Who is behind the Mexican anti-feminist shock group?
The "No More Innocent Prisoners" collective is an anti-feminist shock group that demands the release of femicide perpetrators, among other things.
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On January 16th, three years had passed since the attempted femicide of Natalia Lane, a trans activist and sex worker from Mexico City. The activist called for a protest to denounce the impunity in her case and her status as a victim of institutional violence and revictimization by the justice system. At the protest, the “National Collective No More Innocent Prisoners,” an anti-feminist shock group, was present to defend the aggressor and criminalize Lane with transphobic slogans.
The attempted femicide that Natalia Lane survived is the first case to be prosecuted for a trans woman in Mexico for the crime of attempted femicide.
In June 2024, Judge Rubí Celia Castellanos Barradas ordered a lower court judge to comply with an injunction that changes the pretrial detention measure for the aggressor, Alejandro 'N', who is currently in pretrial detention. This puts Natalia at risk because the aggressor could be released.
Karina Escandón Camargo, leader of the "national collective no more innocent prisoners," uses social media to call for demonstrations against protests by cis and trans women who are victims and survivors of gender violence.
Their rhetoric on the street and on social media is anti-rights. Furthermore, they defame and criminalize victims, calling them "criminals disguised as victims," and in the case of Natalia Lane, they have said: "a transgender criminal who worked with the 'goteras' gang, a criminal gang that robs, drugs, and murders its victims."
“We are not dealing with an anti-punitive group”
We see that they don't protest in every case. They only protest in those that have a media impact, such as the case of saxophonist María Elena Ríos, attacked with acid by a man allegedly sent on the orders of her ex-partner, former PRI congressman Juan Antonio Vera Carrizal, in 2019, or the case of students at the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), where Diego 'N', a former IPN student, was acquitted of altering and selling photographs of his female classmates to make them appear nude.
This procedure has worked to get the media to replicate their messages, where they use the children of this group as a shield to portray as a "threat" and label as "violent" the women and transfeminist groups who denounce the impunity in their cases.
Siobhan Guerrero, a philosopher of science who has studied anti-gender movements, reflects on this in an interview and explains:
“We are not dealing with an anti-punitive group, because if they were, they wouldn't be criminalizing with the intention of imprisoning people as they are doing. They are playing this strange game of portraying activism, in this case trans activism, as a threat, and it's a trait they share: undermining audience empathy, so that audiences effectively say, 'the gender perspective was a mistake.' They are fueling this whole idea that, in reality, demands such as gender issues, LGBT+ issues, and trans issues not only don't benefit the majority of the population but actually harm it.”
And she adds, “the trope they have chosen is the gender perspective in law and the choice of that target is very interesting because they are choosing not to point out the real problem but to instrumentalize a real problem to attack the gender agenda in a broad sense and blame the gender agenda for prison culture.”
What is known about the national collective "No More Innocent Prisoners"?«
“This group sells an anti-punitive discourse to the media, but when you see who is behind it and you go into their social networks, it is to protect the powerful, the violent misogynists and to attack feminism,” says Eme Flores, a member of the Network of Sexual and Gender Resistance and Dissidence, who carried out an investigation on the “national collective no more innocent prisoners” which she published in her podcast Frezapatistas con Crema .
Flores' investigation traces that it was in 2023 when this collective was created under another name by Karina Escandón Camargo who sought to get her brother, Jorge Edgar Calixto Camargo, a former police commander accused of attempted femicide, out of jail.
“The faces of these groups, which later came together as the 'national collective no more innocent prisoners,' are women demanding the release of a femicide perpetrator, and that has more appeal than having a man demand the release of a femicide perpetrator. These groups found that what is working best for political mobilization is specifically the anti-feminist angle,” explains Eme Flores.
The “National Collective No More Innocent Prisoners” is closely linked to others such as the National Collective of Women for Equality , which has ties to the far right in Mexico and describes itself as: “anti-feminist, pro-life women, defenders of the principle of equality, human rights, and children’s rights.” Its leader has been seen at demonstrations against abortion and in support of Eduardo Verástegui, an actor who sought the presidency on an anti-rights platform that also embraces the ideas of Milei and Trump.
Other groups they are linked to include “No More Hostage Children ,” which organized the first “March for Men’s Day” in Mexico, and “ Uniting Latin America, Childhood First ,” an Argentinian group close to Milei with connections to at least 63 organizations across Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, Peru, Chile, Spain, and Italy. On their social media, they speak of “no to ‘gender ideology,’ protection of the family, and abortion is unthinkable.”
Eme Flores also found that people who work at Televisa and TV Azteca give money and openly support these groups, as well as politicians like the Morena party deputy Sergio Mayer .
“They are exploiting a real discussion to undermine the gender agenda.”
The “national collective no more innocent prisoners” uses a supposedly anti-punitive discourse in which they say that femicide perpetrators are “victims” of the justice system that is “unjustly imprisoning men based on 'false accusations' made by women.”
The truth is that impunity prevails in Mexico for women who are victims of femicide, and the justice system further victimizes them. Likewise, mandatory pretrial detention, a punitive measure within the Mexican penal system, keeps people in jail even when their responsibility for a range of crimes has not been proven. This system disproportionately affects people from vulnerable groups, racialized individuals, and those living in poverty.
“I believe that a much more sophisticated response from activists, academia, and journalism will have to involve intense reflection on how to respond to this deceitful accusation that the gender perspective in law is to blame for innocent prisoners. A reflection like the one I propose is one that doesn't abandon victims without any protection and doesn't ignore the reality of some very serious cases of gender-based violence. (…) What they are doing is instrumentalizing a real discussion to attack the gender agenda. And a response to that has to point out that the problem isn't the gender agenda; the very clear issue is automatic pretrial detention, for example,” explains Siobhan Guerrero.
According to this report by Animal Político , “one in five femicides that occurred in the last decade was hidden by the authorities under a different criminal category or was even registered as accidental death in order to simulate a reduction in the incidence of these cases.”
The investigation also mentions that the few people found guilty of femicide are "the ones who most easily avoid prison, despite having their responsibility established through a sentence, due to the deficiencies of the agencies in charge of investigating and proving these crimes, as well as the discretion with which the judges in charge of these cases grant benefits to the aggressors to avoid punishment."
Under the system of mandatory pretrial detention, LGBT+ people, and especially transgender sex workers, are also affected by criminalization, as investigated by the organization Almas Cautivas in their report, " Transgender Women Deprived of Liberty: Invisibility Behind Walls .
How did this group operate in the Natalia Lane protest?
Presentes Agency covered the protest and we noticed this group for the first time at a demonstration by trans women seeking access to justice. We observed that this group wears blue shirts and is mostly composed of women, some men, and also includes children. They insult, assault, and criminalize women seeking justice.
“What I noticed was that they were like they were in uniform, with a very rehearsed, very anti-diversity message, and they were blatantly transphobic on social media. Something that caught my attention when things got a bit heated was that five minutes after they left, the armed police appeared, with shields… it seems the police were just waiting around, coincidentally, when this group left. That struck me as odd because things had already gotten intense; the women had broken everything, and the police hadn't shown up. It seems there's some kind of dialogue between the collective and the (justice) system because it doesn't make sense that they're defending the institution that supposedly has those they call 'innocent prisoners,'” recalls Milena Pafundi of Presentes en México, who covered the protest.
On the day of the protest, trans women and dissidents who were demonstrating confronted this group using red paint and spray paint. The "No More Innocent Prisoners" collective repeatedly misgendered the trans women, and Natalia Lane was labeled a "criminal" and a "liar."
The children brought to this demonstration by the "No More Innocent Prisoners" collective were used, and after the protest, they falsely accused trans women of assaulting children and women on social media. That didn't happen.
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