Human rights activist Norma Andrade, founder of the collective “Nuestras hijas de regreso a casa” and winner of the Edelstam award in 2022 for her tireless fight for women, spoke to the WOFP about femicide as a big problem in Mexico, but also about the census of missing persons that the federal government is carrying out. It should be added that the activist has been seeking justice against her daughter’s murderers for more than 23 years. Since that day, she has had to speak with four presidents of Mexico, five governors, twelve prosecutors and countless public ministries and still, to this day her daughter’s murderers remain free.
1.- According to the United Nations, in Mexico, 9 to 10 femicides are committed every day.
What actions should Mexico take to eradicate this problem?
At first, I thought that we needed the government’s sensitivity, that they had to start givingvalue to women lives. After speaking with some presidents in Mexico, we managed to get a law passed that spoke about life free of violence against women. Institutions and laws were created that we needed, so to speak, to resolve the situation. I am telling you that when these institutions were started, three women were murdered a day and now we are at eleven. And that is despite the fact that we have infrastructure, specialized prosecutors and we already have laws. This is supposed to be the apparatus to resolve things. Do you know what we have not achieved as families? That this situation enters the political agenda.
2.- Although we have been able to observe progress in gender matters, considering the creation of new institutions and laws that aim to defend women, why do the indicators show that this phenomenon, instead of decreasing, is increasing?
It is not a training problem, because training has been given for more than ten years. There are even institutions that manage the violence meter. In the prosecutor’s office, it is assumed that the people who are there are sensitive people and where the judges are obliged to take training in gender matters. The reality is that the public prosecutors do not have personnel who are sensitive to dealing with a family who comes to file a complaint because their daughter was killed. At first I thought that we needed public policies to resolve this situation. Now, what I have been able to observe over these 23 years is that the government has no interest in solving it. What we wanted at the beginning was for the judges to be trained in gender perspective.
The problem is that the personnel was trained, the laws were created, but when we read the judges’ rulings we see that they do not use the elements that the gender perspective dictates.
There are various cases, one of them was the sentence of an indigenous woman who was employed in the trafficking networks. In defending herself, she killed her aggressor and was arrested for homicide. The question here is: Where is the intersectionality that the judge should have used? Considering that she was an indigenous woman, who did not even speak Spanish and who had been kidnapped to become a sex worker. The judge, who was supposed to have taken all the training, ended up sentencing the woman. What we ask ourselves is: So what was the point of promoting a law so that judges could take training courses on gender perspective, only to end up not applying them?
3.- What is your opinion of the census that the government is organizing?
It is one of the most nefarious ways that this administration has to justify its negligence and submission in the matter of disappearances. We have been able to confirm that, in this registry prepared by the Mexican Government, many people were deleted from the registry. In the first lists, the government clung to the fact that they had already been located. So we had to make several complaints and protests so that in the end the names of those people who had been removed from the registry were re-inserted. We did an investigation that we titled the double disappearance of Esmeralda, first she disappeared in 2009 and then the government made her disappear in 2023. How are we going to speak well of a job that is not good? We are around a thousand mothers who assume themselves as searchers or trackers for different groups and we all have contact, from Tijuana to Yucatan. When the census figures prepared by the
government appeared, we all went to look for our sons and daughters and many saw that they
were not registered on the lists of missing people.
There was a National Search Commission that cost us a lot of work to create and now they are dismantling it. Carla Quintana, who was its previous director, was deposed because she was opposed to the construction of that registry. She always referred to that census as a shaving of the registry.
4.- What happened to the National Forensic Data Bank (NFDB)?
The NFDB was created following the precedent of the cotton field in Ciudad Juárez and is one of the resolutions that the court marks. Carla Quintana reported the disappearance of 50 thousand bodies from the NFDB. According to her, they had taken them to do DNA studies, but since it was during the shaving period, it was no longer possible to know. The Bank exists, the fact that it is no longer going to be operational is different. All the movements that are being made in the NFDB is to dismantle that institution. All the experts who worked there have already been fired. I would say that between December and January they began to liquidate the staff.
The objective of all governments, not only this one, but also the previous ones, is to be able to boast a decrease in numbers. Although the reality is totally different. The current government washes its hands of the matter by saying that 90,000 missing persons are few, although it is known that the real number is estimated to be between 130,000 and 150,000 missing people.
5.- What consequences do you think the Inter-American Court of Human Rights taking up your daughter’s case will have?
It is an achievement of my struggle, of many years of pressure. Of course it makes you happy and then we wonder if it might really change something. My granddaughter said that this is an empty triumph. Thinking about her words, what does that mean to me? Socially we are demanding that the government be forced to protect orphans from feminicide. What do I mean? That when a woman is killed and children are left behind, the government should be held responsible. We want a law and not a protocol that they apply whenever they want.
Because my daughter left children and I as her grandmother have had to face this problem for 23 years. It is not only education, it is also maintenance and the psychological problems that they develop throughout their lives. We must remember that my grandchildren grew up with me in marches, in sit-ins, in hunger strikes and in dialogue with the authorities. That is how my grandchildren grew up and not only mine. That is how all the parents who have had a murdered daughter are. Those who have taken care of that, most of them have been the grandmothers.
In my case, fortunately, I had the conditions to take care of my two nephews. Maybe not the best ones since I fell into depression. Fortunately, I had the economic conditions to be able to raise them, but not all grandmothers are in those same conditions. Many of them have already passed away and who had to take care of those children, many times it was the older sister. I am talking about a specific case, María Luisa had to take responsibility for her younger brothers, since her mother had been murdered. This issue was not addressed in the resolution of the cotton field case, considering that the women who were murdered did not have children.
In addition to this, the State must guarantee a protection protocol that classifies systematic femicide. What is this? It is a femicide tolerated by the State. In my daughter’s case, we know from DNA that one of her three attackers is a serial killer, who has participated in at least five cases and is a relative of a high official. We also know that it is a group of men who are dedicated to killing young girls and that the government knowingly allows it. Why do I say that it allows it? Because if Mexico has already identified the attacker, why hasn’t he been arrested?
He has been identified since 2010. What do we want? For systematic femicide to be established in the penal code. Because it is the system that allows it, tolerates it and perpetuates it.