Transfeminicide in Mexico City: Ivonne was murdered in her beauty salon
Ivonne, a 32-year-old trans woman, was tortured and murdered in her beauty salon in Iztapalapa. One person has been arrested.
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On July 1st, Ivonne Álvarez, a 32-year-old transgender woman, was tortured and murdered in her beauty salon in Iztapalapa, a borough located in eastern Mexico City. According to information from the Mexico City Attorney General's Office, her murder is being investigated under the femicide protocol, and following the investigation, a man allegedly involved in the crime was arrested.
In an interview with Presentes, Silvia, Ivonne's sister, suddenly says, “I feel terrible. I can't believe this because she went out to work, she had to come back, I was waiting for her like every day when she arrived in her truck with the music blasting and honking. I still think she's going to come back, that I'm going to see her getting ready, putting on her wig, and asking me, 'How do I look?' Oh, I would tell her, 'Beautiful.' Because I always thought she was beautiful. But the truth is, I have to accept that I won't see her anymore.”.
Ivonne was originally from Nezahualcóyotl (State of Mexico) but worked 13 kilometers away in Iztapalapa (Mexico City). She enjoyed eating tacos and smoothies, dancing, and listening to electro house and pop music at full volume. In March of this year, she opened her own business, a beauty salon and barbershop .
To open her beauty salon, Ivonne had to sell a car and work as a sex worker. “There were few clients because of the situation, right? So, to have money, to be able to eat, she also sold desserts and was a sex worker because she couldn't make ends meet, but she opened the salon to stop working as a sex worker,” Silvia explains.
She was murdered in her beauty salon
At nine o'clock on Wednesday night, June 30, family and friends lost contact with Ivonne. "She was the kind of person who was always calling someone, she was always on the phone with her friends, with me, we never lost track of her, you see? But now her cell phone was going straight to voicemail," Silvia said in an interview.
On the morning of July 1st, Silvia went to Ivonne's house to look for her, but she wasn't there, nor was her truck. Silvia found this strange and contacted a couple of Ivonne's friends to see if they had seen her at her beauty salon. "One of them told me she saw her go into the salon with a guy, and when she returned, the curtain (a metal mesh door) was closed and her truck wasn't there.".
After receiving this information, Silvia became even more alarmed and decided to go look for her sister. The calls continued to go directly to voicemail.
On the trip from Neza to Iztapalapa, a friend of Ivonne's told her she noticed something "strange" at the beauty salon: the curtain was locked with two of the three padlocks. "Her friend called me saying she was going to look through the window; she had to borrow a ladder to get there and told me, 'I can see someone in green in there.'" Silvia knew Ivonne had dressed in green when she asked about her.
When Silvia arrived at the beauty salon, there were already police officers in the area, and in her anguish, she demanded to see Ivonne. “I saw her, I saw her tied up at the feet and hands, taped up, and with a rag over her head. The cause of death they gave us was asphyxiation by strangulation,” she recounts.
So far this year, 16 trans women have been murdered in Mexico, according to the National Observatory of Hate Crimes against LGBT people .
“We want justice and nothing more”
Ivonne's truck was located by the police ten minutes from her beauty salon. Inside was a man accompanied by a woman. Silvia recounts in an interview, "When the police arrived, he confessed everything. The police didn't even ask him anything, and he just blurted out, 'I screwed up, I screwed up,' and said he did it with a friend.".
Silvia is convinced that there is at least one person on the run, because she believes that a single person is not capable of carrying out all the violence that Ivonne experienced.
On July 5, the Mexico City Attorney General's Office issued a statement indicating that detectives from the investigative police assigned to the Femicide Investigation Unit arrested a man who was allegedly with Ivonne at the beauty salon the night she was murdered. The detainee is currently being held at the East Men's Preventive Prison, awaiting trial before a judge.
“We want nothing more than justice for my sister because those men can’t just walk around like nothing happened. If they did that to her, what else can they do to other people, to other women? We want justice and nothing else,” Silvia maintains.
In Mexico, the crime of transfeminicide is not codified, and the State has not made any effort to develop a comprehensive assessment of the experiences and specific needs of trans populations in Mexico. According to Rocío Suárez, a human rights advocate and member of the Center for Support of Trans Identities (CAIT), this remains “one of the major outstanding issues at the national and state levels.”
In Mexico City, CAIT conducted a survey last year, and one of the “major findings” was that “recognition of gender identity is not, in most cases, helping trans people, and especially women, to improve their living conditions in terms of health, work, safety, and justice,” says Rocío Suárez, director of CAIT.
According to that survey, around 80% of transgender people perceive a high level of discrimination in Mexico City. Furthermore, the violence they experience occurs in close environments such as family, relationships, and the community.
Information leak
Several media outlets picked up on information from a reporter who revealed the names and faces of three men as alleged perpetrators of Ivonne's murder. Additionally, various reports indicated that two 18-year-old men were arrested but charged with drug dealing, sparking reactions from LGBT groups on social media.
One of them was María Clemente, a trans activist and newly elected federal deputy, who demanded justice and urged the Mexico City Prosecutor's Office to "investigate the trans femicide of Ivonne as the crime with the greatest legal responsibility and that drug possession be taken as an aggravating factor and not as the primary crime.".
Regarding information circulating in the media about the arrest of two people possibly involved but linked to drug possession offenses, the Prosecutor's Office has not yet issued any information confirming or denying this.
“I believe that when this information is being leaked, the Prosecutor's Office should also be very clear and inform the public about the charges against the people who are supposedly arrested in cases like these,” Rocío Suárez emphasizes.
For her part, Silvia told Presentes that there were indeed two arrests, but, “they have nothing to do with my sister’s murder because when they caught the boy in the truck, family and friends came to attack the police, I think with the intention of preventing them from taking him away, right? But in that commotion, they arrested some people and it started to be said that they found drugs on them, but they have nothing to do with it,” she says.
And she returns convinced, "All we want is justice for my sister, nothing more.".
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