We, plaintiffs and supporters of the Sepur Zarco case for justice for sexual slavery, take up the political cause that gave rise to this commemoration. Today, more than ever, we women remember, we reclaim our history and we affirm that we will not turn back. Today more than ever: No to Oblivion. No to Silence. No to Impunity.
The following is an interview we did for Interview From Mexico in which she describes her work searching for trafficking victims, new forms of trafficking and the scandalous case of a sex ring run out of the headquarters of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) in Mexico City.
Emiliano Zapata, Mexico’s iconic revolutionary hero, is buried in Cuautla, Morelos just eight miles from the 620 Mw thermal-electric plant, already constructed in the small town of Huexca. In the same towns where Zapata fought for the rights of Mexico’s rural majority, mega-development projects are setting off fierce protests.
Honduras has been rated by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) as the country with the highest homicide rate in the world from 2010 until 2012, when the most recent report was issued.1 From 2005 to 2013, the number of violent deaths of women rose by 263.4%. This violence is the result of multiple factors, including high levels of economic inequity and inequality, poverty, corruption, militarization, and an ever increasing presence of organized crime and drug trafficking, all of which has a strong negative impact on the human rights of the population, and on the lives of women in particular.
The women of the Movement for Justice in El Barrio–a community-based organization led by immigrant women in New York– and the Zapatista women of La Realidad are two examples of how women in struggle all over the world are coming together to inspire and learn from each other, and how, in the process, they are transforming the world.
Yakiri, a victim of sexual assault, discusses discrimination in Mexico’s criminal justice system after being released from prison. She still faces charges even though the killing of her would-be rapist was ruled an act of self-defense.
It’s common practice to take stock on this day of where we are and how far we’ve come in the movement for full gender equality and respect for the human rights of women. This year in the Americas, the situation is getting worse rather than better.
In Mexico, rural women have vowed to defend the right to food, to biodiversity, to our natural resources, and to end the violence in all forms that arises out of capitalist and patriarchal systems. They reaffirmed these commitments on Mar. 8.
When violence is attacked with violence, women become both victims and defenders. They are disproportionately and differently affected by violence, violation of human rights and the erosion of community. Yet Mesoamerican and the U.S. governments continue to fund militarist enforcement policies framed as counternarcotics or anti-terrorism that arm and train men to patrol and control the population that put women at great risk.
Twenty years since the alarm was first sounded in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua due the large number of women murdered with signs of torture and sexual abuse, the phenomenon has spread to the rest of the country.
