Politics take toll on Mexico’s human rights agency and feminist movement

By the time she and Soberanes moved into Okupa Cuba, the people and organizations running the occupation had changed completely. 

The initial takeover was carried out primarily by members of the Mexico chapter of the international movement known as Ni Una Menos (Not One Less), but the ranks slowly changed out over time. 

The original activists were forced out by “shock groups,” according to Yessenia Zamudio, president of Ni Una Menos in Mexico. 

“The last ones who were in Okupa Cuba extorted neighbors, asked people on the street for money … they were in possession of drugs,” she said in a phone interview. 

Zamudio described a fractured feminist movement in Mexico, accusing other groups, such as the women behind Mexico City’s feminist anti-monument, of being actors who profit from their pseudo-activism. 

“That’s not a movement, it’s a word they made up,” she said. “It’s not an organization, not a group of relatives of victims.” 

Out of dozens of feminist activists interviewed by Courthouse News for this and previous articles, Zamudio was the only one to speak critically of the other women struggling to find justice in Mexico.

Under Zamudio’s leadership, Ni Una Menos signed an agreement with the National Human Rights Commission in May 2021 intended to “strengthen and expedite attention to victims.”

The agreement did have some effect in the months after its signing. Women received support from the commission to help conduct searches for disappeared loved ones and bring cases before federal authorities. 

However, none of the activists Zamudio put Courthouse News in contact with said they still receive this support from the commission today.

“I had the support of the CNDH, but they stopped it, and I don’t know why,” said Angelina Almeida, who claims her husband was forcibly disappeared by Mexican marines in 2015 in Tamaulipas. 

But she has her suspicions as to why that help dried up. 

“Once they saw that we were getting results, most of all when we found someone to testify directly against the marines, they stopped helping,” she said.

Delia Quiroa — who continues to search for her brother Roberto, who disappeared in Tamaulipas in 2014 — had a similar story. 

“That agreement was just so they could feign action for a while,” she said in a phone interview. “That’s how politics work in Mexico, they play to appearances for a time, but later they don’t come through.”

They will probably never see justice in these cases, Almeida said, “because the Mexican state is always going to protect its institutions first, and citizens come after.”

Both Almeida and Quiroa said they respect Zamudio as leader of Ni Una Menos, but expressed doubt in her collaboration with the commission. 

“She will likely get very angry at what I’ve said, but the CNDH stopped supporting me,” Almeida said. 

But she does not blame Zamudio, whose daughter María de Jesús was murdered in 2016, for the fragmentation of Mexico’s feminist movement.

“I don’t quarrel with Yesenia or any feminist group,” she said. “We’ve all shed our tears, fought our struggles, lived our terrible situations, and we all deserve the same respect.”

With the support of the National Human Rights Commission, Zamudio was able to get Mexico’s attorney general to issue arrest warrants for her daughter's alleged killers, a professor and student from the National Polytechnic Institute. Although authorities have told her that they know where both men are, neither has been arrested. 

In November 2019, Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador appointed Rosario Piedra Ibarra to lead the National Human Rights Commission. Piedra Ibarra is the daughter of Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, one of Mexico’s most famous activists who spend decades searching for her son Jesús after he disappeared in 1974.

The appointment was heavily criticized by civil society groups due to Piedra Ibarra’s close relationship to López Obrador and her unsuccessful 2018 candidacy for a federal deputyship for the state of Nuevo Léon. She ran for López Obrador’s ruling Morena party. The National Human Rights Commission is ostensibly an autonomous governmental entity that is meant to work independently of other federal institutions.

Upon taking office, Piedra Ibarra invited her mother’s longtime friend and fellow activist José Martínez Cruz to join the commission as an inspector — but the appointment lasted only eight months. 

Martínez cited "differences with Rosario in the objectives for furthering the work in defense of human rights,” as his reasons for leaving in a phone interview. 

These differences were apparent “from the first day,” Martínez said, and they only grew as he continued to try and get to the bottom of some of the country’s most burdensome human rights issues. 

One such case was the 2014 disappearance of the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college students.

“She told me not to touch it,” he said.

This “daily confrontation” over what the commission should do dashed his hopes that the López Obrador administration would be any different from its predecessors. 

López Obrador's office did not respond to a request for comment.

“Sadly, the CNDH has taken on a much different role from the one I committed to, the one Rosario told me we were going to do and which she ended up not fulfilling,” Martínez said. “Power changes people.”

The commission denied Courthouse News’ request to speak with Piedra Ibarra. In relation to the case against Tello and Soberanes, it referred to press releases in which it called Okupa Cuba a movement that “tried to dress itself as ‘social protest’ and a false condition of victims.”

It also accused Tello and Soberanes, who are supported by the collective of groups that maintain the anti-monument at Mexico City’s Roundabout of the Women Who Fight, of being financed by “party leaders, civil servants, legislators and at least one international organization.”

Tello flatly denied this financing, saying she wouldn’t live in the notoriously dangerous Mexico City neighborhood of Tepito were that the case. 

Marcela, an organizer with the anti-monument group who preferred not to give her last name, said the group has received occasional reimbursements for certain activities from organizations like the global civil society group Avaaz, but does not receive regular funding from it or any other group either in Mexico or abroad. 

Avaaz helped with reimbursements for logistical and equipment costs for a March 2021 protest in which the activists projected the names of Mexico’s forcibly disappeared women on the walls of the National Palace in Mexico City, Marcela said.

A spokesperson for Avaaz confirmed that this was part of its Mexico chapter’s campaign against femicide and that the group was its partner on the ground, but denied giving the group any donations.

There is much infighting between various feminist groups in Mexico, Marcela said. But she attributed it to governmental influence in the movement. 

“The state is very clever,” she said. “The government locates women in the movement who want prominence or need economic assistance.”

During Wednesday’s protest, supporters of Tello and Soberanes participated in the “iconoclastic” tactics that many in the feminist movement have come to use in the face of a government unwilling to act in response to traditional chants and marches.

The commission cited the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in a justification of its actions against the activists and its condemnation of their tactics in an April 2022 press release. Neither the court nor the commission responded to requests for comment.

Decades of what the National Human Rights Commission considers legitimate protest have not resulted in a safer Mexico for women, Tello said as activists painted words on the façade behind her: “Your walls will get cleaned. When will we get justice?”

“It’s a way to tell them that material things can be repaired,” Tello said. “But lives cannot.”

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