Almost twice as many women are being killed in Tijuana this year as violent crimes soar

Almost twice as many women are being killed in the Mexican city of Tijuana this year, with the country's National System of Public Safety releasing figures illustrating the soaring of violent crimes on the bordering city.

The agency said that the amount of women killed in the first half of the year was practically the same that the figure for all of 2023, a pace they have never seen before. Concretely, 18 femicide investigations were opened in the city until June, compared to 20 for all of last year.

It also called for Baja California authorities to launch a series of measures to help better protect women against femicides, including increased police protection, prosecution and stronger penalties for those who kill women.

"Violence against women is due to several cultural factors that need to be addressed, we need to get to the root cause, including our legal system," said Ixchel Guadalupe Barbosa Romero, head of Baja's Human Rights Commission. "Many times charges are brought, but there's no follow through, we need to insist the state attorney general's office does its job."

Local and state police have said they lack resources to increase enforcement, according to Fox 5 San Diego.

The situation in Tijuana is far from isolated, considering that over 3,000 women were officially murdered last year alone. However, activists claim that the figure is much higher and accused the outgoing government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly known as AMLO) of downplaying statistics.

According to the UN Women, femicides, defined by the international body as an intentional killing with a gender-related motivation, accounts for 25% of the investigations into the killings of women and girls in Mexico.

In 2023, 848 women were confirmed to be victims of such crimes in the country. However, police investigations into gender-based violence have oftentimes suggested suicide or reckless homicide instead of femicide, UN Women added. Because of this, many causes of death could have been wrongly attributed when they could potentially be femicide, according to the international body.

Incoming President Claudia Sheinbaum is set to take office in October as the first-ever woman to hold the country's highest office, but feminist organizations have shown skepticism about this changing the situation for women in the country.

Sheinbaum has said that cases of femicide dropped significantly during the leadership of López Obrador. "The national femicide rates have gone down more than 40%," then-candidate Sheinbaum said in April 2024 during the first presidential debate.

To substantiate her claims, Sheinbaum presented a graph from the federal Secretary of Security showing a supposed drop in femicide rates. However, the graph compares different months and not years, and is without context, according to fact checkers at Animal Politico. The image also ignores that 2021 was the year with the most femicide victims since 2015.