Whenever María Salguero, 40, has a moment to herself, she sifts through her Google Alerts and the local news in Mexico for reports of femicides.
This unusual pastime began in 2016 when Salguero, a human rights activist and geophysical engineer by training, decided to build a map tracking cases of femicide, and filling in the gaps left by official data, in her spare time.
Femicide (also referred to as feminicide) is the deliberate killing of a woman or girl because of their gender. UN Women, the United Nations’ gender equality organisation, notes that these gender-related murders may follow other violent acts including domestic abuse, describing the context in Latin America as one of “high tolerance” towards such “normalised” attacks.
In a café in central Mexico City earlier this year, Salguero told me that she “had already worked on a map of people who are disappeared [in Mexico]”, referring to the tens of thousands of missing women, men and children in the country, believed to have been abducted and likely tortured or killed. In 2018, the government’s own figures counted more than 37,000 ‘desaparecidos’.
While working on this map, Salguero said, she “noticed that there were more and more articles about women who were being murdered”. Around the same time, some of her friends, who are journalists, told her that they were having trouble quantifying and tracking the number of femicides.
“Building a database is not that hard, nor is georeferencing it, I told them… I started my own”, Salguero explained. Over the last two years, her work has had a significant impact. Mexico’s mainstream press has cited her data, for example. She has also been invited to the states of Quintana Roo, Michoacán and Zacatecas to present her findings to local governments.
Recently, El Universal, one of Mexico’s most important national papers, described Salguero’s project as “an important source to…