Mexico president: Anti-femicide protests won’t change policy

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Tuesday that recent protests against rising killings of women in Mexico would not change his government’s long-term, ground-up approach to dealing with the problem.

Asked at his daily news conference whether the outpourings of indignation would have any concrete effects on his administration or result in a change of focus, the president doubled down on his broader policy for tackling all sorts of violence and criminality in the country.

“No, on the contrary, we are going to reinforce the same strategy of addressing the causes that create the violence,” Lopez Obrador said, “to seek to live in a better society, to attend to young people, to attend to the countryside, for there to be no unemployment, for disintegration of families to be avoided, for values to be strengthened.”

More:

• In Mexico, women are hated to death

• Why do femicides in Mexico persist?

• Mexico arrests suspects in the killing of seven-year-old girl

He spoke two days after an estimated 80,000 women marched through Mexico City and other cities across the country saw smaller demonstrations, and a day after untold thousands of women and girls skipped work or school in a protest billed as “a day without women” to call attention to those who are killed or disappeared.

Such demonstrations have grown in recent months, especially in the capital, amid increasing anger about gender-based violence, including a grisly murder-mutilation and the kidnap-killing of a seven-year-old girl, both in Mexico City.

According to official figures, 3,825 women met violent deaths in 2019, an average of more than 10 a day and a rise of 7 percent over the previous year. Homicides generally have also been rising for several years straight, dating back to before Lopez Obrador took office in December 2018, though the rate of increase slowed last year. The vast majority of all crimes in the country go unpunished.

Asked whether the government could present a detailed plan for reducing violence against women, Lopez Obrador responded that his government has a policy on women’s rights more broadly.

“If it is not complete or is insufficient or is not disseminated, is not known, let it be presented again and updated,” he said. “Let (Interior Secretary Olga Sanchez Cordero), who coordinates all these actions in defence of women’s rights, make a presentation next week, if that works for you.”

The president called women’s movements “very important” and said his government supports them. He also alleged that his political opponents are cynically taking advantage of them to try to hurt his government.

Lopez Obrador noted the extensive reporting on the protests and suggested that demonstrations he led when he was in the opposition were not similarly covered. Lopez Obrador regularly pushes back against critical coverage during news conferences and sometimes speaks derogatorily about media outlets and specific stories.