Gruesome Killings Spark a Protest in Mexico City

Hundreds of women marched through Mexico City and its environs to condemn the gruesome killing of an 18-year-old in Monterrey, in the northern state of Nuevo Leon.

On Sunday, protesters marched in Nezahualcoyotl, a tough area where two women were killed in the previous week. “No to Harassment” and “Mexico is a Mass Grave” were among the signs carried by the marchers, who were mostly women.

The march in Mexico City was mostly calm. Demonstrators tied miniature missing posters on the Angel, an independence monument, each one documenting a woman’s disappearance.

Many of the posters featured Debanhi Escobar, who was discovered dead in a cistern at a Monterrey motel on Thursday, almost two weeks after she went missing.

Marchers screamed “Justice, justice!” and carried a banner regarding missing women that read “24,000 are missing.” In Mexico, the total number of missing people of all genders has surpassed 100,000.

Police and prosecutors, according to activists, have been tardy and inefficient in their investigations.

These allegations were bolstered when Debanhi Escobar’s father claimed that officials had searched the motel multiple times. Investigators did not discover her body until workers detected a bad odor emanating from an underground water tank.

She died of a head wound, apparently shortly after she was last seen on April 8.

Her case made headlines in Mexico because the young woman was abandoned on the side of the road late at night, allegedly after a cab driver tried to fondle her.

The case gained headlines after the driver, who was supposed to drive her home that night, took a terrifying snapshot.

The snapshot was taken by the driver, who worked for a taxi app, to show that the 18-year-old was alive when he exited his car on the outskirts of Monterrey.

Nobody saw her again until late Thursday when her body was discovered in a water tank near a pool at the wayside motel by detectives.

Women’s murders have grown in Mexico in recent years, rising from 977 in 2020 to 1015 in 2021. Those were simply incidents of “feminicides,” a legal word used in Mexico to describe women who are slain because of their gender. Women are killed at a substantially higher rate than men.

Women’s disappearances are still on the rise, with almost 1600 women reported missing so far this year.