Another victim in Ciudad Juárez: Isabel Cabanillas, 26 years old, mother, artist and activist. Women keep taking to the streets, crying out: “We are not meat to be slaughtered.” Since 1993, more than 1,500 girls have been killed in this border area between Mexico and the United States.
Isabel Cabanillas, a Mexican activist for women's rights, had disappeared on the evening of 17 January in Ciudad Juárez, in the state of Chihuahua. She was found the following morning on the street, shot dead in the chest. After her identification, family members, friends, artists, associations and ordinary people – above all women – marched to demand justice and to protect her memory through art, the language she used every day.
Her artist friends portrayed her with an open smile and a fearless gaze: la chica del las macetas, "the girl of the pots" that she painted and sold, along with clothes. Now her face, like those of many other young women murdered and left on the street or in the nearby desert, appears on the murals of the "city that kills women" – as Ciudad Juárez is known – and another wooden cross painted pink, placed on the pavement where she was found, joins the hundreds of others scattered within a few kilometres.
According to data reported by the Mexican human rights defence commission in a document presented to the government last June, in the state of Chihuahua alone there were 258 cases of femicide in 2017, and 49 between January and March 2019; yet the official figures are far removed from the count – even more staggering and terrifying – kept by local associations of mothers who watch their daughters, barely more than children, disappear into total impunity.
The highest percentage of murders is recorded among those aged 15 to 19; the victims are often very young workers in the maquiladoras, the multinational assembly factories that line the border controlled by the narcos of the Juárez cartel, one of the most powerful in the country. But for the activists of the association Hijas de su maquilera madre, with whom Cabanillas worked, drug trafficking has nothing to do with it, and they are asking the police to pursue a new line of investigation, as Lidia Graco, a friend of the victim, explained to us when we reached her by phone on Monday in Juárez, just as the funeral was taking place.
"The gun is the hallmark of drug traffickers, but we are convinced it is a red herring; Isabel was killed because she was an activist, a courageous woman who believed in freedom and a feminist capable of speaking out against violence and injustice. She was very popular and well known – her murder is a clear warning to us. On the Friday she disappeared, she was working on a mural in an area she knew very well, but on her way home she was made to vanish.
We filed a report immediately, and the following morning we read the news about the discovery of a body; from the description it could have been her, so we alerted the family, who then handled the identification. A great many people are attending the funeral, and a demonstration is also planned in Mexico City, where she had many friends. Here being a woman is dangerous, going out on the street is dangerous, seeking freedom is dangerous, being poor is dangerous. We are in shock right now, but Isabel must have justice, she will have justice, and we will keep fighting for her."