OR
na after another and Practically day after day, a young woman, student or worker, disappears and shortly after her violated body is found out there, anywhere. This is now happening in such a systematic way that one can even figuratively say that the climate of hostility and violence that the country is experiencing has given rise to the emergence of a kind of collective serial killer that adopts different faces and people, but who does not interrupt his systematic task. It is even already established in the collective mind the notion of a modus operandi with well-defined, predictable components, and thus normal
. This is the first response of the authorities, which will almost always be to deny, disqualify the victim and downplay her death.
Then, and as a reaction, an immediate form of organization and mobilization of parents and colleagues who doubt the official version and demand that the death be assumed to be femicide. And, finally, it is known that it will be necessary to fight against oblivion, the opacity of the judicial process, if it comes to that; the pressures and the corruption and the arrangements that in the dark little by little dilute the process and mediate the anger. And all this happens because, despite the continuous chain and accumulation of disappearances and deaths, and the stubborn movement of organized women, no changes have been established and neither has a social climate and new institutional devices that act permanently, beyond the circumstance, and that they build a climate that dismantles from within consciences, from homes, schools and workplaces that deep notion in the social DNA, that women correspond –ex natura
– a secondary place especially if it is poor, hard-working and defenseless. A redoubled classism.
Basically, each act of violence or murder is about denying women their nature as political beings, capable of saying, acting and transforming the atmosphere in which they live and of liberating their nature and potential as beings with the power to reorganize the environment and put it at your service, as we men have always done, for our benefit. And that is why the democratization of the home, of the school, of the workplace cannot continue to be confined to the narrowness of the liberal vision of democracy, such as, for example, a vote to delegate to the other the responsibility for the transformation . The participation of women (and men) with full rights in the daily construction of transformative environments must be claimed – as revolutionary. And that implies dismantling much of the previous construction, of centuries and decades, that penetrates all corners of the aforementioned spaces. In schools and universities, democratization implies looking critically at spaces such as the distribution and access to institutional power and, even more basic, the access and permanence of women in the centers of superior knowledge. That is, access to the fundamental power of knowledge.
All of this –even just bringing it up– tends to scare us men. We will not confess that it is the fear of losing power and privileges, but we will attribute it to the heroic defense of a family, work and, in the case of education, institutional order. In the case of the UAM, for example, incorporating the high school average as a factor for admission, in addition to the result of the selection exam, without looking for it, caused thousands of more women to be admitted. But that was not wanted, they only sought to improve the quality of those admitted, but through that opening the women slipped massively. Also in the UAM the highest power structure remains impenetrable: never in its half century of existence, in the Metropolitan –modern and of excellence– a woman has reached the general rectory. And it is understood: the entire structure that sustains institutional power is overwhelmingly in charge of men. However, it is not that a structure of men who choose men now, to silence criticism, choose a woman. It is about creating a horizontal structure, from below and highly participatory that equitably elects women or men. And the same with access: it is not about waiting for or making possible some other blessed mistake or an action by the SEP or the indifferent CNDH, but about fighting for equitable access that frees women (and men) from the price of living the inequity that means that thousands of applicants are rejected and hundreds of precarious academics are the ones who work with the students. Neither decent places to study nor teachers with full rights to educate.
*UAM-Xochimilco
PS A final greeting to Eliezer Morales, companion and friend of many union battles.
Yes, change to the INE, and other areas as well.
