Tel-Chai Nation

A terrible incident occurred recently in Oaxaca, Mexico when a singer was murdered after performing a song protesting violence against women:

Jazmín Zárate would have turned 28 on Monday. That same day, the singer’s body was found in an abandoned lot in San Lorenzo Cacaotepec, on the outskirts of Oaxaca City, the capital of the southern Mexican state. She had been stabbed numerous times. The young woman had been missing since the night before when she had gone to perform at a concert. Her sister, identified as Engy Aquino, has confirmed the death: “My beautiful little sister, with all the pain in our hearts, today on your birthday we say goodbye to you, always remembering your beautiful smile. Fly high and be free as you always wanted to be.”

In Mexico, there is no respite in violence against women. While the country was still coming to terms with the brutal images of the lifeless body of Ariadna López, 27, which turned up in a parking lot in Mexico City, the Oaxaca police located the body of Jazmín Zárate lying in a spot called La Barranca, next to a sawmill. In a country where 10 women are murdered every day, there is no recovery time between crimes. Zárate was a singer, an entrepreneur and mother of a little girl. She had been booked to sing at an event the day before. The Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the death as a femicide, although forensic experts are still working to determine the cause of death.

It's absolutely obscene this horror story continues, with no telling how or when it can be stopped. Now, a singer is among the victims of one of the most offensive acts of heinousness in history. My condolences to her family.

Here's more information about the continuing crisis, and how authorities are focusing upon it:

Some alleged femicide cases, such as that of 18-year-old Nuevo León woman Debanhi Escobar earlier this year, attract intense media coverage and provoke national outrage, but many others are barely reported on, if at all, and go unperceived by most Mexicans.

Firmly in the former category is the case of Ariadna López, whose body was found on Oct. 30 by cyclists in Tepoztlán, Morelos, the day after she disappeared in the trendy Mexico City neighborhood of Condesa. One factor that has raised López’s case profile is the intervention of Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, a leading candidate to succeed President López Obrador.

Sheinbaum accused Morelos Attorney General Uriel Carmona of protecting the alleged killer after he announced that a forensic examination determined that López choked on her own vomit due to intoxication.

“It is clear that the attorney general of Morelos tried to cover up for the killer of a woman because of his ties to the killer,” she said earlier this week.

Mexico City Attorney General Ernestina Godoy said Sunday that a subsequent autopsy completed by experts in the capital found “several lesions caused by blows” on López’s body and determined that the cause of her death was “multiple traumas.”

A man and a woman, reportedly a couple, have been arrested in connection with her alleged murder, but impunity for femicides — and most other crimes — remains the norm in Mexico. Authorities, including the federal government and the president, have been accused of indifference to the country’s monumental gender-based violence problem even as feminist groups organize increasingly large protests to demand action. [...]

While Sheinbaum’s motives for her intervention in López’s case have been questioned, a member of the National Citizens Observatory on Femicide praised the Mexico City mayor.

“I believe [her] words are … exceptional because politicians are normally very careful with the narratives [they present],” Ana Yeli Pérez Garrido told the newspaper El País.

She said she was conscious of the mayor’s political aspirations, but still believes she sent an “important message” by speaking out so forcefully against another official — a person with the capacity to fortify the fight against impunity and help make Mexico safer for women.

Sheinbaum’s words laid bare “the deficiencies” of authorities tasked with combating and investigating crime, Pérez said. “That’s favorable in Mexico, [the shortcomings of authorities] is not a minor issue,” she said.

“… Prosecutors offices have given shelter to impunity, … that’s why it’s important that politicians send messages of intolerance of that,” Pérez added.

Patricia Olamendi, a well-known feminist, asserted that “almost all” prosecutors offices are negligent and Mexicans are fed up both with attorney generals such as Carmona “coming out and saying that the [femicide] victim was drunk” and with the lack of policies to prevent violence against women.

The feminism movement in Mexico has helped to raise awareness of the country’s gender-based violence problem and people now want action, she said. “Society is starting to say enough, because this [ongoing violence against women] is a horror movie,” Olamendi said.

I certainly hope Sheinbaum's being altruistic, and should she be elected Mexican president, that she'll not only make an effort to cut down on all the violent crime that tragically engulfed the country, including the drug cartels, but that she'll also have the security staff to back her up, seeing the dangerous trajectory Mexico's now facing as a result of the cartels, whose members no doubt are also guilty of the gender-based violence that's poisoned the land.

On a federal government website, the commission said that perpetrators of violence against women are “immersed in a society and culture that has historically conditioned them to think that one way to express their masculinity is through violent, dominant, possessive and controlling attitudes and behavior, and that any attempt to change this represents a risk to their manliness.”

As somebody who once knew a severely racist and sexist man from Monterry in Nuevo Leon, I wonder if the culture conditioned men like that to act as apologists for the toxic mentality, which is an utter corruption of masculinity, and with the way things are going in the USA now, they too have accomplished similarities in many ways (did I mention the man I speak of was also venomously anti-American?). This most definitely calls for serious reeducation to recognize consensual love as a role model to follow, not discharging physical/sexual violence against innocent and defenseless women and dehumanizing them.

It's good there's a growing call in Mexico to do something about this tragedy, and in addition, the corruption in local government and law enforcement systems must be purged in order to solve the crisis. In fact, it'd also be vital to ostracize any apologists for violence in society, since they too are a serious problem.

Labels: Latin America, misogyny, Moonbattery, political corruption, sexual violence, showbiz