Local and State Justice: “Reframing rights and justice in the current context of violence in Mexico: Indigenous women and social reproduction in Guerrero, Mexico” Tlapa de Comonfort, Guerrero.

• In Event: Indigenous Peoples, Gender Justice and Legal Pluralism in the United States, Mexico and Guatemala

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ways in which indigenous Nahua, Me’phaa, and Na savi women in the municipality of Tlapa de Comonfort, Guerrero, signify current conditions of violence and struggle, as they seek responses to grievances through diverse spaces of access to justice, including local male dominated community cargo systems, the work of local human rights organizations, and state institutions. This region has in recent years undergone an intensification of levels of violence, in which the impact of “organized crime” articulates to conditions marked by decades of military presence in daily life and the dramatic effects of neoliberal political - economic policies, including widespread ecological erosion and migration. In turn, indigenous women denounce an increase in gendered forms of violence as well as how the combination of physical and structural forms of violence fracture their ability to ensure social reproduction activities. This research documents how women attempt to seek justice and alter current social conditions.

Author

• Mariana Mora, CIESAS/México