By Kathleen Bohné
On Mar. 8, thousands of women across the country—and the world—participated in marches for International Women’s Day, demanding justice, equality and change. Below you will find excerpts from the Mar. 13 edition of “La Semana” newsletter, which was dedicated to topics related to the lives and livelihoods of women in Mexico. To read the full articles and subscribe, please visit www.themexpatriate.com.
“A strong feeling of rage”: the story of Digna Ochoa
On Oct. 19, 2001 the body of 37 year-old human rights attorney Digna Ochoa y Plácido was found in her office in Mexico City. She had been shot twice, in the leg and in the head. A note was found near her body threatening other human rights defenders she worked with at the Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez (Centro Prodh). Over two decades later, on Jan 19. 2022, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Mexican state responsible for “serious failings” in its investigation of her death—which prosecutors claimed was suicide—and it was announced that the case will be re-opened.
One of thirteen children born to a working-class family in Misantla, Veracruz in 1964, Ochoa’s early life was shaped by the wrongful imprisonment of her father in 1980. “We saw how justice worked in Mexico, we saw the dishonesty of some lawyers, we saw all of it…so we decided to become involved in social justice,” said one of her brothers, Jesús Ochoa y Plácido.
Digna attended university to study law in Xalapa and worked for the state attorney general’s office, but was also active in political opposition groups. Her first encounter with violence and intimidation happened in 1988 when she was kidnapped and raped by state police. She reported to the authorities, but her allegations were never investigated and in 1991, she entered a convent where she studied for eight years. She left before taking vows.
During the investigation of her death in 2001, police and prosecutors attempted to justify their theory of a suicide staged to look like a murder by describing Ochoa’s religiosity and her personality as “demanding”, having a “strong sense of rage” and possibly suffering from “histeria conversiva” (conversion disorder) and paranoia. None of these psychological assessments was based in evidence beyond the investigators’ access to her personal diaries and correspondence and their thinly veiled misogynistic bias.
By the time of her death, Ochoa’s life had been threatened repeatedly: she had been kidnapped and held in Mexico City for several hours in 1995 and one night later that year, intruders broke into her home, tied her up, drugged her and interrogated her. At the time, Ochoa was working on several cases involving alleged abuses by Mexican law enforcement and the military against accused members of the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army). In 2000 she went into exile in the U.S. and was given Amnesty International’s “Enduring Spirit” award.
When Ochoa returned to Mexico in 2001, she still had provisional protection as had been recommended by the Inter-American Human Rights Court in 1999, but those measures were lifted only two months before her death. She was working on a case involving campesino environmentalists in Guerrero who had been detained and tortured by the military, forced to confess to cultivating marijuana and poppies. The men were freed by an executive order from President Fox in 2001 and their sentences were commuted…
Extended-hour public school program is shut down
The Department of Public Education (SEP) announced on Feb. 28 the end of the “Programa de Escuelas de Tiempo Completo” (PETC), a government program started in 2007 that provided extended hours of schooling for students across Mexico. The education advocacy group Mexicanos Primero estimates that 3.6 million children will be affected. The funding has been re-allocated to one of the López Obrador administration’s educational initiatives called “La Escuela es Nuestra” (The School is Ours), in which monies are distributed directly to committees of parents who then create and disburse budgets for the schools. According to the most recent audit by the Auditoría Superior de la Federación (Superior Federal Auditor), this program already had left 552 million pesos unaccounted for in 2020. Querétaro, Michoacán, Puebla and Mexico City announced they would continue with the PETC using their own state resources.
The families likely to be most affected by the termination of the PETC are the poorest, with two working parents or a single working parent. The program provided meals for students, which for the poorest children, was the primary meal of their day. Data indicate that working mothers who had access to the PETC had an increase of up to 29% in their income, and students in the program were less likely to show severe educational deficit and performed better on standardized tests. Coming so soon after the educational and economic fallout of extended school closures during the pandemic, this will deliver another blow to struggling families, and particularly, to mothers.
The PETC was far from perfectly managed and in some schools, parents complained that there was a lack of planning for the extra hours; in others, students were benefiting from additional classes in English, arts and other subjects. “For me it was helpful because I work, and instead of having the kids at work with me, they were in school and they were given a meal,” commented a mother interviewed in Cuilacán, Sinaloa…
