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“Something is wrong if in the 21st Century, society still allows women to be killed,”
said producer and director Brigitte Leoni at the Filmar Latin American film festival in Geneva earlier this month. The former UN communications officer was presenting her latest documentary “Norma”, about a Mexican mother, Norma Andrade, who has fought for justice after the killing of her daughter, Lilia Alejandra, in Ciudad Juarez in 2001.
After 23 three years of relentless struggle, Norma is now awaiting a hearing of her daughter’s case at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. If successful, it would be the second femicide case addressed by the international court since 2009. But justice in Mexico is still desperately falling short of protecting crimes against women and girls. “They are failing us,” Andrade lamented at a panel discussion that followed the screening of the film. “We now have laws and infrastructure that we didn’t have before, and yet they keep on killing more women.”
There were an estimated 3,000 femicides in Mexico in 2023, though only one out of 10 cases are denounced by the victims, and the rate of impunity is above 95 per cent. The global number of femicides the same year was almost 85,000, the UN said in a reportreleased ahead of Monday’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Around 60 per cent were committed by an intimate partner or by family members – an average of 140 women and girls per day.
-By Paula Dupraz-Dobias
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