Day Without Women: Mexicans to strike over gender violence

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Thousands of women across Mexico planned to stay home from work or school on Monday for “A Day Without Women,” hours after an unprecedented number of them filled the streets to protest rampant gender violence on International Women’s Day.

The back-to-back protests mark an intensification of the struggle by Mexican women against violence and impunity in one of the most dangerous countries in the world for females.

Women in Argentina and Chile have staged strikes in previous years and will do so again Monday.

“What we want to provoke is that they see that if we’re not there, the city won’t circulate. That there are many of us. What are they going to do without us if they are killing us?” said Viviana Mendez, a lawyer and mother who planned to take part in the strike.

The idea is to become invisible for a day so that coworkers, bosses, boyfriends, husbands and in some cases children reflect on the absence of each participating woman.

Government data say 3,825 women met violent deaths last year, 7% more than in 2018.

That works out to about 10 women slain each day in Mexico.

Thousands more have gone missing without a trace in recent years.

Authorities seem incapable of preventing or properly investigating the crimes, very few of which result in convictions.

“In Mexico it’s like we’re in a state of war; we’re in a humanitarian crisis because of the quantity of women that have disappeared or been killed,” said María de la Luz Estrada, coordinator of the National Citizen’s Observatory of Femicide.

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