Holocausts, Inquisitions, Crusades, witch hunts, lynchings, slavery, wars of imperial conquest and dominion; none of this begins with mass death and terror, but with the othering of some as the raw materiel for the wealth and power of elites, with divisions of identity and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and most especially with the idea of male privilege, our most ancient and universal system of unequal power and oppression.
Recently I unfriended someone I went to high school with and just a few days ago reconnected with here on Facebook; I identified him as who he represented himself as because he led with something only the two of us knew. But his profile and history were empty, so I didn’t really know who he is now or his story over the last decades.
After a few exchanges of conversation he wrote a misogynist hate speech comment about a female who I had reposted as a hero in calling out Trump. My immediate reply was, this is where we part company. So why am I writing about this in reference to this article? Because hate speech precedes, normalizes, enables, valorizes and legitimates hate crimes.
The guy who calls a woman a term intended to minimize her power will one day kill if unchecked. Silence is complicity, and failing to call someone on their behavior grants permission. Every teacher and parent knows this is how you create rules about what is allowed, by failing to consequent a behavior you do not wish to be repeated. We must do this as friends also; run limit setting therapy, deauthorize hate, and disengage when from contact when necessary to remain safe or avoid rewarding acts we cannot permit or be associated with.
Hate speech, which seeks to harm a class of persons, is the only exception to the right of free speech as parrhesia, the sacred calling to expose injustice, and the independence of journalism as a sacred calling to seek the truth, for hate speech dehumanizes others as a criminal theft of citizenship and identity which violates our ideals of equality and liberty; hate speech is an act of tyranny and terror which is subversive to democracy as a free society of equals..
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
Hate speech is a red line, and has no place in open debate or the free market and exchange of ideas. It is an attempt to subjugate both its targets and those it claims to speak for as a primary strategy of fascism, and it is an instrument of othering.
In this case it was sexual in nature, but this is also true generally as a tool of systems of oppression. And it gets worse from there, as disempowerment and dehumanization becomes abuse and in its terminal form femicide.
This is where misogyny leads; as written by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian, in an article entitled The livestreamed killing of an influencer could be femicide – a misunderstood crisis: Much remains uncertain about Valeria Márquez’s death. But it shines a light on a universal issue; “Valeria Márquez was killed in one of the most horrifically public ways possible. On Tuesday evening, the 23-year-old Mexican social media influencer, who had built up a large following with videos about beauty and makeup, was recording a TikTok livestream in the beauty salon where she worked in Jalisco, a state in west-central Mexico. A man entered the establishment and, with her video still running, shot her dead.
Many details of the case are still unclear. However, Márquez’s death is being investigated as a femicide, according to a statement by the Jalisco state prosecutor.
Femicide is defined as the intentional killing of a woman or girl with gender-related motivations. (The term for killing males because of their sex, something that has occurred during war and genocide, is androcide.)
While femicide is a universal and age-old issue, it is poorly understood. It is also sometimes willfully misunderstood by some men’s rights activists, who like to argue that it is a nonexistent problem because men make up the majority of victims (and perpetrators) of homicide. So it’s worth spelling out the parameters of femicide. If a woman is killed in a robbery gone wrong, that’s (probably) not femicide. If she is killed by an ex-boyfriend who views women as the property of men rather than autonomous human beings, that’s femicide. “Honour”-related killings are also obviously femicide.
We are missing a lot of data on femicide. “Too many victims of femicide still go uncounted: for roughly four in 10 intentional murders of women and girls, there is not enough information to identify them as gender-related killings because of national variation in criminal justice recording and investigation practices,” UN Women wrote in a report last year.
Naming the problem – understanding why femicide is different from homicide – is important, because it helps us solve it. If more institutions took misogyny and domestic violence seriously, we’d see fewer dead women. A report by the World Health Organization notes, for example, that “stronger gun laws related to men previously cited for or convicted of intimate partner abuse are of particular importance in reducing rates of femicide”.
Justice for Márquez doesn’t just involve finding her killer and ensuring they are punished. If this was femicide, it means being very clear about the misogyny that led to her death. It means holding all the lawmakers and institutions that perpetuate this misogyny to account. Justice means understanding that her death wasn’t some sort of tragic one-off, but part of a far larger problem.
“If I die, I want a loud death,” the Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna wrote on social media shortly before she was killed by an Israeli airstrike this year. “I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time … ”
That quote has haunted me ever since I read it. So many women who die premature and violent deaths die quiet deaths. They become statistics. Márquez must not just become another femicide statistic. Let her death, which has shone a spotlight on femicide, be loud. Let it have an impact that will remain through time.”
Go not quietly, friends.
This is an endemic and pervasive problem in Mexico, Latin America, and other patriarchal cultures because it is a design feature of patriarchy and a benefit to its apex predators as immunity for crimes against women; this is the purpose of unequal power, to create and enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
So the murder of a woman to steal her power is sadly far from unique, though the livestreamed murder of a beauty influencer is certainly shocking and horrific.
But neither is resistance and the solidarity of women in liberation struggle against patriarchy as a system of oppression unique.
As I wrote in my post of November 26 2019, Song of the Revolution: the performance of Chilean women protesting rape culture and the patriarchy encompasses Latin America; In a courageous performance of solidarity and defiance of authority, Chilean women have created a viral Song of the Revolution in a street theatre of sung and danced protest, A Rapist in Your Path, which references the atrocities and sexual terror of the Chilean police and government both now and under Pinochet, but also challenges rape culture and the Patriarchy and as such has rapidly spread across Latin America and the world.
Maybe the Girl Scouts should offer merit badges in close quarters combat and small unit tactics.
As Charis McGowan writes in The Guardian, “The song was written by Lastesis, a feminist theatre group based in the city of Valparaíso, who credited Chile’s women protesters for helping spread the work around the world.”
The group’s members are “Paula Cometa”, “Sibila Sotomayor, Daffne Valdés, and Lea Cáceres.”
“A Rapist in Your Path is based on the work of the Argentinian theorist Rita Segato, who argues that sexual violence is a political problem, not a moral one.”
“The lyrics describe how institutions – the police, the judiciary and political power structures – uphold systematic violations of women’s rights: “The rapist is you/ It’s the cops/ The judges/ The state/ The president.”
“Another section repudiates the many ways that women are blamed for falling victim to sexual violence (“And it’s not my fault / nor where I was / nor what I wore”) before concluding: “The rapist is you.”
As I wrote in my post of June 2 2024, Victory Mexico: In Celebration of President Claudia Sheinbaum; We celebrate victory for the people of Mexico in the election of her new President Claudia Sheinbaum. This is historic both for Mexico and the world; in the heart of patriarchal darkness and the psychopathy of macho violence as a system of control and oppression, her people have elected a woman. If Mexico can do this for herself, what can all of us together do in solidarity and liberation struggle?
Mexico is now a world leader in human rights and gender equality. Though her predecessor was admirable and a man of great heart and vision.
How does one balance two truths which contradict each other?
First I wish to offer eulogy for the historic Presidency of AMLO, who with all of his very human flaws remains a man who placed his life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, and whose legacy includes the restoration of the Revolution in Mexico.
A thousand Trumps cannot equal him; my hope for our common future is that Mexico herself will live up to his example.
Truth is in the details, to paraphrase the idiom which originated with Gustave Flaubert as “Le bon Dieu est dans le détail”, and herein my next step in the problematization of this event is to contextualize it in terms of the history of Mexico and what Rita Segato called “the colonialization of power” as an imposed condition of revolutionary struggle.
As I wrote in my post of November 21 2020, Hope and Struggle: Mexico;
Yesterday we celebrated the one hundred tenth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution; I cooked Oaxacan cuisine, a vestigial skill of my adventures as an ally of the Zapatista Revolt in the mid 1990’s, and there was music and dancing, if only that of my partner Theresa and myself under the glittering stars of our mountain home.
It has also been two years since the great reformer AMLO was elected President of Mexico as a figure of our hope for the future, one of many successive waves of revolutionary struggle to engulf the nation in the century and more since the Revolution of 1910, and it is to the historical dialectics of hope and struggle that my thoughts now turn.
Claudio Lomnitz has charted the course of that history in his brilliant article in Jacobin, The Mexican Revolution Is Not Dead; “The Mexican Revolution erupted 110 years ago today, as ordinary Mexicans rebelled against despotism and inequality. Before it was over, the country’s agrarian oligarchy had been destroyed.
The Mexican Revolution began 110 years ago, in response to a formal invitation. It then slowly unfurled into an uncontrollable mess. Its leader, the gentlemanly Francisco Madero, issued the summons in his Plan de San Luis: “On November 20, from 6 p.m. on, all citizens of the Republic shall take up arms to overthrow the authorities that currently govern us.”
“Mr and Mrs Madero kindly request your distinguished presence for the initiation of the Mexican Revolution; please RSVP at your local Anti-Reelection Committee,” it may well have read.
Except that rather than summoning a much-hoped-for, oh-so-civil civil society, Madero’s call was answered by a cast of characters that has contributed to making Hollywood a more diverse kind of place: bandit heroes like Pancho Villa; a villanous coup-plotting gringo ambassador; and Francisco Madero himself, who received his marching orders at séances, from the spirit of his long-departed little brother, Raúl. And then there was also the arch-traitor, alcoholic and second Indian president of Mexico, General Victoriano Huerta, who had his boss, the mild-mannered Madero, killed; and the ancient patriarch general Porfirio Díaz, who had the folly of seeking reelection for the eigth time (when is enough enough?). The list still goes on and on . . . peasant leaders like Emiliano Zapata; wily schemers like Venustiano Carranza . . . All locked in a fight to survive, or to kill one another off — for, like Chronos, the Mexican Revolution devoured all of its children.
The Revolution put Mexico’s contradictions on display, for all the world to see. It was a modern war, but unlike the First World War, with which it was contemporaneous, the Mexican Revolution’s modernity sometimes let off a cheap, secondhand aroma. Its most prized gun was not the Krupp’s astonishing “Big Bertha,” but rather the “carabina .30-30” of lore. These guns were purchased from the US Army’s stock of leftovers from the Spanish-American War of 1898. Still, knockoffs and all, the Mexican Revolution was a modern war, yet it served to upend the painstakingly cultivated image of modernity that had been nursed during thirty years of dictatorship (the “Porfiriato”). The positivist dream of Mexican evolution was shattered by crowds of sombreroed peasants, and soldadera women, wrapped in their rebozos atop the transport trains, slapping tortillas, and sleeping or fighting with the soldiers. From a symbolic point of view, the Mexican Revolution was the world’s biggest jacquerie.”
“On the other hand, thanks to widespread agrarian reform, the Mexican Revolution successfully destroyed Mexico’s agrarian oligarchy, and it was the first country to nationalize its oil industry. The Revolution also destroyed the old Federal Army, and so Mexico became one of the rare Latin American countries not to have military coups in the twentieth century. These and other major accomplishments have generated hesitations regarding what history’s veredict on the twentieth century’s first social revolution should be.
Even so, by the 1960s, many intellectuals were saying that the revolution was dead. It seemed to be dead, in any case, but then the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s brought it back to life. Privatization, democratic reform, and state shrinkage allowed the revolution to migrate from the state to the opposition, a process that culminated in 1988, with the annnointment of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of Lázaro Cárdenas, and former PRI governor as its candidate for the presidency. Along with Cárdenas, Zapata, Villa, and the rest of the revolutionary pantheon migrated to one opposition or another. Thus, in 1994, an indigenous rebellion rocked the southern state of Chiapas, and it took up Zapata’s name and cause. The Zapatistas also revived the symbolic topography of the revolution and made it their own.
More recently, Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Movimiento de Renovación Nacional (“MORENA,” which is now a political party) named its newspaper Regeneración, after Flores Magón’s famous journal, while AMLO has been at pains to identify neoliberalism with the Porfiriato, and himself with Franciso Madero.
The Mexican Revolution, then, is not dead. But is it alive? That’s harder to say, because it has died and been revived several times, often lingering as a ghost. Maybe this is because, despite its many sinister and farcical elements, the Mexican Revolution was, in the end, tragic — a concatenation of events that was bigger even than its heroes and villains. For this reason, it still occasionally offers models for contestation and self-fashioning, much as the French Revolution once did.”
Which brings us up to the present moment, with AMLO beset with enemies, enemies in the guise of friends like America and the plutocratic elites whose wealth rests on the de facto slavery of illegal migrant labor and weaponized disparity and racism, and allies with questionable motives who are unreliable, like a majestic lion surrounded by ravenous hyenas.
As written by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador himself in the essay Privatization Is Theft, from the book A New Hope for Mexico published in the year of his election as President; “In terms of our collective wellbeing, the politics of pillage has been an unmitigated disaster. In economic and social affairs, we’ve been regressing instead of moving forward. But this is hardly surprising: the model itself is designed to favor a small minority of corrupt politicians and white-collar criminals. The model does not seek to meet the needs of the people, or to avoid violence and conflict; it seeks neither to govern openly nor honestly. It seeks to monopolize the bureaucratic apparatus and transfer public goods to private hands, making claims that this will somehow bring about prosperity.
The result: monstrous economic and social inequality. Mexico is one of the countries with the greatest disparities between wealth and poverty in the world. According to a 2015 article written by Gerardo Esquivel, a professor at the College of Mexico and a Harvard graduate, 10 percent of Mexicans control 64.4 percent of the national income, and 1 percent own 21 percent of the country’s wealth. But most significantly, inequality in Mexico deepened precisely during the neoliberal period. Privatization allowed it to thrive.
It’s also important to make note of the following statistic: in July 1988, when Carlos Salinas was imposed as president on the Mexican people through electoral fraud, only one Mexican family sat on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people — the Garza Sada family, with $2 billion to their name. By the end of Salinas’s term in office, twenty-four Mexicans had joined the list, owning a combined total of $44.1 billion. Nearly all had made off with companies, mines, and banks belonging to the people of Mexico. In 1988, Mexico sat at twenty-sixth place on a list of countries with the most billionaires; by 1994, Mexico was in fourth place, just beneath the United States, Japan, and Germany.
As is readily observed, economic inequality today is greater than it was in the 1980s, and perhaps greater than the periods before, though a lack of accurate records makes such comparisons difficult. Although Esquivel doesn’t highlight it, inequality skyrocketed during Salinas’s term, when the transfer of public goods to private hands was at its most intense. Under Salinas, the divide between rich and poor deepened like never before. Salinas is the godfather of modern inequality in Mexico.
It’s clear, then, that privatization is not the panacea that its proponents would have us believe. If it were, beneficial effects would by now be visible. At this juncture it’s fair to ask neoliberalism’s supporters: how have Mexicans benefited from the privatization of the telecommunications system? Is it a mere coincidence that, in terms of price and quality, both phone and internet service in Mexico rank seventieth worldwide, far below other members of the OECD?
What social benefits has the media monopoly conferred — other than to its direct beneficiaries, who have amassed tremendous wealth in exchange for protecting the corrupt regime, through brazenly slanted coverage of opposition candidates? What have we gained through the privatization of [Mexican state railroad company] Ferrocarriles Nacionales in 1995, if twenty-plus years later these outside investors haven’t built new train lines, and can charge whatever they want for transport?
How have we benefited from the leasing out of 240 million acres, 40 percent of the country (Mexico has 482 million acres total) for the extraction of gold, silver, and copper? Mexican miners earn, on average, sixteen times less than those in the United States and Canada. Companies in this field have extracted in five short years as much gold and silver as the Spanish Empire took in three centuries. Most outrageously, up until recently they were extracting these minerals untaxed. In short, we are living through the greatest pillage of natural resources in Mexico’s history.
This destructive policy has done nothing for the country. Statistics show that in the past thirty years we’ve failed to advance. To the contrary, in terms of economic growth we’ve fallen behind even an impoverished country like Haiti. The only constant has been economic stagnation and unemployment, which has forced millions of Mexicans to migrate or to make a living through the informal economy, if not resorting to crime. Half of the population is precariously employed with no safety net.
The widespread abandonment of agriculture, lack of job or educational prospects for our youth, and spiraling unemployment has resulted in insecurity and violence that have taken millions of lives. In the magazine Mundo Ejecutivo, Alejandro Desfassiaux reports that “the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) and the National Registry of Disappeared or Lost Persons (RNPED) reported over 175,000 homicides and 26,798 instances of missing people between 2006–2015.” As Desfassiaux puts it, “this violence affected countless others when family members are included.”
For these reasons, it’s illogical to think we can end corruption through the same neoliberal political and economic approach that has so patently failed in the past. To the contrary, until there’s a deep and sustained change, Mexico will continue its decline. Our present course is unsustainable, and we are nearing the point of complete collapse.
Our political economy today echoes the failures of the Porfiriato period at the end of the nineteenth century, when the prosperity of a few was placed above the needs of the many. That failed experiment culminated in armed revolution. The need to topple the PRIAN oligarchy and their ilk has never been greater, just as happened with Porfirio Díaz. But this time around we will not descend into violence, acting rather through a revolution of conscience, through an awakening and an organization of the pueblo to rid Mexico of the corruption that consumes it.
In short: instead of the neoliberal agenda, which consists of the appropriation for the few, we must create a new consensus that prioritizes honesty as a way of living and governing, and regains the great material, social, and moral wealth that was once Mexico’s. We should never forget the words of José María Morelos two hundred years ago: “Alleviate both indigency and extravagance.”
We must ensure that the democratic state, through legal means, distributes Mexico’s wealth equitably, subject to the premise that equal treatment cannot exist without equal access, and that justice consists of giving more to he or she who has less.”
Next I turn to our future, and as we emerge from the legacies of our history I say now what I once said to the wife of a poetry professor in regard to the great classics of literature and their authors; There are those who must be kept and those from whom we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same. Anne Rice that was, who used the idea of Those Who Must Be Kept in her novels and modeled her character of Mael on myself.
As I wrote in my post of March 9 2020, Three Stories of the Woman’s Day March in Mexico Which Became a Revolt: Defiance, Seizure of Power, and Victory; Eighty thousand women in Mexico City marched against femicide and gender based violence this Sunday in a triumphant reprise of the Valentines Day march which was met with police repression, this time overwhelming the police sent to club them into submission in a stunning victory over patriarchal state terror. But this is not the story here.
Demonstrations on International Woman’s Day and a following 24 hour Day Without a Woman strike Monday, echoes of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata thundering across the centuries like a lightning strike, erupted into revolt as tens of thousands of women stormed the Presidential Palace and firebombed it with molotov cocktails, demanding that Amlo break his wall of silence and listen to their calls for government action to end the killings and transform the culture of patriarchy and toxic masculinity which has plunged the nation into a cauldron of death and sexual terror. This is almost the story, the one we must tell future generations of this day.
No, the story here is just this; ten women are murdered each day in Mexico, victims of a patriarchy which has until now run unchecked and without accountability. And this the women of Mexico will tolerate no more, and are holding their government responsible for their lives.
So I wrote four years ago, as the anti femicide and violence against women riots seized Mexico and brought it to a standstill for a crucial moment, and though patriarchy as a system of oppression is as ancient as what we call civilization and as powerful as any other tyranny with the authorization of theocracy, and is also the among the most pervasive of multigenerational criminal conspiracies, the women of Mexico broke the wall of silence and began a great reckoning for a moral disease older than the Hanging of the Maids in Homer’s Ulysses.
In President Claudia Sheinbaum, the women of Mexico have a champion let us rejoice and celebrate this seizure of power, and also stand in solidarity to bring change to the Patriarchy for all humankind.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Performance colectivo Las Tesis “Un violador en tu camino”
The War Against Women, Rita Segato
A New Hope for Mexico: Saying No to Corruption, Violence, and Trump’s Wall,
Andrés Manuel López Obrador
The livestreamed killing of an influencer could be femicide – a misunderstood crisis, Arwa Mahdawi
Mexican beauty influencer shot dead during TikTok live stream
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/14/mexican-beauty-influencer-killed-tiktok
Murder of Colombian model sparks outrage over rising femicides
Trump is using his assault on government to retaliate against women
Judith Levine
‘The only healing will be through justice’: Pulitzer winner Cristina Rivera Garza on femicide in Mexico
Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice, Cristina Rivera Garza
The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17645.The_Penelopiad?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_10
Lysistrata, Aristophanes
‘Femicide nation’: murder of young woman casts spotlight on Mexico’s gender violence crisis
‘Nowhere is safe’: Colombia confronts alarming surge in femicides
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/14/mexico-femicide-protest-ingrid-escamilla
March 15 2025 Women’s History Month: Feminism as Revolutionary Struggle and a Reimagination of Humankind and our Historical Civilization
https://torchofliberty.home.blog/2025/03/15/march-15-2025-womens-history-month-feminism-as-revolutionary-struggle-and-a-reimagination-of-humankind-and-our-historical-civilization/
Torch of Liberty 