Since 2015, the SESNSP has a record of femicides in the country, 5,718 violent deaths of women were classified as femicide, which represent 23.6% of the intentional homicides that occurred in the country in that period.
At the local level, no prosecutor’s office investigates 100% of the deaths of women as femicide. There are states like Sinaloa that investigate 73% of the homicides of women as femicide, but in others, like Guanajuato, that percentage drops to 5.8%.
In Mexico there is an underreporting of femicide. Some prosecutor’s offices choose to classify the crime as intentional homicide and not as femicide, which explains the gap that exists between the figures for both crimes, warn specialists.
“The authority is very resistant to classifying the crime, preferring that it remain as intentional homicide than femicide because saying that there is a femicide context is not a good note for the state government, much less being in an electoral context,” says María de la Luz Estrada Mendoza, coordinator of the National Citizen Observatory on Femicide (OCNF).
The activist indicates that the prosecutor’s offices and attorney general’s offices do not apply their investigation protocols adequately either, which is why cases of murders of women are not treated with a gender perspective and they continue to be re-victimized.
“The authorities in the face of murders where they presume some criminal group may be, do not investigate them, they classify them as homicides. Zacatecas is one of the states that in its Gender Violence Alert report indicated that there are murders due to organized crime and the federation should attract them; but they are femicides and the authority classifies them as intentional homicides.
“Another problem is that in the cases of girls, as a rule, they are not classified as femicides; then the number could be higher. They say that there is no power relationship, they think that the power relationship is between a wife and a husband, two adults, not between a girl and an adult”, she explains.
