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News > Latin America

More Than 1,500 Mexican Women Murdered Since 2015: Report

  • Women attending a protest against femicide in Mexico hold aloft a banner declaring:

    Women attending a protest against femicide in Mexico hold aloft a banner declaring: "No more machismo-based violence." | Photo: Reuters

Published 23 December 2017
Opinion

This year marks Mexico's highest murder rate since modern records began in 1997, dealing a fresh blow to President Enrique Peña Nieto's pledge to fight violence.

A total of 1,525 femicides were recorded in Mexico between January 2015 and November 2017, with authorities receiving more than 436,000 complaints of domestic violence, according to a report by the Executive Secretary of National Public Security released on Friday.

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The report also found that almost 36,500 sexual assaults were carried out by state officials.

This year marks Mexico's highest murder rate since modern records began in 1997, dealing a fresh blow to President Enrique Peña Nieto's pledge to fight violence as next year's presidential elections loom large.

Last week, an investigation conducted by UN Women, Mexico's Interior Department and the National Women's Institute showed that the annual femicide rate more than doubled between 2007 and 2012.

In total, as many as 52,210 women have been murdered in Mexico since 1985. Nearly one-third of the victims were killed during the last 10 years. 

Despite the North American country having specific laws in place to tackle the issue, the number of femicides has steadily risen over the past few decades, a reflection of Mexico's growing culture of impunity. 

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A total of 23,101 murder investigations were opened in the first 11 months of this year, surpassing the 22,409 registered in the whole of 2011, figures published on Friday night by the interior ministry showed. 

At 18.7 per 100,000 inhabitants, the 2017 Mexican murder rate is still lower than it was in 2011 when it reached almost 19.4 per 100,000, the data showed. 

Peña Nieto took office in December 2012 pledging to tame the violence that escalated under his predecessor Felipe Calderon, who initiated a fully militarized approach against drug-trafficking. 

But Peña Nieto's failure to contain the killings has damaged his credibility and hurt his centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which faces an uphill struggle to hold onto power in the July 2018 presidential election. The law bars Peña Nieto from seeking re-election.

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