Breathe
By Gabriela Sotomayor
At the time of writing (17h05) Geneva local time, the video posted on the X account by Mafer Turrent has 977 likes, 432 retweets and 80 thousand views. Meanwhile, Regina Seemann's video has 909 likes, 606 retweets and 97 thousand views on her X account. Both complain of vicarious violence as their partners threaten to take their children away from them. In a country of 120 million inhabitants, their complaints are lost in the digital space. Hardly anyone listened to them.
This is the audience that victims of family violence have in the sea of X messages (Twitter), this is the attention that two mothers desperate to keep custody of their children are getting. Mafer has already been released and will continue the trial against her from her home. Regina is still on the run. Both have as tools for their defense, in addition to lawyers, their posts on the networks, but few listen to them.
It is surprising that in the networks of women journalists in Mexico the issue has not transcended. Most of them do not show solidarity, do not speak out, do not share it, and do not publicize it, except on rare occasions. Mafer is shouted at by her energetic husband: "if you don't kneel down I'll kill your brothers" (who are children). Nor do they react when Edgar says to her: "I'm a psycho! Nor do they seem to be outraged by other types of gender violence, such as the death threats received by female journalists, especially those who investigate drug trafficking or the corruption of those in power. If it does not provoke the empathy of journalists, much less that of ordinary women.
What can it matter that a woman loses custody of her children, goes to jail or has to flee from one city to another as if she were a criminal, in a country where an average of 8 femicides occur daily in total impunity? Who does these cases keep her awake at night if the president of the country in this strange "women's time" has not even mentioned the names of the women murdered at the hands of their intimate partners? President Claudia Sheinbaum talks about everything but women's rights. She has said nothing about the searching mothers, about the scourge of young women victims of forced disappearance, kidnapping, serious human rights violations. He named 2025 the year of Indigenous Women, but not by naming them is he doing anything special for them. It sounds like a cliché.
Violence against women, especially domestic violence, is a pandemic, that is, it is a disease that is spreading throughout the world, not only in Mexico, but in every corner of the world. If we were to say that there is an epidemic in Mexico, we would be very short-sighted. The cases of Mafer and Regina, which are now emblematic cases, were not mentioned in many of the newscasts, nor did they occupy the headlines of the newspapers, nor were they picked up on radio and TV. Why? Because the cases of domestic violence in Mexico would occupy all the pages of the newspapers and mentioning them on radio or TV would take all the time of the newscasts. Talking about the subject is not business, nor does it cause curiosity and apparently now it outrages very few people, most of them women.
I think there should be a "thermometer" like the one kept by UNESCO on the number of journalists murdered in the world. Can you imagine how many names a list of cases of domestic violence reported to justice in Mexico would have? And in Latin America? And in the world? I remember the steel barriers that former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ordered to be put up to "protect" the National Palace from the women's march. Nothing better than those metal fences for the demonstrators to paste hundreds of posters with names and surnames of victims of femicide, rape, in short, of all kinds of violence. It backfired.
The indolence of violence against women in the country by women themselves is tremendous and incomprehensible. It is not enough to go out on March 8 to defend their rights and tear down walls. The attention that the cases of women victims of serious human rights violations receive in the country is almost nil. And in the end, what do the victims receive from their gender partners: indifference, an icy and cruel indifference.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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