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Mexican women cannot escape a single day from the epidemic of gender violence that is raging on them. The same Tuesday that they were shaken by the findings of the third autopsy performed on the body of Debanhi Escobar, murdered in Nuevo León, Luz Raquel Padilla Gutiérrez, mother of a child with autism and activist for the visibility of autism, died in the Civil Hospital of Guadalajara. caring for people with illnesses as a job and a right that resided in the municipality of Zapopan. Three days earlier, Luz Raquel had been attacked by three men and a woman who threw alcohol at her and set her on fire in a park a few blocks from her home, an attack that was fatal, causing severe burns to 90 percent of her body.
The brutal crime presents a series of elements that make it, without a doubt, one of the most chilling and outrageous episodes of violence in our country. In the first instance, no one can remain indifferent to the hatred that Padilla Gutiérrez’s neighbors displayed once morest her and her son due to the drawbacks
(shouting and hitting the walls) during the crises that the child experienced because of his condition. The intolerance and ignorance of the residents of his neighborhood reached such a degree that graffiti appeared at his home with explicit death threats such as I’m going to burn you alive
o death to light
and one of her neighbors even attacked her with industrial chlorine, which caused minor burns.
But if the attacks once morest Luz Raquel escalated to femicide, it was due to the omissions and negligence of the authorities who had to safeguard her integrity. The activist had already reported to the Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office and the Zapopan Police Station the death threats of one of her neighbors, identified as Sergio N, and following the attack with chlorine, which occurred on May 17, she obtained a restraining order once morest said individual, but the authorities never took steps to translate the injunction into effective protection.
Likewise, the municipal government would have refused to integrate her into a program called Pulse of Life, consisting of providing threatened women with an electronic device with a location system and a panic button, since it did not consider the threats to be sufficient cause to protect her. To make matters worse, despite being a subject of obvious interest in clarifying the attack, Sergio N was not sought or located by the authorities in the days immediately following the attack, but on Wednesday he presented himself to the Zapopan police of his own free will, presumably for fear of intimidation that he would have suffered on social networks following the death of Padilla Gutiérrez. With this history of catastrophic failures of the municipal and state administrations, the denial of any responsibility and the affirmation that not all the measures available to the government at any level are sufficient
to avoid these acts by the emecista governor Enrique Alfaro have been an outrage for the groups with which the victim worked, for feminist groups and for women in general.
It is clear that in this case it is no longer enough to capture and prosecute the material murderers of Luz Raquel Padilla, but rather to proceed once morest all those who, from public positions, were complicit in this outcome by denying the necessary protection to a person who was in obvious danger and that he cried out for the defense of his life. Likewise, the episode is a reminder of how much remains to be done in raising social awareness regarding challenging conditions such as autism, and how easily male violence becomes a murderous force.
