The United Nations ranks Mexico one of the most violent countries in the world for women. The Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography found that 66% of women and girls age 15 or older have experienced some type of violence personally, and 41% have experienced sexual violence. In addition to the universal forms of male violence we typically think of in the United States—domestic murder, rape, physical assault in heterosexual relationships—the women and girls of Mexico live with the threat and reality of gang violence and government violence on a daily basis. Hundreds, if not thousands, of women have disappeared all over Mexico since the 1980s, presumed murdered and still unfound. Other women and girls have been found dead in the mass graves that pepper the country, more victims of the savage drug war that seems to have no end in sight. Local police and other government officials are known to be corrupt and violent themselves, often doing nothing to investigate crimes committed against women, including disappearances, and even raping women and girls both in and out of police custody. What Mexican women and girls face is not just ordinary male violence and misogyny but the violence of white capitalism, racism, and drug consumption that spills over from the United States, keeping the drug-trafficking gangs alive and fueling their terrorism. The men in law enforcement and the government who are supposed to protect these women from violent husbands, boyfriends, fathers, and gang members instead use their power to further victimize the women or else ignore them. If the gangsters and the cops weren’t bad enough, Mexican women and girls must also fear the men who kidnap and traffic them into the international sex trade. Without even looking at other women’s issues like wages and abortion rights, we can recognize the female condition in Mexico is dire and horrifying.

Mexican women have been fighting their male oppressors with feminism for the last century, and a new generation of young feminists are attacking Mexico’s misogyny with the courage and passion long since abandoned in the world’s more stable, white majority countries. Mexican women—like so many other women outside the so-called first world nations—can’t afford to be passive, soft, or liberal in their feminism. They must be radical. They must be brave. They aren’t fighting for some misguided idea of “equality” with the evil men in their society; they’re fighting for their lives, their freedom, and their safety. They have only themselves to depend on. No one else in the world is coming to save them. Because their situation is so desperate, Mexican feminists hold on to their rage and summon their courage, even though the potential consequences Mexican men threaten them with are so much more gruesome than anything the average American or European or Canadian feminist needs to worry about. For that, those of us feminists in the States and other “first-world” countries can learn from Mexican women, just as we can learn from the women who fight their oppression throughout the second and third world.  

If a single Mexican feminist can symbolize and exemplify the bravery and militancy of Mexican feminism, her name is Lydia Cacho. Using her journalism career as a vehicle for her feminist resistance, Lydia exposed the sex crimes committed against children by former hotelier Jean Succar Kuri and the involvement of Mexican politicians and businessmen in covering up Kuri’s child porn, child rape, and child sex trafficking activities. She has also reported on the unsolved female homicides in Juarez, Mexico, opened and ran a women’s shelter, and written several books exposing international sex trafficking. Even though she was raped herself and unjustly arrested in retaliation for her investigation of the child sex trafficking in Mexico, even though she has fielded death threats and threats of physical and sexual violence for over a decade, even though she has been robbed and harassed and had her dogs killed by the men who fear her work, she has survived and refuses to stop delivering the truth. Despite the U.N’s Human Rights Council telling her to leave Mexico, she refuses. In a country where journalists have already been murdered for doing their jobs, even when they do not seek to disrupt male violence against women and girls, Lydia remains steadfast in her commitment to feminist reporting and human rights activism. She has suffered for her work, but without her, Mexico would be an even darker, more dangerous place for women and girls. She has the commitment, determination, and radical spirit that also carry the Mexican feminists protesting in the streets, who keep the resistance alive. 

Mexican feminism is powerful, not least of all because it can inspire and teach women around the world how to live and act bravely. Mexican women and girls, as they fight the men in their own culture for their right to survive in physical safety, need the help of American women in fighting the U.S. forces that fuel drug-related gang violence in Mexico. They need the help of women everywhere to fight the male sex traffickers who operate worldwide. Mexican feminists call on us in the U.S., Europe, Canada, and elsewhere to match their radicalism, not just for their good but our own.