‘We are tired, angry and mad’: 180,000 women march in Mexico City
Thousands take to the city’s streets on International Women’s Day to protest rampant violence.
Women chanted as they marched through Mexico City on International Women’s Day March, March 8, 2024. [Lexie Harrison-Cripps/Al Jazeera]
By midday on March 8, 2024, small groups of women dressed in lilac, wearing purple bandanas tied around their wrists, hair and necks, started to congregate in Mexico City. Soon they comprised an 180,000-strong crowd, marching and chanting together on International Women’s Day.
The chants were amplified by megaphones or voices directed upward, faces turned to the sky. With arms in the air, they yelled about their strength in numbers, the lack of police protection and their intent to fight for their rights.
“No somos una, no somos diez! ¡Somos un chingo, cuéntanos bien!”
(“We are not one. We are not 10. We are a s***load, count us right.”)
“There are so many women,” said Ileana Alvarez Mendoza, 40, who attended the march with her 10-year-old daughter, Emiliana Leyva Alvarez. “How can the government say we aren’t that many?”
Nearly 10 women were killed every day in Mexico in 2023: there were more than 2,500 female victims of homicide and over 800 femicides, according to the Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection. In 2021, more than 40 percent of women over 15 had experienced some form of violence in their childhood, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).
A group of women at the side of the march near Mexico City’s opera house, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, stood coated in streaks of purple paint, holding up signs saying “Paint me if you have been abused.”
A never-ending line waited patiently to take a turn with the paint brushes.
“¡La policía no me cuida! ¡Me cuidan mis amigas!”
(“The police don’t look out for me. My friends do.”)
Mehida Perez Martínez, a 45-year-old from Cuernavaca, a town near Mexico City, said she was marching for her children and for herself, explaining that she lives in a safe area in Mexico City but is “constantly aware of the men surrounding me”.
“Anyone could be a predator and I can’t trust the police, especially men,” said the mother of three, who joined the Amnesty International contingent of women. Dressed in a lilac tank top and baseball cap, she marched holding a sign that said, “My mom taught me to fight for my rights”.
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