Building Resilience due to violence: The struggle of Mexican Communities (original) (raw)
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Ciencia Jurídica, 2017
This text addresses strategies of protection of women at risk of or suffering violence, carried out by human rights bodies and organizations in Mexico. It focuses on different forms of intersectional and cumulative violence and vulnerability against women and girls including of an economic and institutional type. It then explores how such mechanisms based on the national and local understanding of international human rights law, may better tackle the structural vulnerabilities suffered by women facing different categories of risk, such as female asylum seekers, undocumented female migrants and refugees.
Women’s Struggle against All Violence in Mexico
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2018
Women's Struggle against All Violence in Mexico: Gathering Fragments to Find Meaning I write from Mexico, and I will mainly speak about what we are experiencing here, which is not the same as what is happening elsewhere, especially in the southern part of Latin America. Mexico is going through a very dicult period of unrestrained violence, displacement, disappearances, and deaths, which has now lasted for over a decade (Paley 2014; Gutiérrez Aguilar and Paley 2016). This tumultuous, opaque, rough period started in the beginning of 2007 when former president Felipe Calderón-who came to o ce following very suspicious election results-decided to take the military out of the barracks, supposedly putting them in charge of the task of "destroying narcotra cking." At the same time, Calderón prepared the conditions to do away with what was left of the country's public wealth, especially electricity and petroleum. Since then, we have been caught in a growing spiral of violence that has produced data on murders, confrontations, and disappearances comparable only to what is occurring in Syria. In December 2012, Peña Nieto succeeded Calderón in the Mexican presidency. This governor, although slightly transforming his predecessor's rhetoric, nevertheless continued the same strategy of an expanded (Paley 2016), fragmented, and di use (Fazio 2016) war of counterinsurgency. Re-energized women's struggles against all forms of machista (male chauvinist) violence have developed in Mexico within these extremely dicult contexts of imminent threat, and, therefore, they exhibit features speci c to those contexts. I begin this essay by highlighting the opaque and generalized environment of institutional and paramilitary violence that we inhabit,
Violence against Women in Mexico: Conceptualization and Program Application
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2006
Violence against women has been a problem in human cultures for centuries. This is still the case both in developed and in developing countries, but it is in developing countries where the problem is aggravated as the result of cultural norms that are tolerant of men exerting power over women and girls as a commonly accepted practice. This power is often put into practice through physical and psychological acts of violence. In Mexico, as in many other countries, there is a legal framework that protects women from such acts, yet in the case of Mexico it has not yet been translated into actual improvements in their lives. We present an overview of advances in legal remedies regarding violence towards females internationally and in Mexico. The fact that these advances per se do not lead to changes in social norms that tolerate violence against females is emphasized. Also presented is the experience of the Mexican Institute for Research on Family and Population (IMIFAP) with the design and implementation of programs that promote protective factors and changes in behaviors in such a way that violence is effectively prevented. These programs focus on the development of psychosocial skills and knowledge through participatory workshops that promote self reflection, and they are developed and evaluated before being then applied on a large scale in poverty-stricken communities. These workshops lead to more egalitarian relationships between genders. IMIFAP´s programs address not only violence but also other areas are integrated such that the enablement of psychosocial skills is applied in the broader sociocultural context, leading to healthier and economically more productive lives. These programs are derived from the Framework for Enabling Agentic Empowerment (FENAE), which enables choice and the development of agentic empowerment through integrating skills, knowledge, and the context in which people live.
This article is based on qualitative research in Mexico City focused on low-income women who face intimate partner violence. It is in line with works that question, through the lens of intersectionality, the false opposition between agency and victimization observed in a large proportion of literature on intimate partner violence. The investigation analyzes the women's descriptions of the everyday forms of resistance they use to survive alongside their aggressors. Our results demonstrate that, through different resistance strategies, they exert different forms of agency that are, or can be, a way of questioning male domination, and can lead to a more open demand for rights, if adequate social and institutional conditions are met.
Discourse of Gender Violence in México and Spain: an analysis from the Mexican migration
Pando Amezcua Saraí, 2019
The objective of this paper is to analyze the perception and representation of gender violence and the impact that changes in the socio-cultural context can have on it. The discourse is the main reflection of cultural and social beliefs and serves as a fundamental element to explore and understand the legitimacy of gender violence; the notion of social representation allows us to capture this collective dimension of social problems in their context and in moments of social transformation.The research process carried out semi-structured interviews with Mexican people living in Spain and living in Mexico, exploring four main dimensions: definitions of gender violence; the reactions and the intensity of this kind of violence; the causes of gender violence, as well as personal experiences. The results suggest that there is an impact on changing contexts in the social representation of gender violence, but the most relevant references are linked to the experience and trajectory of gender itself.
Communal Responses to Structural Violence and Dispossession in Cherán, Mexico
Latin American Perspectives, 2021
Mexico is currently subject to generalized violence due to conflicts between drug cartels , the state, and resource-extraction companies jostling for territorial and economic control. In 2011 and in this context, the inhabitants of the indigenous municipality of Cherán confronted the criminal organization responsible for kidnappings, extortion, and illegal logging in their communal territory. Study of this conflict and the communal responses generated in the peace process reveals that the violence was founded on social inequality and was both cause and effect of the indigenous population's material and cultural dispossession. The peace formation process involved the valorization of a collective and territorially rooted identity, the strengthening of security and justice practices based on the authority of assemblies, and an incipient interest in the construction of economic alternatives for the local population. Actualmente, México vive una situación de violencia generalizada debido a los conflictos entre los cárteles de droga, el Estado y las empresas de extracción de recur-sos que luchan por el control territorial y económico. En 2011 y en este contexto, los habitantes del municipio indígena de Cherán se enfrentaron a una organización criminal responsable de secuestros, extorsiones y tala ilegal en su territorio comunal. El estudio de este conflicto y las respuestas comunitarias generadas en el proceso de paz revela que la violencia se fundó sobre la desigualdad social y fue tanto causa como efecto del despojo material y cultural de la población indígena. El proceso de paz implicó la valorización de una identidad colectiva y territorialmente arraigada, el fortalecimiento de las prácticas de seguridad y justicia basadas en la autoridad de las asambleas, y un interés incipiente en la construcción de alternativas económicas para la población local.