My name is Karen. 2018. Summer. Mexico City. Last year in December they murdered a woman named Karen.
That Karen was found dead in the Mixcoac neighborhood. The femicide took place in what we call a “hotel de paso,” the kind with hourly rates. The Pasadena Hotel & Villas in San Juan Mixcoac is in the neighborhood next to mine. I leave the house with one objective in mind: I’m looking for Karen, although I know I won’t find her. I know she’s no longer alive. It takes me half an hour to walk to where the tragedy took place. My destination is a peach-colored granite building on Avenida Revolución. Number 826. An eight, a two and a six hang between signs that read, in thick green letters on white, Entrance and Exit.
“Karen is no longer alive.”
This is where Karen died, and here I am, still alive. Alive only because of dumb luck, or fate, or chance, because eleven women are murdered in my country every day. It’s unknown how many of these cases are classified as femicides. Karen’s case was hardly broadcast on the news, and she is just one among many more we will never know about.
I take a look around. Street vendors sprawl over the sidewalk. A chorus of voices offering sandwiches, pirated movies, belts, and bootleg athleisure becomes a unified roar that overwhelms me. Everywhere you look is chaos: poorly trimmed hedges, an impromptu gym set up under an overpass, the yellow paint on the asphalt. I can barely find my footing between the cracks in the pavement.
I haven’t been able to write these days, and what I’m typing now isn’t so much literary as it is literal. I google “December 27 Karen dead” and read all the available information about the young Argentinian woman who lost her life. The results reveal that in room 214 of the Pasadena Hotel she “suffered several gunshot wounds and lacerations . . . ” Other sources state that it was “two gunshot wounds to the head,” or that “she was murdered by multiple gunshot wounds.”
Karen is dead.
A man killed her.
Women aren’t dying in this country. They’re murdering us.
Rereading my paragraph from above, I notice that I wrote “December 27 Karen dead.” Just the word “dead” generates 198,000 results, some of which reveal that she “married a Mexican man in secret and was also being courted by one of the ‘higher-ups’ of the Tepito cartel.” Other sources focus on the alleged murderer, an actor she was supposedly dating at the time, who was arrested and later exonerated. All lines of investigation stem from Karen’s romantic life. They re-victimize her. One article states: “Karen Ailen Grodzinski was found with one gunshot wound to the head in a hotel on December 27. On her Facebook profile she had multiple pictures of herself wearing only body paint or in her underwear, but she hadn’t posted anything since 2015. On Twitter she described herself as a ‘model, dancer, professional make-up artist and event promoter.’” They blame her professional life for what happened to her: the phrase “murdered while offering services as an escort” reappears in various articles.
I edit. Dead is not the same as murdered. “Karen has died” is not the same as “Karen is dead.” The search “December 27 Karen murdered” generates fewer results, only 73,500. One article catches my eye. It says Karen was in search of “a brighter future that never came.” Do we as women have any future in Mexico? El Universal offers a response to this question in their article, “The Women of 2050.” It states that the woman of 2050 “won’t recognize the limits imposed by gender roles when it comes to creating, studying, or working. She will grow up in a more inclusive society.”
But must we wait that long?
I’m a woman.
No. That’s not right.
That’s a half-truth.
A half-truth that doesn’t even apply to me.
I’m a woman who is still alive in this country, a woman hoping for a future.
I keep sifting through the information on my browser. “Karen” and “murder” lead me to the news site SinEmbargo. I read through it again and again. My name, her name. And then there’s another:
Woman Disappears in Baja California in December. Body Discovered Four Days Later in Creek.
—Mexico City, January 18.
The body of Karen Castro Jiménez, a young woman who had been missing since December 6, was found in a creek in Ensenada . . .
Karen disappears. They find her in a ditch. Karen was shot once or twice. She was executed and discovered with deep wounds all over her body. This Karen could be any Karen. It could be me. Scratch that—I could be me or I could’ve been her. Or my aunt, whose name was passed down to me. We don’t know if my aunt was a victim of femicide or suicide. Perhaps a femicide-related suicide? Or maybe a suicide-related femicide like that of Mariana Lima Buendía, the lawyer whose body was found in her home in Chimalhuacán in the State of Mexico. Her husband, a police officer, confirmed that she had committed suicide, which was accepted by the authorities. That was June 28, 2010. Irinea Buendía, Mariana’s mother, did not believe this. She was sure that her daughter was murdered by her husband. Mariana had told her mother that her husband threatened her by saying, “You’re going to end up in a water tank like the first two who couldn’t learn to treat me right.” After five years, Mexico’s Supreme Court recognized that there was evidence of “systematic impunity” in the case, and that, actually, there was another person responsible for Mariana’s violent death. That person has yet to be held accountable, as is the case in many femicides.
The potential victims are you and me and her and all of us. The women in this country have no name. We’re one.
We are one and the same.
I say my name out loud.
“Karen.”
Then: “Karen’s crime.”
“Her name was Karen, a model murdered in CDMX.”
Karen’s body was found by the bed in the hotel room and showed evidence of violence. The investigation file adds that the murderer arrived around 7:50 p.m. and booked a room. Then Karen entered said room to meet her executioner. Forty minutes later “the man left the hotel wearing a motorcycle helmet, which struck the owner as odd, so he decided to check the room. Upon entering, he saw Karen’s body, lifeless on the floor.”
Lifeless Karen.
You, Karen, are alive.
One lifeless Karen.
The text quoted in the preceding paragraph comes from a news article that declares that “the main motive being investigated at this time is romantic vengeance” and that, “on July 6th of last year, Karen married a sporting goods merchant from Tepito with whom she lived in the Nápoles neighborhood.” The main suspect was a man with whom Karen had “maintained a relationship.” The motive, then, from this particular angle, is to be discovered by investigating the various shades of passionate love: jealousy, rage, disappointment.
A crime of passion isn’t a hypothesis. It’s a cliché.
They call it a crime of passion to silence us.
A crime of passion is the easy way out.
A crime of passion: when someone is motivated by lust to harm or kill another.
This is not a matter of passion but a matter of power according to sexist logic: you belong to me, or you belong to no one.
“You are mine or you are not” is gender-based violence.
A crime of passion always excuses the murderer and places blame on the victim.
A crime of passion is a euphemism that justifies femicide.
What happened to Karen was femicide.
What could’ve happened to me is femicide.
What could happen to all of us.
Is femicide.
My spell check doesn’t recognize femicide and instead underlines it with a wavy red line. I can choose to delete it or add it to the dictionary. Why wouldn’t the program recognize such an unfortunately common occurrence?
I read a headline from the website Animal politico: “Karen, the Argentinian model, was shot to death in a hotel in CDMX; the @PGJDF_CDMX is investigating the murder as a femicide.” I go over the timeline again. “Karen Hotel Pasadena.” She was twenty-four years old, not twenty-three. The hotel has since continued operating with an astonishing air of normalcy. Its sign still reads, “The Hotel Pasadena, An Unforgettable Experience.” It’s as if nothing has happened, but it is happening, daily, all the time.
Some women have more privileges than others, but, unfortunately, we are all exposed to gender violence in this country. They could kill me too, because every four hours a woman is killed in Mexico. Or I could be raped, which occurs every four minutes according to the National Secretary of Health. I fall in the age group (between fifteen and forty-five years old) where the probability of being murdered or raped is higher than that of getting cancer or HIV. These statistics just scratch the surface of what we’re living through day to day.
It’s getting dark, the natural sign that we must be even more alert than usual. I should be getting back to Colonia del Valle, but it’s not that late, I tell myself. I could walk back like I always do. Then I remember my street, Avenida Coyoacán, and its long stretches with hardly any streetlights. I break out in a cold sweat thinking about it. My precious courage dwindles when confronted by common sense.
Don’t walk on poorly lit streets.
Don’t walk on the streets.
Don’t walk on.
Don’t walk.
Don’t.
I call an Uber. The app estimates it’ll take me eleven minutes to reach my house. “The last anyone heard of Karen, she was about to take a taxi near the hotel.” Karen never made it home. Will I? I send a message to the group chat on my phone labeled “I got there” with the car and driver’s information. We started this group chat shortly after the femicide of Mara Castilla, a woman who was murdered by her driver while using a similar rideshare service. There are thirty-six members in our group chat. Thirty-six women who navigate alone in this metropolis that refuses to declare a state of emergency for gender-based violence. According to the authorities, it’s not necessary because femicides in Mexico City are “lower than the national average.” In four years, 576 women have been murdered, but the Attorney General’s office only considers 36% of those cases to be femicides. The statistics contradict their statements.
Every day I think about how it could happen to me too. It’s not just one woman, but all of us. It affects all of us. You, me, her. Each and every one of us. I have the privilege of living in one of the city’s safest neighborhoods, Benito Juárez, which, according to “official” data (the numbers sometimes vary or even contradict each other depending on where the data comes from) has the second-lowest femicide rate: 2.2 cases per hundred thousand citizens.
The others in the group chat are following my ride and sending me emojis along the way. Everyone’s chosen their own go-to. I normally use the grinning cat (😺) because life goes on, but, as women, we never know for how long.
*
We pull up to my building, and I thank the driver as I get out of the car. I start to type “home” when I realize this is the third time I’ve used the group chat this week. We have to look out for each other. Given the indifference of the authorities, we organize among ourselves. Basic advice for preventing gender violence inundates our social media. We have to be prepared. Stay alert and focused, always keep your phone charged and have minutes to spare in case of an emergency, never get on an empty metro car or bus when using public transit, keep an eye on your surroundings. Before I open the door to my apartment, I turn to look over my shoulder.
There’s no one there. Just me.
They said Karen wasn’t afraid of anything.
I wish I could say the same.
But I am afraid.
Very.
