According to the National Citizen Femicide Observatory, at least seven women are killed each day in Mexico — a shocking statistic that María Guadalupe Ramos Ponce is determined to change.
Ramos is a lawyer, a professor at the University of Guadalajara and an adviser to United Nations organization UN Women. She also pours her heart and soul into CLADEM, an international network that connects various women’s organizations and activists throughout Latin America.
“CLADEM opened the door to feminism for me and changed my life,” Ramos told the Guadalajara Reporter.
Through CLADEM, she has been hard at work in Jalisco, fights gender-based violence and helping grieving families seek justice for crimes committed against loved ones. CLADEM plays a crucial role in connecting victims’ parents and siblings with a public prosecutor.
“We accompany the victim’s family, we don’t do the work ourselves,” she said. “The dad, the mom and the sisters come and do the talking.” Connecting the family to authorities is a key step as the victim’s relatives often have no idea where to look. Letting the family testify can also have a huge impact on their case.
When CLADEM is not directly helping locals, the organization campaigns to bring awareness to women’s issues and build support for same-sex marriage. In fact, they recently won some important cases for gay marriages in Jalisco.
Highlighting CLADEM’s effective use of the law, Ramos noted that the majority of those working in the organization are lawyers.
“My biggest achievement has been increasing the visibility of femicides,” Ramos said. She and other activists lobbied hard to include the term in the Mexican criminal code. Securing this addition was no easy feat. Opponents had strong reactions; they thought sex-based hate crime should not be treated differently from homicides. “As a lawyer, they told me I was crazy, that it was unconstitutional, that it was an invention, because the law is supposed to be neutral and not gendered,” she explained.
After a long battle, CLADEM was finally successful. In 2012, the term was included in Jalisco’s penal code and since then, the prison sentence for femicides — which need to fit certain specific characteristics — can be from 25 to 45 years.
Codifying and penalizing femicides was crucial, but more needed to be done. CLADEM decided to collect new data on Jalisco’s women’s rights situation. No one had a clue about the severity of gender-based violence in the state: statistics with a focus on gender were non-existent. Crimes were archived as homicides regardless of whether the victim was male or female.
So Guadalupe went to work going door-to-door collecting data on femicide in Jalisco. She found that they had seen an increase in Jalisco between 1997 and 2014. People were becoming aware of the issue and Jalisco needed to act.
In 2016, it was found that eight Jalisco towns and cities had reported a surge of femicides over the last four years. To fight back, Jalisco implemented a 
mechanism that prevents and sanctions femicides, called Gender Alert.
Today, Jalisco follows 15 measures to end gender-based violence. The action points establish short- to long-term public policies and are divided into five categories: emergency, prevention, protection, justice and security. The state’s efforts are monitored by the federal government, which gives state authorities directions and goals.
Ramos is optimistic. She told the Guadalajara Reporter that, despite setbacks, the Gender Alert is moving forward. Jalisco is now working on the judicial section of the Alert by setting up a “contextual unit.” This unit would focus on investigating femicides and disappearances in the state and determine whether there are links between the crimes. Until now, each case was studied separately from the others.
Now that the gender-based violence mechanisms are underway, Ramos’ new focus includes long-term change through education and culture. Machismo “permeates pop culture, music, TV and education,” she noted. It is still popular and “we need to end the positive view of it,” she said.
Cultural change is slow but possible. Mexican band Café Tacuba recently announced they would stop playing their most popular song, “Ingrata,” because of its violent lyrics, which are directed against women. “We now understand [femicide] is a problem, we know it is an issue,” says the band’s vocalist, Rubén Albarrán. “Personally, I am not interested in supporting that. A lot of people say it’s just a song. But songs are culture.”
Thanks to people like Ramos and her NGO network, step-by-step legal changes are improving women’s rights in Mexico and Jalisco.
“When you find out that your arguments are the ones with heavier weight, that’s a great, great success.”