The Other Pandemic

Tijuana Baja California August 16, 2022

By Journalist: Melina FG

Staying at home has been the main recommendation during this time of health alert, but there is no talk of the other pandemic, of gender-based violence.
(Stay at home has been the recommendation given to avoid contracting COVID-19, and this measure is also proposed to combat gender violence)
This evil, this social virus is the one that all women have to suffer: to live fighting the exacerbated violence of the streets to be able to get home safe and from the micromachismos that permeate society.

How many times have we heard the lukewarmness of the arguments? “Don’t go out so late at night”, why did you go alone?, “You caused that to happen to you”, why until now do you denounce if it happened to you years ago? “The fault is ours” and many other phrases that all they do is re-victimize us.

Even to think that we do not have to leave the house at all in order not to be violated by a sick mind.
We no longer know what is more dangerous, whether to take care of the contagion of a virus that also kills us in a gradual, painful way or to be killed in a violent way and without deserving it.

We take care of what can happen to us on the street, because that is what has made us believe throughout history that only on the street do we live and suffer the worst aberrant acts that a woman can experience.

Lie, because the increase in the numbers of domestic violence, workplace violence, social violence, shows us and confirms that we are no longer safe anywhere.
Our place of protection has already been converted into a barracks with no way out, the aggressors no longer give up, they already disguise themselves as our own family, a friend, an acquaintance, in whom we have placed our trust, they disguise themselves as the protector who decides to take the life of each of the victims.

“You are a second-class citizen, without privileges and without honor
Because I give the money, you are forced
To pay me honors and follow my humor
Find a job, study something, half the salary and double work
If you complain, the door is there, you are not authorized to give an opinion”

I will take advantage of your girlish love
I will laugh at your love as an adult…

With your mother’s love I’ll take a nap
And to your love of wife I will lie
We invent, we buy
We win battles and we also march
You cry about nothing and complain about everything
For when we sometimes get drunk.”

Los Prisioneros portrayed our past and present with lyrics and music with “Red Hearts”, today we continue to fight.

Historically, we have been forced to remain silent in everything that concerns our person, to be an instrument of service to others.
These are years in which our ancestors lived under the shadow of someone else subjected to doing, seeing, hearing, receiving the most despicable acts, that one human gives to another.
Living in submission and violence, disguised as acts of love for the simple fact of remaining in the family nucleus, those famous blood ties and family pacts.
The forced permissiveness with which we deal, we are afraid to say “No”, and these two letters are our way out to not experience baseness that hurts us.

Keep quiet so as not to create a ruckus, generate conflicts of interest, because even that forced silence we also have in our areas of personal, social, intellectual and work development.

Today, when we have decided to rebel, we have been branded as crazy, exaggerated, radical, this madness is the sign of our demanding rage for justice, for equality, for reciprocity, for empathy, for living in peace, living free, and clinging even to the sorority of other women who are in the same fight or in their own deconstruction.

We are tired of saying “yes” to everything!

We are on the way, we think maybe it would be different years after spending two pandemic years and full of that exacerbated violence with and towards us, we are going to demand justice, raise our voices, break everything, “Break the Pact” that patriarchal pact that hurts, damages , and in the worst case “It’s killing us”.