“Young women disappear through action, omission and indolence”: Denise Dreser criticized institutions and society

The Mexican journalist Denise Dresser expressed her position on the situation of violence that women experience every day. Through her publication Common grave, the writer shared a reflection and analysis about the political, cultural and social obstacles that thousands of young people in the country face simply because they are women.

“Misogyny stalks women in Mexico, producing absences and seeking mothers, in state after state. Young people are disappearing through action or omission or indolence. They are disappearing because society is still discussing whether it was their fault for going out alone and at dawn,” Denise said.

The recent case of Debanhi Escobar paralyzed Mexico, but the event was just one of the thousands that occur every day in every corner of the territory. On April 22, the Attorney General's Office of Nuevo León announced that Debanhi's body had been found dead in a cistern at the Nueva Castilla Motel.

This news touched the hearts of thousands of people and refreshed the anger that many and many feel at the lack of government strategies to stop femicide and ensure women's safety. For this reason, Dresser pointed out to the institutions and remarked:

“I think about so many families like that and I want to scream and flee from life and the living because my country embarrasses me. Because we failed you. You and so many others. The institutions failed you, the governors like Samuel Garcia, President López Obrador, the cops, the prosecutors, the men.”

Proof of the inefficiency of the authorities and of impunity in the face of the numbers of dead women that are increasing every day, is that during the process of searching for the 18-year-old girl, the governor of Nuevo León, Samuel García, said that seven other women had been located.

The political scientist also stressed in her text that it is not fair that in this type of situation women should be judged for going out to a bar to have fun, dance and live “as my daughter has done so many nights, educated to be a person and not something or object. Educated to own herself as Debanhi and María Fernanda were and Alison and Jaqueline and Karen and Paulina and Yolanda and thousands more who came across the reality of being a woman in this country, turned into a mass grave.”

He also spoke of the eternal vulnerability that surrounds females, since at any time they can be disappeared, raped, abused and abandoned without them “looking for it”. “Walk alone at night and you can become another number on the list of nearly 100,000 missing persons, as just documented by the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances,” Dresser said.

He also spoke of a “normalized abnormality” in which sexism and machismo have made women's bodies something insignificant and worthless, a situation that causes violence, death and suffering to thousands of people, “I am sad for Debanhi's family, for the family of so many, for Mexico, but above all — in this very moment instant — I am sad because of what they have torn from them and from us”, emphasized the journalist.

In addition, he expressed his anguish, pain and anger that no government has been able to fulfill the obligation to protect its citizens, because the numbers of missing persons continue to rise “as men of power walk around the National Palace, mocking (...) The little that remains is to leave, to shout that we are not taken care of by the police but by friends”.

He mentioned that every femicide is a shared wound that causes such indignation that one cannot help but burn doors and “paint monuments”. There are currently thousands of parents looking for their children for years, there are thousands of parents who continue to demand justice.

Finally, Denise Dresser commented that it is very difficult to deal with a reality where there are “seven missing a day, three hundred killed a month, bones in the desert, and what is left of a body when someone seeks to erase it.”

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