Her opinion is a warning for being herself an indirect victim of gender violence, a plague against which thousands of Mexican women will protest this Tuesday on the occasion of International Women’s Day.
Liliana, her younger sister, was murdered almost 32 years ago by a possessive and violent boyfriend, unable to accept that she ended the relationship. The homicide, labeled at the time as a “crime of passion”, remains unpunished.
The deep mourning of Cristina and her family, as well as the free spirit and defiance of conventionalisms that characterized her sister, are the input of “Liliana’s Invincible Summer”a work published last year and acclaimed by readers and critics.
Mix of essay, punctilious investigation and chronicle of an exhausting search for justice, The book also denounces the debts of the Mexican State with the victims of femicide.
Mexico commemorates Women’s Day amid growing gender violence, with 1,006 femicides in 2021, compared to 978 in 2020, and impunity for more than 90% of crimes against women, according to official figures.
perennial indifference
Although she acknowledges that gender violence “occurs with particular notoriety” in Mexico, the author emphasizes that the problem is global.
“In the United States, where I have lived for a long time, there are a lot of femicides that are not called femicides simply because the word is not used as often as it could be,” says Rivera Garza, a professor at the University of Houston. , Texas, since 2017.
The author refuses to engage in controversies around the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who questions the thriving Mexican feminist movement, accusing it of being manipulated by his political opponents.
“I don’t want to talk about AMLO, I want to talk about the situation in the country, I want to talk about wills from below, about mobilizations that arise from civil society. It seems to me much more important,” he maintains.
It recognizes, however, that the State and the authorities must be “always in the crosshairs” of the feminist struggle, that it should be “multifocal” and remain “eyes wide open” in the face of various aspects of daily life that demand critical review.
“The current authorities and those of the past have shown continuous indifference,” he stresses.
