Brazil-Mexico Feminicide

Experiences of violent colonization of the bodies of black and indigenous women

Abstract

Femicide is a gender crime that can occur both in the private and public spheres, in different societal contexts, and the motivation is given by contempt for women, that is, it is a misogynistic crime. The perpetrators of the crime, for the most part, are male and have some kind of affective bond, consanguineous or not. In both Brazil and Mexico, there is a tendency for a specific type of race/ ethnicity/skin color to be killed/murdered by femicide. In Brazil, according to the 2020 Atlas of Violence, 68% of those killed by femicide are black women, and in Mexico, 59% of women who suffer femicide are indigenous (INEGI, 2015). In this sense, the article deals with the lack of State attention in both countries for these women who suffer the most, as they fail to protect them, that is, there is a lack of specific public policies, configuring itself as a necropolitical action in that the State authorizes which bodies can be murdered: the bodies of black women and indigenous women. In this sense, the method used is the dialectical historical-materialism from a bibliographic review to make the readings of the socio-historical conformation of the countries and through the perspective of coloniality, neocoloniality, decoloniality, associating them with other founding elements such as intersectionality in order to correlate the incidence of femicide of black women and its negligence in Brazil, and, in Mexico, in relation to indigenous women, seeking the causes of such absence of public policies in the historical formation of each country, as well as dealing here with those that do not are found in the statistical data in both countries, where, in this work, this situation was called a “blind spot”.