On March 6th, the ‘Emergent Plan to Guarantee the Integrity, Safety and Life of Women and Girls in Mexico’ was presented, which outlines the main strategies that the new government intends to implement towards prevention, attention, sanction and eradication of violence against this sector of the population.
The Secretary of the Interior, Olga Sanchez, said that this plan will be the starting point to intervene “in a decisive and prompt way in the fight against any practice of violence that threatens the rights, integrity and life of women.” “All of them are united by a common factor: the lack of timely and diligent intervention of the Mexican State to preserve its integrity and to ensure their lives,” she said.
Among the main actions proposed by the Plan are: seeking greater coordination between the different levels of the Republic and the states that can play a role in the prevention, attention, sanction and eradication of violence; making modifications to the General Law on Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence in order to prevent, investigate, punish and repair the damage to victims to make it effective; implementing campaigns on the right of women to a life free of violence; monitoring the incidence of crime and acts of violence, mainly disappearances, sexual violence, family violence and femicides; promoting safe cities and spaces free of violence, and creating mobile applications and Web pages to identify high-risk areas; sanctions to those who are omitted or act with negligence; establish a unique penal code to homologize femicide throughout the country, among others.
Some of the actions mentioned will be implemented immediately while others could take up to six months to implement due to their complexity, said the director of Inmujeres, Nadine Gasman.
In this regard, Maria de la Luz Estrada, president of the National Citizen Observatory of Femicides, stressed the importance that the federal government has recognized that violence against women is a state problem and that, to date, the authorities “have not been able guarantee a life free of violence.” Of the gaps she warned that, “You have to know how, you have to have risk maps and still need to know what the zones, the municipalities, are where they will be carried out.” “In the country they have tried to take actions to face the increase in crimes committed against women for reasons of gender, without achieving satisfactory results since 2012, because most of the strategies have not focused on concrete actions or have not been able to be evaluated because of the lack of a methodology to do it”, she explained.
For its part, the director of the National Network of Refugees (RNR in its Spanish acronym), Wendy Figueroa, warned that the plan presented by the government and Inmujeres lacks objectives and even measurements for evaluation, so it is necessary to review it in depth.
According to the authorities themselves, in Mexico 66 of every 100 women suffer some kind of gender violence; and on average, every day,nine women are murdered.
For more information in Spanish:
Plan Emergente para garantizar la integridad, la seguridad y la vida de las mujeres y las niñas (Inmujeres)
Ven insuficiente y poco claro el plan de protección a mujeres (Pie de Página, 7 de marzo de 2019)
El plan para atender a las mujeres víctimas de violencia tardará meses (La Jornada, 7 de marzo de 2019)
Presentan plan emergente para seguridad de las mujeres; continuarán refugios, afirma presidente (lopezobrador.org.mx, 6 de marzo de 2019)
For more information from SIPAZ:
Nacional : OSC denuncian omisiones en investigación y combate a feminicidios (August 16th 2018)
National: the Mexican government does not comply with the recommendations of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (June 23rd, 2014)
Chiapas/National: Femicides on the Rise (May 24th, 2018)
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