city of Ecatepec in 2018 were the spark that set off feminist organizing in Mexico State. Previously, she said, they would have twenty or thirty people at feminist marches, but the protests that convened after August 18, 2018, began to draw hundreds. During a march in September of that year, separatist feminists arrived and tried to force men to leave the march.
By March 8, 2019, separatists began directing their anger toward transgender marchers and trans-inclusive feminists. Daniela now sees these events as early warning signs of rising TERF influence.
When we spoke at the start of this year, Daniela had stopped participating in feminist activities because of threats she and her comrades had received from TERFs. “I’m sure that the group that specifically works in Toluca are shock troops that are sustained by the state,” she said. “Sometimes I get scared saying that, because it’s a very serious accusation, but we have a lot of proof that has led us to that conclusion.”
Organizations led by TERFs began to boycott events and shred agreements in feminist assembly processes. On March 8, 2020, a transwoman was assaulted by a TERF while they marched in Toluca. After that, feminist marches in Toluca became increasingly violent.
“We have no problem with iconoclasm, we have no issue with broken glass, but these were things, like, the beatings of women … attacks on trans women … anti-trans graffiti on the street and directly on the house of a trans activist,” said Daniela.
In 2021, after mounting pressure from trans activists, Mexico State began to discuss the Agnes Law, which among other things allows for changes to gender on official documents. On March 8, 2021, a TERF group set a picket to protest the proposed law.22 Trans activists also set up a protest camp, which they later shut down after they were threatened with physical violence.
Media reports and witness testimonies indicate that TERF groups, even those who carry out acts of violence and vandalism so often condemned by authorities, have been allowed free rein in Mexico State. After members of Radical Roots attempted to burn the doors of congress following the approval of the Agnes Law, they retreated back to their tents in the main square.23 On other occasions, police have stood back and watched as groups like the Indómitas Radicales destroyed property.
Activists like Daniela have since been able to establish that there are strong links between TERF organizations in Mexico State and the ruling PRI government. “When we [trans-inclusive feminists] would march, there was always a heavy police presence,” she told me via phone. “As we were being attacked by police, they [trans-exclusionary feminists] were free to act, and the police didn’t do anything.”
On March 8 last year, trans-inclusive feminists were heavily gassed and beaten by police in Toluca, while the Indómitas Radicales engaged in property destruction completely untouched. And during protests to pressure Mexico State’s congress to pass abortion legislation in August of 2021, marchers were dispersed using water cannons and tear gas.24
The role of the Mexico State government in cultivating TERF groups goes beyond turning a blind eye to their activities. In 2021, Mexico State’s Women’s Secretariat held monthly workshops with the Feministas Indómitas Radicales and the Satanic Feminists, both TERF groups (the Satanic Feminists have since rebranded as the Catholic Feminists), and participated in at least one public Zoom call with a high-profile anti-transgender activist.25
“I’ve received very direct threats, telling me that I will be beaten up unless I learn to respect my biological sisters,” said Daniela, noting she was doxxed for promoting trans-inclusive feminism. “I had to leave for a week, because the threats became very serious, and I know I’m not the only one.”
In the lead-up to March 8 this year, Daniela was debating whether or not to join the march in Toluca, saying the harassment and threats she’s faced have led her to fear the marches she once found so powerful.
But when we talked following the march, she told me she had indeed decided to go out into the streets on International Women’s Day, together with over ten thousand women, for a historic march in Toluca. Together with thousands of others, she helped make sure the march was trans-inclusive and that TERF organizations didn’t gain new terrain (but they still strung up their hateful piñata).
The issue of TERF groups in Mexico isn’t limited to Mexico State. But Mexico State is where the protection of TERF organizations by those in power is clearest.
Fighting Against All Violences
In the weeks following March 8, I met with feminists from Pan y Rosas in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora state. They told a similar story: TERF organizers had been the first to convene on March 8, and trans-inclusive feminists had considered abandoning the symbolic date so as not to be associated with trans-exclusionary feminists. Finally, however, they issued a separate, inclusive callout and convened a march with a distinct starting point.
TERF groups in their city, they said, attract many, especially younger women. “But their feminism is white, it’s classist, and it’s [based in rape culture],” said Lucia, who is a social worker in Hermosillo.
On March 8, she said, there was a massive turnout of trans-inclusive marchers, which buoyed the spirits of organizers in the northern city. But, they said, “the violence isn’t stopping, it’s getting worse.” Just a few months earlier, gunmen opened fire and threw grenades during a feminist march in the Sonoran city of Guaymas, killing three.26
“This is a really hard context to organize in,” said María José, one of the organizers I interviewed in Sonora. “It’s really hard.”
Like elsewhere in Mexico, Sonora is experiencing militarization and paramilitarization related to the so-called war on drugs, which closely maps with control of strategic territories including border areas and mineral- and water-rich lands.27
Though March 8 is by far the largest feminist demonstration in Mexico, women, trans, and nonbinary people also gather to march and protest on other symbolic dates.28
Protests and celebrations are also held in response to victories, as on April 8, 2022, when Jalisco state approved gay marriage, or May 18, 2022, when Guerrero state legalized abortion to twelve weeks. Rolling marches and vigils are organized in response to tragedies, like the disappearance and murder of Debanhi Escobar in Nuevo León in April.29
For all the efforts to divide women, trans, nonbinary, and queer people and to prevent them from taking to the streets—in a climate of often extreme violence—a heterogeneous feminist movement is steadily gaining ground throughout Mexico.
Dawn Marie Paley
Notes
1. “Autoridades de la CDMX calculan 75,000 asistentes en la marcha del 8M,” El Economista, March 8, 2022.
2. A Supreme Court ruling last year requires state governments to legislate and regulate abortion access across the country, but twenty-three (of thirty-two) states have yet to decriminalize abortion. Women who accompany those who need to terminate pregnancy are organized into groups to assist with accessing pills and using them safely. See Daniela Rea, “Veracruz Decriminalized Abortion Last Year, but Activists Remain Crucial in Ensuring Access,” Pie de Página, May 11, 2022.
3. “Asesinan a Ximena García, mujer trans y militante de Morena, en CDMX,” El Financiero, January 27, 2022; María Ruiz and Daniela Pastrana, “Trans Activist Natalia Lane Stabbed in Mexico City,” Pie de Página, January 21, 2022.
4. María Julia Castañeda and Darinka Rodríguez, “Radiografía de la transfobia en México: ‘Me enseñaron que ser yo era un motivo de muerte,’” El País México, March 31, 2022.
5. “Declaración sobre los derechos de las mujeres basados en el sexo,” Women’s Declaration International, accessed May 23, 2022.
6. María Galindo, Feminismo bastardo (La Paz: Mantis Narrativa, 2021), 27.
7. Drawing on the work of Mixe activist and writer Yásnaya Elena A. Gil, I have avoided collapsing Indigenous women’s organizing and struggle into feminism. See Yásnaya Elena A. Gil, “La sangre, la lengua y el apellido: Mujeres indígenas y estados nacionales,” in Gabriela Jauregui, ed., Tsunami (Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2018).
8. Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, “¡Feminismo es Revolución!” in Diego Castro and Huáscar Salazar, eds., América Latina en tiempos revueltos. Claves y luchas renovadas frente al giro conservador (Morelos, Mexico: Libertad Bajo Palabra, 2021), 49.
9. Véronica Gago, Feminist International: How to Change Everything, trans. Liz Mason-Deese (New York: Verso Books) ebook, 47.
10. Carina García, “En Día de Visibilidad Transgénero, diputada trans renuncia a bancada de Morena,” Expansión, March 31, 2022.
11. “México: Acusan a organización feminista Pan y Rosas de encubrir a militante trotskista por abuso sexual a chilena,” El Desconcierto, June 6, 2017.
12. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, “Mensaje de la Jefa de Gobierno, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, durante el evento conmemorativo por el Día Internacional de las Mujeres,” March 8, 2022.
13. Carlos Salinas Maldonado, “López Obrador señala a las feministas de querer ‘afectar’ su gobierno y las califica de ‘conservadoras,’” El País, September 29, 2021.
14. Mary Beth Sheridan, “As Mexico’s Security Deteriorates, the Power of the Military Grows,” Washington Post, December 17, 2020.
15. Sergio Rincón and Arturo Ángel, May 10, 2022, “Plan de la Sedena prevé una Guardia Nacional sin civiles para 2022,” Animal Político.
16. México Unido contra la Delincuencia, “La militarización de la seguridad pública: Imidiendo la construcción de un México más seguro y en paz,” March 2021.
17. Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, “Caso mujeres víctimas de tortura sexual en atenco vs. México sentencia de 28 de noviembre de 2018”.
18. Guadalupe Vallejo, “Gobierno de la CDMX: Las mujeres policías cuidarán sin reprimir en el 8M,” Expansión, March 4, 2022.
19. Daniela Pastrana et al., “International Women’s Day: Dispatches from Mexico,” Pie de Página, March 12, 2022.
20. Ever Aceves, “La piñata trans en el 8M,” Pie de Página, March 12, 2022.
21. Daniela as well as the other women interviewed for this essay requested I refrain from using their last name out of fear of reprisals.
22. “Retoman feministas protestas contra la Ley de Identidad de Género en Edoméx,” Ultra Noticias, June 21, 2021.
23. “Feministas incendian fachada del Congreso en Edomex; mantienen plantón desde marzo,” Reporte Indigo, June 5, 2021.
24. “Dispersan con gas y agua a feministas a favor del aborto en Edomex,” August 10, 2021.
25. “Secretaría de la mujer inicia terapias a servidores públicos para evitar violencia de género,” DigitalMex, January 19, 2021.
26. Elías Camhaji, “Granadas y balacera frente al palacio municipal: La tragedia que enlutó a Guaymas,” El País, November 26, 2021.
27. I have explored this phenomenon in some depth in my previous work. See Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2014); Dawn Paley and Simon Granovsky-Larsen, eds., Organized Violence: Capitalist Warfare in Latin America (Regina, Saskatchewan: University of Regina Press, 2019); and Dawn Marie Paley, Guerra Neoliberal: Desparición y búsqueda en el norte de México (Mexico City, Libertad Bajo Palabra, 2020).
28. For example, on March 31, the Transgender day of Visibility; May 10, when mothers of the disappeared hold protests on Mother’s Day; July 25, the International Day of Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women; September 5, Indigenous Women’s Day; and November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
29. Maritza Pérez and editorial staff, “Muerte de Debanhi enciende protestas feministas en el país,” El Economista, April 24, 2022.