In Mexico, Open Season On Boyfriends?

Move over, Mexican cartel violence! Contributor GBFM put me on the scent of an even greater threat emerging south of the border: girlfriend violence!

She awoke to a gun in her face. What happened next would change Mexican law

h ttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/8/she-awoke-to-a-gun-in-her-face-what-happened-next-would-change-mexican-law

By Alícia Fàbregas, 8 September 2023

Tijuana, Mexico – On the evening of December 12, 2019, as Alina Narciso was falling asleep in her home in Tijuana, Mexico, she remembers hearing her boyfriend Luis Rodrigo Juarez snorting cocaine.

Hours later, she was awoken by a gun to her head. It was Juarez, asking her if she “was going to leave him again”.

“One hand was enough for him to beat me in strength, and drunk and drugged, I thought: I don’t have a chance against him,” Narciso, now 28, told Al Jazeera.

What happened next would raise questions about self-defence law in Mexico — and reshape how the criminal justice system in the state of Baja California assesses gender-based violence.

Both Narciso and Juarez were police officers: They met through work when Narciso was only 22.

But from the very beginning, Narciso said Juarez was extremely controlling: “He wanted us to be together all the time.” He also could be violent: According to Narciso, he had sexually abused her and threatened her life on multiple occasions.

Narciso had tried to leave several times, but Juarez always promised to change. He would stop drinking and seek psychological help, she remembers him telling her in a bid to make her stay.

I didn’t hear “he wouldn’t let me leave” in that. Okay, this is an old story of some feral chick loving her thugbait until she didn’t. Why should we care?

But the barrel of the gun jolted her awake. Narciso said she tried to escape, but Juarez would not let her. He holstered his weapon and began to beat her furiously, pulling her hair, smashing her face against a door frame and grabbing her by the neck.

In the struggle, Narciso said she managed to grab the firearm.

Sounds like self-defense at first glance, or in the State of Texas, the he-needed-killin’-defense. But the judge disagreed.

Socorro Tehuaxtle, Narciso’s mother, lived next door. Hearing [six] gunshots and her daughter’s cries, she ran over to see what the trouble was. But when she arrived, Juarez was already dead. Tehuaxtle told her daughter to call the police.

I cannot help but feel that as a police officer, she had more tools for handling an abusive boyfriend than waiting to kill him until he got spun up on liquor, coke and nagging. For example, she could have…

When her case finally came before the court of Judge Daniel Aguilar Patino, she tried to explain her history of abuse.

While Narciso had never filed a formal police report, she had told colleagues about Juarez’s violence and even enlisted a police unit once to protect her while she attempted to move out…

…said something.

Some of the officers who arrived were colleagues, and at first, Narciso thought they would understand her situation. It quickly became clear, however, that they did not see her as a victim forced to defend herself. Rather, she was a suspect.

One even asked her why she had fired so many bullets, Narciso later testified. He reminded her that Juarez had been a friend.

Narciso spent the next three years in pre-trial detention.

[In] October 2022, the judge rejected the allegation that Narciso’s life had been in danger. In his ruling, Patino found Narciso’s reaction to Juarez’s attack “excessive”. He said the evidence her lawyer presented was not enough “to cast doubt” on her guilt.

Patino ultimately sentenced Narciso to 45 years in prison for aggravated homicide, a term much longer than some sentences in Baja California for femicide.

Texas would still have let her off. “It was an excessive amount of firepower, yes, but he needed killin’ and nobody else got shot.”

Faced with the prospect of her daughter being imprisoned for decades, Tehuaxtle began to campaign for her release.

That is a splendid example of women not being “men with boobs”. Her daughter kept going back to Thugbait despite all the never-reported abusive behavior, but when Baby finally shot him six times after an alternatively-sober argument, a murder conviction “took my baby away!” For no reason at all, huh?

Tehuaxtle talked to the media, women’s organisations, and human rights lawyers including Meritxell Calderon [Vargas], who started to volunteer on the case.

Meritxell the Hutt did time at the University of San Diego as a “Kroc Border Fellow”.

Segue

h ttps://www.sandiego.edu/peace/institute-for-peace-justice/initiatives/biography.php?id=86

Meritxell Calderón-Vargas is a human rights lawyer from Baja California, who mainly defends the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ population and migrants on the northwestern border of Mexico. She writes a column in La Jornada BC called "Where the witches cross," serves as coordinator of the Ibero-American Network for Human Rights.

End segue

Calderon believes Judge Patino’s actions speak to a larger lack of awareness among judges and prosecutors. “Many of the people who train public servants are the same people who have not updated their knowledge on women’s human rights issues,” she said.

Ultimately, Narciso and her lawyer filed an appeal on October 25, 2022, on the basis that the court had not taken into account her history of abuse with Juarez.

Narciso’s lawyer argued that her claim of self-defence needed to be evaluated through the lens of gender-based violence.

The case gained widespread attention, thanks in no small part to Tehuaxtle’s advocacy work. The state governor of Baja California, Marina del Pilar, and congresswoman Michel Sanchez Allende both offered their support, and feminist groups helped raise awareness for Narciso’s appeal.

Six months later, in May, the appeals court ruled in Narciso’s favour. It declared that she had indeed acted in self-defence, calling her actions “necessary” for her safety.

In addition, the court sanctioned the judge who originally sentenced her to prison, Patino. He was ordered to take training courses in “gender perspective”, a term used in Mexico for the consideration and study of gender discrimination and social roles.

“It is not good to flog officials for their integrity” Proverbs 17:26

Since her appeal, Narciso has continued to combat the legal system — to push for intimate partner violence to be considered in cases of lethal self-defence.

On August 24, a law named in her honour passed unanimously in the Baja California legislature, with 22 votes in favour and one abstention.

Sponsored by congresswoman Sanchez, the Alina Law reforms the state’s penal code, requiring judges and prosecutors to take into account gender, abuse and intimate partner violence when weighing self-defence cases.

But there is still a long way to go to combat stereotypes around intimate partner violence, according to Miguel Mora, the president of the Human Rights Commission of Baja California.

Wow. Baja legalized the murder of thugbait boyfriends two years ago, under “the Alina Law”? No wonder their crime rate is as high as ever. Society gets more of what it subsidizes. Encouraging women to feel safe while pursing the bad boys, subsidizes a lot of sex for the bad boys. But noooo, it’s mens’ fault for doing the vile behaviors that feral women reward.

The Alina Law advances in Mexico: impunity for women who kill men

The so-called “Alina Law” has caused an intense debate around self-defense and the "gender approach" in the Mexican penal system.

Proposed as a reform to the Penal Code, this initiative seeks to expand the criteria so that women victims of violence can defend themselves without being criminalized.

However, its detractors warn that it could open the door to serious legal abuses.

Even so, its detractors refused to notice the problem with no name.

What is the Alina Law?

The law is named after Alina Narciso, a former police officer from Tijuana who, after suffering domestic violence, killed her ex-partner. In 2023, a court overturned the homicide sentence against her by considering that she acted in self-defense.

Thank Huitzilopochtli that they didn’t reinstate her as a cop.

(How did those deities end up with names as ugly as their faces? Was correctly pronouncing their name an initiation rite of priests, or was the difficulty a status symbol of some kind? “Only the worthy can speak my name!.. nobody is ever worthy.”)

This case marked a turning point in the debate on the need to legally protect women who defend themselves from their aggressors.

The way back to sanity is not to punish the bad men. It is to punish the bad women incentivizing the bad men. Punishing the bad men will only result in endless openings at the top of the Bad Boy Pareto Distribution. (The BPD, if you will.) This effort to “protect women” from violent lovers only incentivizes her to seek them out by sheltering her even further from consequences, by convincing her female gullibility that “the System” will keep her safe.

Pro-tip, girls: the System won’t even try to keep you safe. Merely pretending to, is sufficient for the System’s man-hating agenda.

What if we passed a law instead, that abusive boyfriends could not be punished for anything he does to her? Maybe that would make the boring nice guys a more attractive alternative to thugs on crack with a history of violence? I recall ancient Rome passing such a law, and next thing that anybody knew, they were crushing Carthage as one of the most successful nations in history.

None of the other Internet pundits ever notice the Original Sin underlying all these political agendas. The blind spot is amazingly gigantic. “Let’s liberate women and see what happens!” then everybody walked away with zero curiosity about what happened.

They know. They’ll never admit it, but they know.

Driven by legislators from Morena and PAN, the Alina Law proposes to modify articles 23 and 49 of the Penal Code. This is so that women facing physical, psychological, sexual or feminicidal violence can claim self-defense without being accused of “excess” in the use of force.

The initiative has already been approved in Baja California and is currently under discussion in entities such as Tamaulipas and the State of Mexico.

MEXICO IS SERIOUSLY DEBATING WHETHER TO DECLARE OPEN SEASON ON MEN!

The arguments in favor

Those who support the reform assert that it is a necessary measure in the face of a justice system that has historically revictimized women. They point out that many women are treated as criminals when defending themselves from serious assaults, especially within the home.

Additionally, they argue that the Alina Law incorporates a gender perspective that allows these cases to be judged in their true context. A situation of systematic abuse and power inequality, where the victim's defense may be her only means of survival.

Textbook feminism.

The critical voices: risk of impunity?

On the opposite side, communicators like Alex Flores and other analysts have warned about the risks of this reform. They accuse that the elimination of the concept of “excess in self-defense” could lead to homicides being justified without solid evidence.

According to Flores, the text is too ambiguous and doesn't clearly define what is considered an “imminent danger”. Nor does it define how it will be assessed whether there really was a situation of violence.

This could allow a woman to claim feeling threatened without there being a real or direct threat, thus creating a dangerous and discriminatory legal loophole.

This would have been a good law if women had used it to summarily execute every coke-sniffing, violently drunk government agent bastard in Baja, but it’s now two years later and that hasn’t happened.

That’s not who women are. They are not men with boobs. They aren’t going to fight for justice and they sure as hell aren’t innocent in all this intimate-partner violence.

“I woke up to him trying to kill me!”

“What was he doing when you went to sleep?”

“Cocaine. Nothing unusual.”

The challenge for legislators will be to refine the legal frameworkto ensure real justice: protect victims of violence. But without allowing the law to become a shield for impunity.

Violence is always bad, because it’s what men do! But not financial crime, because it’s what Congress does!