Chiapas Women Address Femicide in Mexico

Mujeres Zapatistas

Zapatista Women Reject Sheinbaum Presidency as Symbolic While Femicides Persist in Mexico

By Ximena Rodríguez-López

Chiapas, Mexico — As Claudia Sheinbaum serves her historic term as Mexico’s first woman president, Zapatista women in the southern state of Chiapas have expressed deep skepticism toward her administration and its promises. Despite global praise for the symbolic milestone, women in the Zapatista territories argue that the presidency changes little for those most vulnerable to gender-based violence—especially Indigenous women.

At the 2025 “Resistance and Rebellion” gathering, Zapatista women leaders sharply criticized the so-called “Fourth Transformation,” describing it as superficial and disconnected from the structural crises affecting their communities. The Zapatistas, who have maintained autonomous governance since 1994, reject state feminism that celebrates representation while failing to address the material realities of femicide, land dispossession, and poverty.

Their critique comes at a time when femicide remains a national crisis. According to Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), more than 1,000 women were murdered in 2024, with hundreds classified as femicides—killings of women specifically because of their sex. Human rights organizations report that investigations into these crimes are often delayed, misclassified, or entirely abandoned. In rural and Indigenous communities, where state services are sparse or absent, justice is even more elusive.

Zapatista women emphasize that sex-based violence in Mexico is not just interpersonal, but institutional—sustained by a lack of accountability, entrenched machismo, and the indifference of the state. The presence of a woman in the presidency, they argue, does not automatically translate to progress for women, particularly those outside urban, elite, or mestizo spaces.

Sheinbaum has made sex equity a centerpiece of her public agenda, promising to expand educational and economic opportunities for women and strengthen laws against domestic violence. However, critics contend that these reforms do not fundamentally address the systemic nature of femicide, nor do they prioritize the self-determination of Indigenous women who have long demanded control over their own communities and bodies.

For Zapatista women, the struggle is not for symbolic inclusion in a patriarchal system, but for autonomy from it. Their model of community-based resistance—rooted in collective decision-making, anti-capitalism, and gender equality—is a direct challenge to both state power and mainstream liberal feminism.

While Sheinbaum’s presidency may mark a turning point for some sectors of Mexican society, the women of the Zapatista movement continue to remind the world that true transformation must begin where state power ends—with the women who have never been protected by it.