MEXICO .- Karla Romero Tezmol had 11 years when she was abducted in 2016. Since that time in the state of Tlaxcala every day a woman is kidnapped a day in the state, one of the most affected by crime against women.
However, the Mexican government took five years to decree the gender alert, a mechanism that tries to help reduce violence. It was until last August, after a lot of pressure from female activists, complaints and protests.
Karla Romero has not yet been located – who today must have 16 years -, the Undersecretary of Human Rights, of the Ministry of the Interior, Alejandro Encinas, recognized that Tlaxcala is among the entities with the highest rates of human trafficking and sexual exploitation. He also described the age profile of the victims.
“Corresponds to young women, in 90% of cases with little education, from low-income families or without work ”, he warned.
The case of the girl Karla Romero has been one of the most emblematic of the country because it returned the eyes to the central entity, located one hundred and fifty kilometers from the Mexico City , which in the years 90 generated a scandal when in the United States a mafia of pimps who kidnapped girls in Mexico was captured to force them into sex work in New York.
Karla Romero left her house on her way to elementary school, in the El Cristo neighborhood of San Pablo del Monte, but almost upon reaching her destination she was abducted by unknown subjects who forced her to get into a vehicle. From that day until today his whereabouts are a mystery.
“I have stopped shouting justice, as many mothers have done, because I know that as long as man governs there will be no justice,” he reproached Olga Tezmol, the girl’s mother. “I don’t know if the mechanism is going to help or not but, in the meantime, her father and I are going to keep looking for her.”
According to the General Law on Women’s Access to a Free Life Violence, the Alert on Gender Violence against Women (AVGM), is a mechanism for the protection of women’s human rights that consists of a set of emergency government actions to face and eradicate feminicidal violence.
It also applies to the existence of a comparative grievance that prevents the full exercise of women’s human rights, in a specific territory (municipality or federative entity) .
Up to date on 22 country states have been activated 25 AVGM since 2015; in three entities it has been activated on more than one occasion. In Edomex in July of 2015 and September of 2019. In Veracruz in November of 2016 and December of 2017 and in Guerrero in June of 2017 and June of 2020.
Hardly, the days 17, 18 and 20 last August, the Ministry of the Interior issued Alert statements in Chihuahua, Tlaxcala and Sonora.
In the country, there are no officially recognized exact or updated figures, but rather those that are collected through activists. In Tlaxcala, from January 2020 to August 2021, the Woman and Utopia Collective revealed that there are more than 500 disappearances of girls and women in Tlaxcala and only the 10% has the application of immediate search mechanisms.
What happens?
According to Edith Méndez, who heads the group, one of the main problems is that there are constant violations of the protocols for searching for disappeared persons by the Attorney General’s Office of the State (PGJE).
“Despite the fact that Tlaxcala has institutions and resources, The search for missing women and girls is not immediate, and in many cases they still ask relatives to wait until 72 hours to activate protocols. ”
The most representative case was that of Karla. About her, the National Human Rights Commission issued a recommendation to the government of Tlaxcala in 2018 in where it rescues important points about the omission of authorities and the obstruction of the investigation.
But, “to date these cases are not strictly investigated from the beginning and under a regulatory framework, but with different hypotheses, such as the flight of the young women with their boyfriend or that the reason is a family fight; furthermore, they are still asked to wait between 48 and 72 hours to activate a search protocol. ”
Activating the gender alert is a new bet to start a search well, but there are other challenges.
Alejandro Encinas said that the problem for trafficking is a matter of unemployment ; Human rights defenders affirm that it is more impunity. Colectivo Mujer y Utopía announced that a week an average of eight women, young people, adolescents and girls are reported as missing in Tlaxcala.
In 2019 the report yielded at least 400 missing women among adults, youth, and under 18 years, of which 54 are still be located.
The activist Juan Martín Pérez, former director of the Network for Rights of Children (Redim), explained that the increase in the disappearance of girls and women is related to the increase in organized crime , as in a war, where armed groups – both criminals and the Army – look for prostitutes or sex slaves.
Previously, he explains, the trafficking corridor started in Tlaxcala, Puebla, State of Mexico, Morelos, Mexico City, and now reaches Guanajuato. “The crime found that human trafficking was a big business, not only for sexual slavery and that is why now there are more disappearances”
Another issue is femicides. The National Victims Commission recognized that violent deaths in the state doubled in the last five years and 76 Femicides have not been investigated as such. January 2017 to August 2021, documented 95 violent deaths of women, not counting the black number of cases that are only reported as murders.
In August, the local press documented the death of three cases with traces of gender violence, including a woman of almost 60 years and two women under 30 who, after being sexually abused, were transferred to a site to give them the coup de grace in one of the four municipalities that concentrate this crime profile.
You may be interested in:
· ¿ Why does Tetecala want to be the first cannabis town in Mexico?
· The descendants of Moctezuma in Mexico today
· Every day two journalists are threatened with death or assaulted in Mexico