WMC Women Under Siege

Four women were also raped and killed in Mexico journalist murder—but media calls them promiscuous

“Who Killed Rúben Espinosa?” read headlines throughout Mexico after the brutal murder of five people in Mexico City. On July 31, the victims were found in an apartment the Narvarte neighborhood of Mexico City. One of them was identified as 31-year-old Veracruz-based photojournalist Rúben Espinosa.

Eight weeks earlier Espinosa had fled Veracruz due to threats against his life. As Mexican news site SinEmbargo reported, the four women who were in the apartment with Espinosa were raped and tortured and then shot once in the head in a coup de grâce. The women were not immediately identified by authorities, and all of the early media and social media coverage focused on #JusticiaParaRúben. Initial news reports included details about the women’s lives such as the fact that one woman was divorced and another, a Colombian, was a model or a prostitute. The women were partying, announced headlines, until a week later Mexican authorities retracted that story. But the damage to the reputation of those nameless women had already been done. 

On August 5, journalists from Oaxaca held a vigil demand justice for the killing of Veracruz photojournalist Rúben Espinosa. Most who attended, like the journalist in this photo, wore masks with Espinosa’s face. In the background lie photos of the four women who were murdered alongside him. (Alice Driver)

These tactics—implying that women are prostitutes, partiers, or “bad” women—are the ones traditionally used by the Mexican government and media to blame women for their own deaths. For example, this 1993 article in Mexican daily La Jornada about a female victim reports: “The mental health status of this young woman was adequate when she disappeared given that she was in high school, but when her body was found it was discovered that she had been hospitalized a long time in a mental institution, and had a cesarean scar, and we don’t know what happened to the product.”

When I interviewed Mónica Villamizar, who frequently reports for Vice News from Mexico, she emphasized the need for justice for the women in this case. “If these women had been working for the BBC, it would have been front-page news,” she said. “There has to be justice for these girls. It has been focused on Rúben, but what about the other women?”

Activist Nadia Vera, cleaner Alejandra Negrete, makeup artist Yesenia Quiróz, and Colombian hairdresser Mile Virginia Martín were murdered alongside Rúben Espinosa. The Colombian received the vilest treatment by officials and the media, which attempted to use her as a scapegoat by insinuating over several days that she was the owner of an expensive Mustang (clearly an important question: How did a woman like her afford a car like that?), that she was a model or a prostitute, that she liked to party, and that she used drugs or had connections to drug gangs. None of that information was based on evidence, but by the time journalists like Catalina Ruiz-Navarro presented evidence to the contrary, the damage to, at least, the Colombian woman’s reputation had been done.

The family of Nadia Vera published a public announcement taking Mexico City Attorney General Rodolfo Ríos Garza to task for its treatment of their daughter. The family asked him why it has released information that “Nadia was the girlfriend of photojournalist Rúben Espinosa, which is false because Nadia and Rúben were friends, and met while both residing in Xalapa, Veracruz, and collaborated in the [performing arts] Festival4x4.”

In research for my book on feminicide—the murder of women because they are women—in Juárez, Mexico, I found that the police, politicians, and the media exposed or invented personal details about the victims that insinuated that they were prostitutes or promiscuous women. Francisco Barrios, who was the governor of the State of Chihuahua from 1992 to 1998, and Mayor of Ciudad Juarez in Chihuahua from 1983 to 1986, infamously made a speech at a 1993 press conference about feminicide in which he said, “The girls move in certain places, frequenting certain types of people and enter into confidence with thugs who then become their abusers. Good people to stay in their homes with their families, and the bad ones are out on the street.” Like Barrios, many politicians have publicly suggested that good women should be in the home. Gender stereotypes about “bad” women are used to dehumanize victims of violence and provide a pretext for not investigating crimes.

The murders of the four women have been labeled “feminicide” or “femicide,” terms that are developing both legally and theoretically to address misogynistic violence against women, usually killing but also violence that often involves rape or mutilation, such as the cutting of nipples. It is a term that is often misunderstood, but on a basic level it is important to recognize that the majority of violence against men is perpetrated with weapons, which is an impersonal type of violence, whereas violence against women is often extremely personal and physical, based on acts that show power over the female body and female sexuality.

Dr. Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who researches gender violence in Latin America, says that feminicide calls for special treatment in the judicial system; that this crime “an extreme form of hate.” “It is true there is a small proportion of this kind of crime in comparison to young males murder rates,” he said. “But the moral and social meaning of killing women, with its sexual component, has to be considered among the major forms of victimization”—which is not the case at this point. Mexico’s National Citizen Femicide Observatory, a coalition of 43 groups that document the crime, reports that six women are assassinated every day in the country. (This Vice documentary looks at the situation in the State of Mexico, which has currently has the highest rates of feminicide in the country.)

This case of Nadia Vera, Alejandra Negrete, Yesenia Quiróz, and Colombian Mile Virginia Martín provides a clear example of how violence against women is often treated as less important than violence against men in Mexico. The women in this case were made completely invisible until citizens pointed out that they too, had been victims—victims treated as lesser members of society. As Francisco Goldman reported in the New Yorker on August 14, Nadia Vera’s mother, Mirtha Luz Pérez, wrote a poem published by online newspaper Aristegui Noticias dedicated to her daughter: “Don’t leave me sugar girl / to dissolve inside weeping skin / Don’t leave me free bird / for the cold moorlands of absence.” Vera’s parents have been outspoken about the treatment of their daughter and the other female victims by government officials and the media.

I spoke to Roxanne Krystalli, the program manager for the Humanitarian Evidence Program at Tufts University’s Feinstein International Center and a researcher on questions of gender and violence in armed conflict, about why it matters that we distinguish the crime of feminicide from everyday violence.

“If we simply treat the targeting of violence against certain women as coincidental, or as the same as ‘homicide,’ we fail to dissect these messages and, therefore, fail to paint a complete picture of the dynamics and experiences of violence,” Krystalli said.

Rosa-Linda Fregoso, a feminicide researcher and a professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California who has authored several books about feminicide, also advocates for the importance of the recognizing these acts against women specifically. “It makes visible violence against women,” she said. “That’s why we have the concept ‘genocide’; it makes visible crimes against particular groups.”

Fregoso added that in this case, “The focus is on the journalist. You are focusing on attacks against the press. Those are civil and political rights. Other types of crimes, like social or cultural violence, those are made invisible, which is why you need a concept that makes them visible.”

The murder of these five victims in Mexico City has highlighted issues of inequality and misogyny that often plague feminicide victims after the initial physical violence. Vice’s Villamizar expressed something I have heard repeatedly from citizens in Mexico in the wake of this crime: “You wonder how much worse can it get, and then it does.” And as with so many of us, she said, “I’ve had nightmares about these girls and just thinking about how they died.” 



More articles by Category: International, Violence against women
More articles by Tag: Rape, Sexualized violence, Americas
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