One only woman is mapping the femicides of all of Mexico. Her name is María Salguero

Instead of land, forests and mountain ranges, the satellite image of that piece of America displays stacked red crosses, also violet and blue. Crosses that mean death –murders–. Feminicides accumulated in Mexico and counted over the last three years. A woman does this count on her own, with her own resources – almost none more than her own will -. She does the work the State should do. Her name is María Salguero.

Salguero is a 39 year old geophysical engineer from Mexico City. In 2015, she began to test formats that would allow her to prove what she already saw as a trend: that murders of women were not only occurring in the state of Mexico, but throughout the country. She grew up reading the crime sections of the newspapers and the papers devoted only to crime, in a country where violence and missing people became daily events, especially under the government of Felipe Calderón.

In 2014, Salguero helped in the elaboration of the map of 8,000 disappeared, Buzzfeed reports. With this knowhow, she got into the endeavor that she now does as a form of activism. Salguero activated google alerts such as “Woman murdered”, “woman stabbed”, “feminicide”, “woman’s remains”, “woman’s corpse”, “girl murdered”, “woman dismembered”, as she told Verne. In January 2016, she began mapping all this: every morning she checked these alerts and reviews the crime pages of newspapers all over Mexico. Then she started counting.

Her first work is being developed on a map that can be seen at the site Los Feminicidios en México. Salguero still feeds it. It records 6583 femicides throughout the country, in only three years, from January 2016 to January 2019. She designed categories that make it difficult to ignore the complexity of the problem: they remind us that these women had a body and a life; that they left orphaned children; that they were little girls or were 59 years old; that they were killed in the most brutal ways; that they were murdered to steal their children or together with their partner as vengeance from the organized crime.

On this map, the victims have a name and, after a click, a story. Montserrat Ángela Salinas or Karina Clara Mendoza, for example, murdered in the region of Veracruz on January, 2016. Or Marina Lima Buendía, murdered in Chimalhuacán in June, 2010. If the woman’s body has not been identified, Salgado still publishes the minimum that is known about that body.

To be able to get into more detail, María Salguero moved the work to a Google map, updated until the first semester of 2018. That’s the satellite image bathed in crosses: the red ones belongs to the 1649 cases of those six months last year; the violet ones correspond to the 2200 murders of 2017; the 2100 killings of 2016 are the blue crosses. Feminicides are on the rise.

“I keep doing the map with my resources, I do it with full dedication in my spare time. But every day my spare time is less,” Salguero told IQ Latino over the phone.

Salguero fed the map every day, at least during four hours. But she also has to work. She has a job at at the National Search Commission of Mexico. She knows she is a little behind in the updating –last time on January 6th–, but she will catch up.

Violence against women is typified in the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary  deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life”.

Thus, femicide is not only attributed to domestic violence, as recognized by the UN in its Lati American Model Protocol for the Investigation of Gender-related Killings of Women: it is also called femicide. And it defines it as “the most extreme form of violence against women”.

“It takes place within the family or in public spaces and can be committed by private individuals or carried out or tolerated by state agents. It amounts to the violation of several fundamental rights of women that are established in the core international human rights instruments—especially the right to life, the right to physical and sexual integrity, and the right to personal liberty,” the document explains.

“Also here in Mexico the murders of women have increased due to the factor of organized crime,” Salguero points out. She assures that this factor is being bypasses when analyzing the femicides. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, she says, invited her to participate in a project to expand on this issue.

The trend of femicides is growing in Mexico, according to the findings of María Salguero’s work. Nine women are murdered every day in Mexico, she told Milenio.

It is not surprising, therefore, that María Salguero ended up recording the murder of an acquaintance, her neighbor Abigail, from whom she just knew the first name. She was murdered in Mexico City in April 2017.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t know my neighbor’s last name and press releases didn’t give it to you. I didn’t have a close relationship with her, she sold the bag of food I always bought from her and we just said hello to each other. But it is shocking to know that she was murdered. It was an execution, like from  organized crime, then we knew that it was a because differences between individuals,” she recalls in the conversation with IQ Latino.

When Salguero began the mapping, recording the murders of so many women turned her emotions upside down. She had nightmares. She handles it better now, she says. Mapping out other subjects and riding her bicycle for very long distances helps burn out the tracks of trauma.

“On Facebook I don’t share almost anything about feminicide to my friends. What I do is I upload videos of puppies and kittens and animals.”