(Jerez, 21. February 2023, Cimac News) Dozens of people took to the streets in the central Mexican municipality of Jerez, Zacatecas state, to draw attention to the alarming number of violent crimes and disappearances in the region. The Jerezada event, an annual festival with a bull hunt like in Pamplona, Spain, had previously been canceled. Residents had requested this because they no longer felt safe on the streets. The community was recently rocked after the state attorney general’s office announced that six women had disappeared in a week.
One of the missing women is Frida Sofía Murillo Raygoza. The 20-year-old mother of a six-month-old child was last seen on February 11. Her mother, Sofía Ceballos, then appeared alone in front of the mayor of Jerez, Humberto Salazar Contreras, during a public event and accused him of not looking for her daughter. “It is enough! I came here alone because of my daughter and because I’m hurt by what’s happening here in Jerez and in the whole state of Zacatecas. They don’t tell us anything, they don’t support us, they don’t seek. The only thing I want is justice and that they do something about the disappeared,” lamented the mother.
The population is fed up with cases like that of Frida Sofía. That’s why she called for the cancellation of the Jerezada 2023. The women who were supposed to take part in a beauty contest as part of the festival had also announced that they would not perform. They wanted to show solidarity with the relatives of the people who suffered violence in the region.
Violence against women in Zacatecas
Last year, the Public Security Agency (Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System, SESNSP) 143 violence-related deaths of women in Zacatecas. Only 16 of these were classified as feminicides. In the second week of February 2023 alone, six women disappeared in the district of Jerez – a place that has been classified by the tourist board since 2007 Magic Town and is therefore classified as particularly worth seeing. As early as 2018, an official warning level for gender-based violence against women was declared for all 58 municipalities in the state of Zacatecas (Gender Violence Against Women Alert). The reason for this was that the government’s measures to guarantee women a life without violence were considered insufficient.
The protests and demands that led to the cancellation of the Jerezada are merely “political” interests for the mayor of Jerez. In a press release, he said his only concern was to revitalize the community’s economy. A few days before the cancellation of the Jerezada was announced, a video appeared in which the mayor was singing songs that alluded to drug trafficking. And this despite the fact that organized crime is one of the main reasons for violence in Zacatecas. According to the project “Where do the disappeared go” (Where do the disappeared go) it is happening on such a scale that the region is the “new epicenter of enforced disappearances”.
Festival canceled due to high levels of violent crime by News Pool Latin America is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 international.