Femicide destroys the lives of survivors and the victims' families

Five years ago, a Mexican woman woke up in a hospital one morning connected to an endotracheal tube and a catheter. She was in so much pain that she barely remembered being brutally beaten by her boyfriend .

The woman has assumed the name of Becky Bios because after the attack she wanted to leave behind her old identity, she said. She withheld her legal name .

Bios said she spent two weeks in a coma in a clinic in central Mexico after the brutal attack , which left her with a ruptured gallbladder and in respiratory arrest.

“Waking up from the coma, I didn’t remember anything. I looked at my body, I was extremely thin. I wanted to talk but felt the tube in my throat,” said the woman, now 36, a psychologist. “I’d never felt so vulnerable .”

Bios said it took her years to find the courage to talk about her case without feeling ashamed and to convince others, including her family and authorities, of the seriousness of the attack .

She said her partner attacked her when she told him she would leave him after several episodes of sexual violence .

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“Little by little, he would corner me and make me think I’m worthless and, worse, I believed him,” she said.

When her partner, now on the run from authorities , entered her hospital room one day, she said she was so enraged she wanted to attack him with the fork she was holding.

She reported the attack after leaving hospital. But the Prosecutor’s Office merely advised her to return if it happened again, she said.

Nearly five years later, she said she still suffers from hearing problems and memory loss.

“I asked for help but nobody believed me,” she said.

Bios considers the attack an attempted femicide , a crime described under Mexican law as the murder of a woman f or their gender . Her account offers rare testimony from a survivor of attacks against women, a crime that has besieged Mexico for decades.

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are frequently carried out by domestic partners and often involve extreme , grotesque , or degrading violence .

In 2019, recorded femicides increased to 976 cases, over double the number registered five years ago. Overall, 12% of murders in Mexico, including those not classified as femicides, are of women.

In recent weeks, the kidnapping and murder of a seven-year-old girl named Fátima and the skinning and disemboweling of Ingrid , a 25-year-old woman, have fueled anger among women about what many view as authorities’ inadequate response to the brutality.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador

blamed “ neo-liberalism ” for the violence against women in the aftermath of Fátima’s murder, sparking widespread criticism.

Prosecutions for femicide remain few and far between. Relatives of victims blame the country’s weak justice system .

Irinea Buendia

said her daughter Mariana Lima was murdered by her husband, a police officer from the state of Mexico. The husband claims Mariana committed suicide .

He was initially acquitted but Mexico’s Supreme Court has ordered the case be reopened, arguing that enough evidence existed to rule out suicide. The accused remains in prison awaiting the outcome of the trial.

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Lima’s case became emblematic because it was the first case of alleged femicide to be escalated to the Mexican Supreme Court . Relatives of victims say authorities do not always take cases seriously.

“My husband died two years ago waiting for justice,” Buendia said.

After a series of brutal femicides throughout the country, women took the streets to stage a massive protest on March 8.

On March 9, women withdrew from public life as a way to protest against violence against women.

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