Reframing ‘Femicide’: Making Room for the Balloon Effect of Drug War Violence in Studying Female Homicides in Mexico and Central America

TLDR: The authors argue that shifting geographies of the global drug trade require greater attention in examining the nature of female homicides in Juarez since 1993, and that the balloon effect of drug trafficking flows provides a more convincing rationale for understanding these homicides.

Abstract: In the past two decades scholars and journalists have created a sensation around a series of female homicides in Ciudad Juarez, attesting to a ‘femicide’ in which women are murdered for simply being women. In many accounts the North American Free Trade Agreement receives a great deal of attention as the driving force behind a purported devaluation in Mexican women's social status. I argue that shifting geographies of the global drug trade require greater attention in examining the nature of female homicides in Juarez since 1993, and that the ‘balloon effect’ of drug trafficking flows provides a more convincing rationale for understanding these homicides. I also address recent studies on the Juarez female homicides that challenge the existence a ‘femicide’ through quantitative analyses that call into question the culpability of free trade. Though superficially convincing, these studies neglect the context-specific nature of individual acts of gender violence that numbers can obscure. I conclude by ...