‘We are tired, angry and mad’: 180,000 women march in Mexico City
Al Jazeera
By midday on March 8, 2024, small groups of women dressed in lilac, wearing purple bandanas tied around their wrists, hair and necks, started to congregate in Mexico City. Soon they comprised an 180,000-strong crowd, marching and chanting together on International Women’s Day.
The chants were amplified by megaphones or voices directed upward, faces turned to the sky. With arms in the air, they yelled about their strength in numbers, the lack of police protection and their intent to fight for their rights.
“No somos una, no somos diez! ¡Somos un chingo, cuéntanos bien!”(“We are not one. We are not 10. We are a s***load, count us right.”)
“There are so many women,” said Ileana Alvarez Mendoza, 40, who attended the march with her 10-year-old daughter, Emiliana Leyva Alvarez. “How can the government say we aren’t that many?”
Nearly 10 women were killed every day in Mexico in 2023: there were more than 2,500 female victims of homicide and over 800 femicides, according to the Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection. In 2021, more than 40 percent of women over 15 had experienced some form of violence in their childhood, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).
