Gloria Piña, author of the documentary, ‘Las Survivientes, olvidadas de la justicia’, was awarded the 2022 Breach Valdez Award. An award that bears the name of two investigative journalists murdered in 2017 in Mexico. In her documentary, the investigative journalist addressed the issue of women who have survived an attempted femicide.
The figures on femicides that occur daily in Mexico are chilling. “It is estimated that in Mexico 10 to 11 women are murdered every day, and the number twelve that the authorities are not talking about are the women who survive these acts of extreme violence,” Gloria Piña tells us.
“Precisely the reason why we decided to talk about this topic of attempted femicide is because this figure is not recognized in Mexican law as a specific classification, and this creates a series of legal loopholes that allow female survivors of femicide to be at constant risk of being murdered, in addition to not having access to health services that allow them to get their lives back on track,” she adds.
Mexican justice has been described as blind justice given that part of the public ministries and judges refuse to recognize the assassination attempts of women, despite the fact that the legal concept of femicide has existed for several decades.
“There is a lot of resistance to using this legal figure and investigating it from a gender perspective, and if there is this resistance to research with women who are murdered, there is even more when it comes to an attempt or an attempt at femicide,” highlights the journalist whose work has been awarded.
Her documentary, ‘The Survivors, Forgotten by Justice’, highlights that only 0.004% of the 1.7 million attacks against women carried out in the past eight years were classified by authorities as an attempted femicide. This implies that 582 attacks take place every day. That is to say 24 every hour. A permanent aggressiveness towards women, unlimited violence, which is explained by the general violence that exists in the country, added to the macho culture.
“The most worrying thing is the message that the impunity authorities give regarding these cases in which it seems that if a woman is murdered, if a woman is attacked, unfortunately nothing happens.” Denounce the Breach Valdez 2022 Journalism Award.
Gloria Piña was the winner in 2019 of the Fundación Gabo award -by Gabriel García Márquez- in the category of innovation, for her collaborative research called ‘Mujeres de Vitrina, migration in the hands of trafficking’, focused on the denunciation of networks of trafficking of women, mainly Venezuelans to Mexico, subsequently forced into prostitution, or being murdered.
In a short time the situation has changed “now what we see is that it is not exclusively about Venezuela, but other countries where migration is emerging with greater intensity, such as Honduras and Guatemala where there are also human trafficking networks that are benefiting from this migration panorama,” he specifies.
“From my point of view from journalism as a trench is that we can make appointments of what happens in the country to make structural changes, it is therefore necessary to talk about this issue and do journalism with a feminist vision.” Gloria Piña assumes as position.
“Unfortunately, due to electoral political issues, journalism has been placed in a situation that adds to a risky circumstance due to violence that is not only seen in the murders against the press but also in the discrediting of the work, discrediting the journalistic work that comes from the presidential power, and that is what unfortunately we have seen every day in the president’s morning conferences,” he laments.
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Editorial coordination: Florence Valdes
Direction: Souheil Khedir, Jérémie Besset, Tiphanie Menta
