- Activists hailed the Mexican federal government's first-ever "gender alert" July 29, 2015
Found @: ABC15
By Amanda Erickson
March 29, 2017
"For months after he learned in 2015 that his 17-year-old daughter was kidnapped outside a club and raped by some of her former classmates, Javier Fernandez said, he refused to go to the police.
That's not to say he didn't want justice. It's all the single father wanted for Daphne, his youngest child. "I wanted to kill them all," he told a New Yorker writer last year.
But in Veracruz, Mexico you don't rely on the police to punish the guilty and protect the innocent. "The last thing the system of justice provides is justice. I just didn't trust the authorities," Frenandez said. He worried that the police would humiliate his daughter and then delay her case endlessly. "I knew they would fail us," he said in an interview.
Instead, Fernandez decided to meet with the men - the three alleged perpetrators and the purported driver of the car - and their well-to-do parents. In those sit-downs, which he taped, he demanded apologies. The young men complied.
"I regret what happened," one said, his words captured on video. "I did great harm."
"I don't doubt it happened and we made a mistake," another said. "We were wrong."
Fernandez hoped the expressions of contrition would help his daughter. Instead, things got worse. Rumors of Daphne's "promiscuity" began to spread on social media. In a note of Facebook, she described those days as a "kick in the stomach." "If I've gone out drinking, if I have worn short skirts, like the great majority of girls my age, that's why they're going to judge me?" she asked. "For that reason, I deserved it?"
Daphne's story - its horrible beginning and unjust end - has rippled across Mexico. Perhaps that's because the tale is so familiar. "To many citizens" in Veracruz, "there is little difference between the rich and the government, and between the government and the criminals," according to the New Yorker piece. The ferocious Zeta drug cartel has a near-monopoly over the state. Eight out of 10 people there say they live in fear. Since 2011, at least 15 journalists have been killed and hundreds of people have vanished. (One human rights advocate, Father Alefandro Solalinde, called the city "a factory of forced disappearances.")
Unsurprisingly, few trust the justice system and fewer come forward after an attack.
Women in Mexico are being abducted, raped and killed at record rates. Women in areas hit hard by the drug war are particularly vulnerable. In conflict zones, women become "territory" to be conquered, and rape is a tool used to intimidate rival gangs and the local population.
"Violence against women isn't an epidemic, it's a pandemic in Mexico," Ana Guezmez, the country's representative to Untied Nations Women, told Reuters..."
Read entire article @: Washington Post
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Pandemic: (of a disease) prevalent over a whole country or the world.
