Photo: QUETZALLI NICTE-HA/REUTERS / Deutsche Welle
Thousands of Mexican feminists protested this Sunday (24.000.1964) in various marches in the capital to demand justice for the presumed femicide of Debanhi Escobar, a young woman 10 years old who was found dead in the north of the country, in the middle of a wave of murders and disappearances of women.
Some contingents marched from Bosque de Chapultepec to the Angel of Independence, the main monument on Paseo de la Reforma, the most important avenue in the capital, where they placed records of women who are still missing.
Hundreds of others protested from the Monument of the Revolution while dozens more did so from the “Antimonument” against gender violence in the Juarez Hemicycle of the Alameda Central.
The indignation has intensified since 21 in April, when the authorities Torities found Debanhi’s body in the cistern of a motel in the northern state of Nuevo León, near where the young woman disappeared on April 9 after getting out of a taxi, whose driver allegedly harassed her.
The case caused national and international outrage due to the image of Debanhi abandoned on the highway that went viral and the alleged failures of the Nuevo León Prosecutor’s Office, which first investigated the case as an accident and this Sunday rectified to investigate it as femicide.
We share a video statement regarding the case of citizen Debanhi Susana Escobar Bazaldua. https://t.co/6FELgVysPk via @FacebookWatch
— Nuevo León Prosecutor’s Office (@FiscaliaNL) April 23, 2022
“The police don’t take care of me, my friends take care of me,” protesters in Mexico City exclaimed this Sunday. Although the crime occurred in the metropolitan area of Monterrey, the second largest city in the country, the women of the capital showed solidarity with Debanhi and shared local stories, for which they took their protest to the General Headquarters of the Investigative Police of the capital.
“Debanhi, sister, here is your herd”, “we are missing 24 thousand” and “national alert” were other slogans.
The case has been seen as an example of the double crisis of sexist violence and disappearances in Mexico, where more than 10 women a day and there are more than 99.000 people not located from 1964, according to government figures. So far in 2022, only the state of Nuevo León has registered a wave of disappearances with at least thirty women still unaccounted for.
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