“Ámber Alert is activated to locate the child under 17 Rebeca Ávila, under 10 years Matteo Padilla, under 3 years Patricio Lerma, under 10 years Jaqueline Campos, under 6 years Dilan Menéndez, a the youngest of 17 years Ximena Hernández … “
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This is how the publications that the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Mexico City published again and again this Friday on its Twitter account, and that show an “epidemic of disappearances” in which every day, on average, the trail of seven minors is lost and 3.6 children or adolescents are killed in Mexico.
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The case of Fatima Aldrighett, a seven-year-old girl who was kidnapped in front of her school and found days later murdered in a plastic bag after being sexually abused, has generated a mixture of pain and rage in a country accustomed to the stories of crimes that plague him . And fueled the demands for the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to do what according to these organizations promised to do shortly after coming to power.
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“Fatima did not have to die. School failed, the prosecution failed, Mexican society failed and, again, Fatima represents the failure of the State, of this human rights crisis that we have talked about so much and that it seems that it is not our turn, which is not going to happen to us, “lamented Juan Pérez García, executive director of the Network for Children’s Rights in Mexico (REDIM).
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“The feminicide of Fatima is not isolated from the 3.6 homicides that occur every day, 6-7 out of 10 with a firearm, the feminicide of Fatima is not isolated with what happens with the recruitment of many teenagers in the country, and it is one more of the victims of disappearance of which 11,000 victims since this absurd war began, we still don’t know about them, “he added in statements made this week in the REDIM Facebook account.
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These balances become even more worrisome when the gaze is focused only on the disappearances of minors.
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Between December 1, 2018 and December 31, 2019, 2,720 cases of missing children and adolescents were registered in Mexico. That is, an average of seven per day which in turn represents an increase against the 4 disappearances per day that were recorded just before that period began, according to figures from the Ministry of the Interior of Mexico. Only 63% of them were found.
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And, if the focus still shrinks, the numbers frighten. In that period, 85 children under 4 years of age disappeared, 63 between 5 and 9 years, 252 between 10 and 14 years and 759 between 15 and 19 years, according to official data.
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“A search in life, not to find the remains”
Pérez García, of REDIM, points out that the main problem is that the prosecutors have not done their job in dealing with these cases. “We still don’t have a live information system that allows us to have alerts and the most regrettable and offensive thing is that keep asking families to wait 48-72 hours to start the search “, said. Not being able to activate an alert quickly was precisely one of the failures in the case of Fatima.
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“The law states that this search is immediate and is a search in life, it is not to find the remains,” he said.
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Amid the outrage in Mexico, López Obrador’s first statements were unfortunate. When asked at one of his daily press conferences, the president linked the crime of Fatima with a “progressive degradation that had to do with the neoliberal model”. AMLO, an acronym with which the president is known, also asked that “they are not painting doors” to those who recently protested the femicides that end up with 10 women in Mexico every day.
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In addition to the anger over the murder of Fatima, the country was in a recent duel for Ingrid Escamilla’s Femicide, a 25-year-old woman who was killed and skinned by her partner.
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The collective rage will go back to the capital streets on March 9, when it was called a ‘day without women’ to protest against the growing gender violence in Mexico.
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“Neither a woman in the streets, nor a woman in the works, nor a girl in the schools, nor a young woman in the universities, nor a woman buying,” reads one of the calls published in social networks.
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