Gender Violence In Mexico

Improved Essays
In 1992, United States President George H.W. Bush, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. What many are not familiar with is how Texas border cities with Mexico, particularly the borderland of El Paso, TX, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, saw a significant increase in gender violence after the signing of NAFTA. Since the early 1990’s to the early 2000’s, Ciudad Juárez became the central stage for the most gruesome femicides in the world. As Ginger Thompson reports, what is the most astonishing of these cases is that almost all of them remain unsolved up to this day (A1). Most of the women killed shared similar backgrounds. They were poor …show more content…
This happens from their most innocent forms (such as jokes or song lyrics) to their antisocial manifestations (such as rape, torture, and murder) and by the media and institutional practices that mislead the interpretation of violent events.
The victims become a morbid source of image production as the material evidence of psychological and physical violence. For most citizens, the media have been the main source of images and information about the femicides in Ciudad Juárez. This fact affords them an important role that could be used to avoid further production of discourses that perpetuate violence.
…show more content…
The style was very cut and dry, assimilating to a very strict AP article that rely solely on the facts that tampered, sloppy, and unprofessional police reports put out for the press (McKinley A8). What was interesting about the coverage found for the El Paso Times was that the articles that talked about the femicides in Juárez were all translated into Spanish, while the newspaper is an English based publication. Occasionally, the articles mentioned the tally of the femicides, however, such facts were usually buried in between statements given by government officials. One article, which was published by the El Paso Times but obtained from the Associated Press, even talked about the actions that the American government was taking to pressure then Mexican President Vicente Fox to solve the cases in a timely manner to provide answers and a proper closure to the many families affected (“U.S. Congress”). Two articles reported on how the mayor of Juárez and the governor of Chihuahua at the time claimed the city was more than the female murders (“Autoridades”). Mayor Héctor Murguía even said that Juárez was the safest border city in the United States, per an article that was reporting on yet the death of another young lady a few days earlier (“Reportan la violación”). The fact that the El Paso Times sometimes relied on wired

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Interpersonal violence against women is endemic in our society. Thus, it is estimated that 14% to 20% of women will experience rape at some point in their lives; that 25% to 28% will be physically abused in a sexual-romantic relationship; and that 8% to 24% will be stalked by someone they know or by a stranger. When these statistics are added to the 25% to 35% likelihood that the average adult woman has been sexually abused as a child, it is clear that the epidemiology of interpersonal violence against women is a pressing social issue (Briere & Jordan, 2004). Equally concerning is the association between these various forms of victimization and mental health issues in women. Female survivors of sexual trauma are vulnerable to a wide range of…

    • 1018 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Mexico and Drug Violence Imagine having rights you take for granted taken away. Think about not being able to live comfortable in your own neighborhood or even having the your right to stay alive. There are growing Mexican cartels invading manys’ lives in and surrounding the Mexico area. The cartels, as of 2006, are murdering while distributing drugs among many other countries and the issue has been growing.…

    • 1259 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Thousands and thousands of women are seeking asylum in the United States, not because of war or discrimination, but they are seeking protection from a more personal danger: abuse from their husbands, boyfriends and male relatives. One woman recounted being raped, strangled and thrown against a wall by her husband, father of her twin boys. Two teenage girls discussed about being forced to become sex slaves for gang members. If the women do report the abuse to the police, they risk their homes being destroyed by gang members. “In my country, nobody pays attention to what women suffer,” Juliza, a victim of being sexual abuse by her husband said in a telephone interview with Pamela Constable who covers immigration issues and communities for the Washington Post .…

    • 634 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Duran, chief of the Foreign Relations Bureau, wrote a report on the Mexican youth that further affected the racism against Mexicans and Mexican Americans. In the report, Duran characterized Mexican people as “having total disregard for human life.” He then went on to state that the “Mexican element” in a person gives the person the desire to use a knife, kill, or let blood. Duran attempts to justify the inequality and oppression the Mexicans face by declaring that because the “Mexican element,” Mexican are unable to understand the “superior” psychology of the Anglo-Saxon. Over the next few years, higher officials in law enforcement and judges were stating more and more racial sayings.…

    • 934 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Feminism in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution was dominated by women who identified as white and/or mestiza heterosexuals and who were most commonly members of the middle class, and sometimes the upper class as well. The lack of diversity within the Mexican feminist community led to the marginalization of numerous groups, most notably indigenous women’s groups, called indigenous feminism, and groups for women who did not identify as heterosexual, referred to as lesbian feminism. This paper focuses on the revitalization of the feminist movement that started in the late 1960s and continued into the late 1980s and how marginalized lesbian and indigenous feminist groups used Second Wave Feminism to begin demanding recognition within the mainstream…

    • 1276 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Photojournalists John Moore was in Guatemala this week to be with the families of the two young boys named Carolos Daniel Xiquin,10, and Oscar Armando Toc Cotzajay,11 that were kidnapped on their way to school and found murdered with their hands and feet bound together. The author learned about the savage killing over social media and decided to investigate the story and little bit further. He traveled to a village near San Juan Sacatepéquez, to speak to the locals in the area regarding the two boy’s murders. He learned that even though the killings were barbaric the small community of Guatemala were able to unite in their grief and lean on one another for love and support. The two-young boys were neighbors and schoolmates.…

    • 536 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Last week I read chapter two of Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Through reading the chapter, I learned more of how oppressive the Chicano culture can be toward all of its members. When I speak of all its members, I mean those who view themselves as homosexual, bisexual, or even members who display behaviors that are uncharacteristic to the Chicano culture. Oscar Casares’ Brownsville, details how patriarchal societies overlook women compared to men. However, Anzaldua broadens the spectrum of who in the Chicano culture is mistreated by heterosexual men.…

    • 799 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Cartel Violence In Laredo

    • 418 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In border towns like Juarez, where the drug cartels have city officials in the palms of their hands, border violence is rampant. In Laredo, Texas, my hometown, violence has not reached that level of intensity, but with its status as the largest land port in the country, drug cartels have focused most of their efforts on pushing drugs through its borders. There has even been an increased amount of Border Patrol activity in the surrounding area. What has seen the brunt of the drug cartel violence has been Nuevo Laredo, the sister city of Laredo on the Mexican side of the border.…

    • 418 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Mexico, a mutilated woman hung from a bridge in the border city of Nuevo Laredo is a one-day story, quickly forgotten. (Booth, drugs still raging ,11 Dec.…

    • 441 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Violence In Juarez Essay

    • 1356 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The authors referred back to the observations they made regarding the gender roles at first, emphasizing how the mothers’ position as the caretaker and the “stay at home mother” resulted in a relatively safer environment for them to be exposed, as compared to the father who would have to leave for work everyday, literally dodging bullets sometimes, as mentioned from previous interviews. They also referred to their observations about how families would isolate themselves so as to avoid the violence as much as possible, they would isolate themselves by avoiding social interactions with neighbors, abstaining from leaving the home unless it is absolutely necessary, and even refusing to go see family or attend church. When talking about the fathers, the general concerns were the exposure they had to the violence just from having to traverse around the city providing for the family, which they pointed out was a major source of stress since lay-offs and shortening of hours were far too commonplace. Above all, the authors pointed out how their study greatly helped illuminate the deep effects the violence of Juarez had on the families that were exposed to it, they referenced this in their observation that the study they performed focused heavily on the points of view of the mothers of the…

    • 1356 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    the new culture lifestyles. In reality, in any Mexican American families, their devotion to their religious figures, the family union, observance of their religious and ethnic traditions, and their cultural identity is functioning as a protective factor to motivate strength when it is necessary in times of individual or family adversity. Defined as coming from a patriarchal society, oppressing and dominating their women, Mexican Americans ´men in the US were forced to change once their women became involved in the work force, therefore developing more autonomy and economic income to their homes. Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994 mention in his study how the Mexican immigrant men´s status systematically decreased the main characteristics of patriarchy…

    • 294 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    For this story “Videotape” it feels as if Don DeLillo had heard of the term “Mondo film” (or as it is also known Shockumantry) and was inspired by it to write a story of someone who would be a viewer of these kind of films. A “Mondo film” is a sub genre of exploitation films that take a documentary/pseudo documentary style focusing on taboo subjects such as death real or fake. Don DeLillo 's “Videotape” shows us a man who has become desensitized to violence. The character in the story is a man who has been consumed by the media; He can no longer be entertained by fictional programs and their violence, but now seeks out his entertainment in the real world.…

    • 1570 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Mexico in recent years has become increasingly more violent. However, this seems to be a contradiction to an established theory that through democratization there is less violence. This seems to be an interesting development to Mexico’s recent democratization. So the question remains, did the institutional changes that led to democracy in Mexico result in more violence?…

    • 1417 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Borderlands: The New Mestiza: La Frontera.” (1987). Course Reserves University of Florida Web. 8 November 2016.…

    • 1242 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Decent Essays

    This gender specific violence also meant ensuring the dominance of the white race. In order to keep this maintenance going, a type of sterilization needed to happen. Women were the target; they give birth to Indian babies so settlers raped them to enhance the Caucasian race. As rapes continued and those products impregnated the children/girls of rapes, the Indian race wiped clean, becomes less and less dominant. The Indian body, already deemed dirtier than any other did, (Smith 9) supported the European settlers theory to eradicate Indians.…

    • 198 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays