Woman have told Sheinbaum - a wife, mother, and soon a president - they have high expectations. 'Many times, we are afraid of leaving the house and not coming home,' one woman told her.
Lauren VillagranUSA TODAY
CIUDAD JUÁREZ – Rosa María Hernández Díaz waited to vote for a new Mexican president until after she attended a Sunday church service dedicated to her daughter who went missing 13 years ago.
Hernández Díaz bowed her head as the priest prayed for peace in this border city plagued by violence, especially involving teens and women. He called her to the altar, and she pleaded with the congregation to help her and other mothers find their missing girls.
Because Mexico's government never has.
In this city notorious for murders of women, in a country where violence against women often goes unpunished, Mexican voters on Sunday elected a woman to lead the country. Now the eyes of women are upon Claudia Sheinbaum, who makes history as the first woman to lead this country that is known for a ''macho'' culture, where women did not win the right to vote until 1953.
Can she make them safer?
More: Mexico has a new president, Claudia Sheinbaum. What does it mean for the United States?
“I want to remind her she is a woman and a mother,” Hernández Díaz said. “And to please empathize with us, the mothers who have missing sons or daughters, and to help us find them. That’s all we want: that she not forget about us.”
More: Mexico elects first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum declared winner in historic election
Emergency declaration for violence against women
A month before the election, a journalist for a Mexican television program told Sheinbaum there were “high expectations” for a female president on the question of gender violence.
“Despite the statistics and what they tell us,” reporter Danielle Dithurbide told her, “many times we are afraid of leaving the house and not coming home.”
Sheinbaum is a trained physicist who shares a Nobel prize and holds a doctorate in energy engineering. As mayor of Mexico City, she was better known as a technocrat concerned with results than a glad-handing politician like her political mentor, current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
López Obrador marketed a strategy he called “Hugs Not Bullets,” which did little to reduce Mexico’s substantial problems with homicides tied to organized crime. And although he campaigned six years ago with a promise to address gender-based violence, one of his first budget cuts eliminated financial support for nonprofits working to address it.
“The resources were important to educate women on recognizing the types of violence and providing psychological and legal services,” said Yadira Cortés, an activist with the Ciudad Juárez-based Red Mesa de Mujeres, which works to prevent violence against women and provide services to victims. “The cuts were his first move. After that everything changed.”
While López Obrador was cutting budgets and sparring with feminist groups, Sheinbaum declared an emergency for violence against women in the capital. She invested in policing, investigations, prosecutions and victim services.
“Most of the violence against women is family violence, and that’s where we have to start,” Sheinbaum told Dithurbide during the April interview.
But even as homicides dropped, the number of murders classified as femicides in the capital climbed by more than a third over the same period.
Writing the names of 'the disappeared' on ballots
The night before the election, Sheinbaum reminded voters that she is also a mother and a grandmother.
She posted a photo with her baby grandson in her arms to X, formerly Twitter, and said, “It’s always a great happiness to spend time with family.”
Social media users pointed out that the mothers and grandmothers of the more than 100,000 disappeared persons in Mexico would say the same but with little hope of ever finding their loved ones, despite digging for their bones on their own.
“The perspective of us mothers is that there isn’t much hope,” said Norma Esther Andrade, whose 17-year-old daughter was kidnapped, disappeared, and brutally murdered in 2001. Andrade’s longtime activism was a catalyst for Mexico recognizing femicide in its criminal code.
Being women “doesn’t guarantee they are feminists and it also doesn’t mean they’ll use their agenda to solve problemas,” she said.
But Cortés – whose own mother survived an attempted femicide – said she is hopeful Sheinbaum will chart her own, new path in office. Sheinbaum has brought advisors into her circle who have worked on issues of gender-based violence, she said.
Andrade joined a different sort of national campaign on Sunday, she said: a movement to write in the names of the disappeared in the slot for “other candidate.”
Andrade went to vote. But across the colorful pages stamped with party affiliations, she scrawled the name of her daughter in black pencil: Lilia Alejandra García Andrade, 1983-2001.
Voting in Ciudad Juárez, the city with highest femicides
After the Mass on Sunday, Hernández Díaz headed home to vote in her local polling station in a neighborhood on the city’s outskirts.
Thirteen years after her daughter's disappearance, Ciudad Juárez is still unsafe for women. The city ranked at the top of any Mexican city for gender-based murders of women, registering 26 femicides 2022, according statistics from the country's security and protection agency.
The last time she saw her daughter – a fan of electronic music who had just finished her first semester in college – it was April 2011. Diana Rocío Ramírez Hernández left to meet a girlfriend downtown and never came home.
Hernández Díaz has never stopped looking. But she’s come up against ineptitude and institutions without the budgets they need to investigate, she said.
“So many things stop the investigations of our disappeared,” she said. “When we came with information, they’d say they didn’t have vehicles or gas to fill them. The search should be for our living loved ones, not for their bones.”
Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
